I am not following the authors argument. This logic accidentally gate-keeps opinions of people with ethical objections, people who can't afford the time and money to use it and even people for whom the tool is inaccessible.
Any objection "This tool is built on stolen data" doesn't change based on whether I have used the tool for 50 hours or not.
By defining a "center" only through the lens of usage we don't find objectivity. This sounds like rationalising survivorship bias for those who are able to pay and participate.
Author here: ethical concerns are legitimate and they don’t require contact. You’re right that the center is not just skewed because of the arguments I made but also because of other factors such as the availability of money and time.
I’m not disputing that. The argument in the article is a much narrower one: use. It’s that without use, one’s view of how it behaves in practice is second-hand from the people that engage.
If all ones criticism is confine within ethical or monetary concerns then this article does not apply.
I usually try to optimize for CPU usage more than I do for RAM, mostly because I care about my battery life and for things to remain snappy. Although Vicinae does a lot of caching where it can it probably maintains a quite reasonable memory footprint when compared to apps with web frontends.
IMO after launcher is optimized to be truly idle while there is no interaction with it shaving memory usage becomes more important for snappiness and battery life. Extra RAM that launcher uses it the same RAM that other apps cannot use and therefore become more laggy. I expect on average shaving off 100 MB of launcher RAM usage will save more battery then reducing time for rendering its window by 0.1s
Or after a while without interaction bloated RAM get swapped out and launcher invocation need to fetch swapped out info.
For comparison here is how krunner looks on my current machine. After some time without interactions:
$ systemctl --user status plasma-krunner.service|head
● plasma-krunner.service - KRunner
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-krunner.service; static)
Active: active (running) since Sun 2025-08-10 20:31:40 WEST; 1 month 12 days ago
Main PID: 57749 (krunner)
Tasks: 37 (limit: 17782)
Memory: 64.6M (peak: 1.4G swap: 338.2M swap peak: 679.8M zswap: 12.4M)
CPU: 2h 58.702s
CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/background.slice/plasma-krunner.service
└─57749 /usr/bin/krunner
It seems to me I feel how it was less on the first invocation.
Any objection "This tool is built on stolen data" doesn't change based on whether I have used the tool for 50 hours or not.
By defining a "center" only through the lens of usage we don't find objectivity. This sounds like rationalising survivorship bias for those who are able to pay and participate.