Nav Toor (@heynavtoor) “A developer in China named tw93 got tired of his laptop dying. He would open Sla” — TopicDigg

A developer in China named tw93 got tired of his laptop dying. He would open Slack and watch 524 megabytes of disk space disappear. He would open Discord and watch another 265. He would open Notion and watch 800 megabytes of RAM evaporate before he had typed a single word. He looked into why. Every "desktop app" on his computer was the same thing. A website wrapped in a full copy of the Chrome browser engine. The framework is called Electron. An empty Electron app starts at 150 megabytes of RAM before you click anything. With twelve of them open, his laptop was running twelve copies of the same browser. He thought there had to be a better way. So in 2022, he started building one. He called it Pake. Two characters in Chinese mean "packaging." He wrote it in Rust on top of a framework called Tauri. The idea was simple. Point Pake at any webpage. Get a desktop app. Without dragging an entire browser engine into the binary. The first version of Slack he wrapped with it was 8 megabytes. Not 524. Eight. That is what 20 times smaller looks like. Four years later, his repo has 50,594 stars. 6,144 forks. The license is MIT. The last commit was yesterday. The bio on his GitHub reads: "Anything added dilutes everything else." Today the Pake releases page contains pre-built apps for ChatGPT, Discord, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Twitter, YouTube, Excalidraw, Flomo, WeChat, and twelve more. All under 10 megabytes. All native. All free. Or you point Pake at any URL you want and it builds one for you in one command. Slack's desktop app: 524 megabytes. Pake-built Slack: 8 megabytes. Discord's desktop app: 265 megabytes. Pake-built Discord: 9 megabytes. ChatGPT for Windows: 260 megabytes. Pake-built ChatGPT: 9 megabytes. tw93 is one person. He has 11,305 followers on GitHub. He runs a blog at He has shipped 39 public repos. He still pushes commits to Pake every week. He did not start a company. He did not raise money. He did not write a Medium post about how Electron is dead. He just shipped the thing that made it true. (Link in the comments)