Good news, but all depends how much Google interested in Linux desktop support in Flutter. I'm highly skeptical due to their "hyper activity" in Linux desktop niche.
Flutter for Linux
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Re: Flutter for Linux
#72So, this makes Flutter apps available through Canonical's Snap store... which is Ubuntu-mostly right now, and controversial enough that the top item on the HN front page as I write is about an Ubuntu derivative (Linux Mint) explicitly dropping support for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771847
"Canonical's Snap store"
Correction: it's "the app store for Linux".
/s
Re: Flutter for Linux
#73What is the off chance that Google will drop Flutter?
Google not too long ago released Jetpack Compose which has some overlap with flutter so it's anybody's guess.
Re: Flutter for Linux
#74I am so excited about flutter ecosystem. Hopefully linux gets first class beautiful native apps now. I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as a backend so KDE is not left out.
Judging by the example in TFA, we must have very different conceptions of what "beautiful" means. That is an atrocious application. * Ungodly amounts of whitespace (seriously, look at that sidebar, look at that search bar. WHY? too much optimisation for what "looks good on a screenshot", maybe?) * Undecipherable symbols where there's plenty of f#cking space to write labels god damn it * I bet bad/nonexistant keyboard…
You do know that none of that is really do do with Flutter, right? Like you're just taking it out on the designers of Flock.
Re: Flutter for Linux
#75Yay, Macromedia Flash for desktop is here, made in Google, Dart instead of ActionScript, wow, just wow.
You're not wrong.
I think they're mostly wrong. I think we put too much stock into the default UI toolkits on each platform since this really isn't much different than how GTK and QT work. They have their own rendering engines and have to draw all their widgets from scratch just like this. The only difference is that GTK and QT are blessed.
I think there's a case to be made for sticking to the defaults for consistency's sake but Flutter is just as native as any other UI toolkit on Linux.
Re: Flutter for Linux
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dart actually has a lot of characteristics that make it appealing for a lot of the areas I'd have (begrudgingly) used Go - command-line tools or local utilities. It "can" be scripted, but also AOT compiles, has a saneish type system with generics, and doesn't have pointers to deal with. It's hard for me to want to use it on the web, but I keep watching it and wishing good things for it.
Dart produces surprisingly small docker images for server code. I recently created small Cloud Run web service with Dart - the docker image is 5.2MB compressed, 12.9 MB as reported by docker. I'm not even sure Go would do better on image size. Tree shaking does wonders here.
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Re: Flutter for Linux
#77Microsoft really has to speed up the Xamarin.Forms / Maui development. The omission of Linux is a really a pity.
MAUI sucks, it is xamarin bis, uses 654654 different renderers, uses C# and compiles with a JIT, enjoy your 100mb MINIMUM apps, even for hello world
Re: Flutter for Linux
#78What is the off chance that Google will drop Flutter?
Google not too long ago released Jetpack Compose which has some overlap with flutter so it's anybody's guess. https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose
compose is JAVA, and android only, since it's JVM, you'll need a big and slow runtime
flutter is dart, and compiles to native, AOT and statically linked tiny executable
flutter is the winner
Re: Flutter for Linux
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
My hunch is that Google is trying to migrate away from Android. Flutter is both the abstraction layer to do that and the new SDK for the new platform. If that's the case, it's higly unlikely.
I think Google realized they needed a compelling cross-plattform solution because React Native started to gain so much traction. In terms of migrating away from Android, I think they will use the newer AndroidX packages as the future abstraction layer, which would enable them to replace the underlying runtime with something more native for each platform. It would be a compilation target for Kotlin as well as Dart. Al…
That's a really wierd take if you actually look at what AndroidX is - it's a set of utility libraries to complement Android so it being some kind of abstraction layer is rather nonsensical. It's like saying boost is an abstraction layer for Linux and it allows its replacement. It's an orthogonal thing that doesn't stand alone.
Re: Flutter for Linux
#80So, this makes Flutter apps available through Canonical's Snap store... which is Ubuntu-mostly right now, and controversial enough that the top item on the HN front page as I write is about an Ubuntu derivative (Linux Mint) explicitly dropping support for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771847
Until SNAP gives me full control (and not just: you can opt-out) over updates/upgrades they're a non-starter.