Flutter for Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Flutter for Linux

#141

Post by mwcampbell » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

vesinisa wrote: post #137

timsneath wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't reached perfection yet (that's why we're still in beta), but our goal is to be _very_ different to Flash in these kinds of areas. Here's an example of text fields: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/demo/text-field Right-click and you have access to the browser context menu; choose Inspect and you can see a or control.

Frankly that feels exactly like a Flash page. Natively selecting text content isn't supported on either Firefox or Chrome on Android (apart from within inputs). Scrolling is broken ("yanky"). Flutter for Web further feels like a nightmare for accessibility. I tried enabling the native Google screenreader on my device. It only says "No text found at that location" when I try to read any of the Flutter demo pages in ei…

About accessibility, you need to find the "Enable accessibility" button and press it first. It's not visible on screen, but you should be able to find it with your screen reader's navigation commands (e.g. swiping left and right on a touch device). Yeah, it kind of sucks that the user has to turn accessibility on, and for that reason alone, I will never willingly develop a web application with Flutter. But at least it does support accessibility.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#142

Post by g5becks » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

virtualwhys wrote: post #139

satvikpendem wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart is...fine. The real value comes in its code generation features, which enable packages to add whatever language features they want even if the language maintainers don't (yet), such as algebraic data types, functional programming features, etc. You can argue this as being good or bad for future maintenance but it's nice to have the ability to add to the language.

> The real value comes in its code generation features, which enable packages to add whatever language features they want Got any eamples of ADTs, pattern matching, immutable collections, data classes, named parameters, etc.? Coming from Scala and TypeScript the Dart language is pretty unappealing wrt syntax and functionality, kind of archaic actually. Flutter looks amazing and have been hoping that Dart would evolve…

https://pub.dev/packages/freezed is ADTs, pattern matching, Dataclasses. named parameters are already part of the language.

There’s about 4 different packages that provide immutable collections, built_collections might be the most popular.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#143

Post by chupasaurus » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 2:52 AM UTC

topspin wrote: post #72

rst wrote: post #52

So, 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

Show me any repo of snaps other than Snapcraft.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#144

Post by drannex » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 3:03 AM UTC

me551ah wrote: post #9

The future of cross platform desktop development looks bright. Microsoft is coming up with .NET 6 and Google has flutter. I just hope that these frameworks can replace bulky electron apps.

I'm looking forward to the first stable version of Blazor, and a way to combine it with proper native mobile bindings to device APIs. Currently working on a version combined with CapacitorJS and I am in love with the possibilities.

.Net 6 is going to be beautiful.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#145

Post by devxpy » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 3:11 AM UTC

zelly wrote: post #124

eklavya wrote: post #6

I 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.

Flutter implements a bespoke renderer called Skia. It is its own backend. For Qt to be compatible with Flutter you'd have to port Qt to Dart. There's nothing wrong with running Flutter apps and Qt apps simulatenously. It would be an interesting project for someone to create a KDE type of desktop environment in Flutter. Can it be done?

There's an experiment from a flutter core dev -- running flutter on a raspberry pi without any desktop environment.

https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-on-raspberry-pi-mostly-fr...

A DE written in flutter sounds like a great accelerator/toy project for making flutter desktop polished and ready for the masses.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#146

Post by g5becks » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

Really wish Dart was more useful for server development. There’s a lot of missing packages that no one seems to be interested in writing right now though.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#147

Post by Rapzid » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 3:45 AM UTC

rst wrote: post #52

So, 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

It just seems like an ad in exchange for the work they did.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#148

Post by kiratp » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 3:48 AM UTC

anonms-coward wrote: post #96

mikece wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter's ability to "compile to web" was something that confused me at first as well, but on second thought it's genius. It makes it easier to ease managers into selecting Flutter since deployments and updates are done via a web browser. If that works for them then maybe there's never a need to go fully native though that option exists if they want to -- and the ability to go back to compiling for web gives managers…

> and the ability to go back to compiling for web gives managers a sense of "this isn't a one-way, I'm screwed if something goes wrong" journey It wouldn't be a good idea to believe that though. Flutter website are just canvas paintings, and have nothing to do with the web. You can't add new html or js to it easily. can't make much use of new improvements in the web world. Most importantly, if you are running a busin…

Or internal tools.

Internal tools should not exclude people needing accessibility features.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#149

Post by Rapzid » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 3:50 AM UTC

What's the story for extending a flutter application dynamically? Is it possible to write and load plugins for them?

Re: Flutter for Linux

#150

Post by snodnipper » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 3:55 AM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #36

skratlo wrote: post #12

Yay, Macromedia Flash for desktop is here, made in Google, Dart instead of ActionScript, wow, just wow.

I assume that this is meant as a criticism, but Flash was quite good at easy-to-make portable graphical apps; they had massive security issues and some lack of polish, but there's a reason why Flash dominated its era. (Also, "Macromedia Flash for desktop" was already a thing, no?) So yeah, "Flash but modern and safe" would be a pretty strong selling point.

Flash remains the most productive UI development environment I have had over the past twenty years. Getting graphical apps working on all major platforms is a fabulous achievement by the Flutter folks.

I have no love for what Android has become and where Kotlin is going. The web today feels like a PDF...huge amounts of movement but not necessarily progress.

I hope more than anything that Flutter continues to gain traction. To my mind it is perfectly reasonable for next generation tech to write to the canvas with the latest widgets as long as there is good accessibility support.