Actually that is exactly what I'd been doing. I recently upgraded to 32 GB of RAM and now the desktop app is usable again, but obviously this is still not even reasonable.
WTF. I remember running a network of 10+ servers and worker-machines on a 4GB hosts not many years ago. And now you can't run a "modern" chat-app without having 32GBs of ram?
You know what? I'm happy with IRC. weechat uses maybe 28MBs and runs stellar.
Maybe you should just consider that the tools you are using simply are flawed and move to something proven instead?
Not true. Slack does not take 32GB of RAM to be usable, more likely the rest of his tools take 30GB of RAM. My laptop only has 8GB of RAM and I have Chrome and Firefox open and active while using Slack. Slack has been open for a couple of weeks and is using less than 500mb of RAM on my machine.
This is correct- my daily environment usually involves multiple VMs and a Docker Compose setup, either a JetBrains IDE or Visual Studio Code, Chrome with some reasonable number of tabs open, Slack, and a few utilities. To further illustrate the reason why this sounds insane, before I was at 32GB, I was at 8GB, and conserved RAM by running Linux with an extremely lean setup (i3 + st + Chrome.) Now I have plenty to spare, and I'm using a much more rich environment.
So yeah, it is a little more complicated than just "Slack needed 32GB" - in fact, and thankfully, even my whole stack fits comfortably. It's what I upgraded from that it didn't work well on.
