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Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

omgubuntu.co.uk

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Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#41

Post by fizdoonk »

foepys wrote: post #9
candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I wish they would expand on what's wrong with Qt or GTK. Flutter support on both Windows and Linux is pretty bad. In my opinion, electron is a better choice for cross platform desktop UI--VScode is a shining example of what that can accomplish. And they're in for a lot of work if they want to customize Flutter so it doesn't look material or cupertino. Also, their big contribution to Flutter is getting it on the snap…

I fear the day we replace everything with JavaScript. All JavaScript apps are so unbelievably slow compared to native apps with native toolkits. At work I need to use MS Teams and holy shit it's so slow and if I'm compiling code it's barely usable on an 8 core processor. I had better performance with chat clients in 2002 on hardware that was about 1% as fast as mine today. VS Code is also very slow, you just don't no…

on chromebook with rockchip cpu and 4gb memory, handles c#, go, and dart project just fine

Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#42

Post by antihero »

foepys wrote: post #9
candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I wish they would expand on what's wrong with Qt or GTK. Flutter support on both Windows and Linux is pretty bad. In my opinion, electron is a better choice for cross platform desktop UI--VScode is a shining example of what that can accomplish. And they're in for a lot of work if they want to customize Flutter so it doesn't look material or cupertino. Also, their big contribution to Flutter is getting it on the snap…

I fear the day we replace everything with JavaScript. All JavaScript apps are so unbelievably slow compared to native apps with native toolkits. At work I need to use MS Teams and holy shit it's so slow and if I'm compiling code it's barely usable on an 8 core processor. I had better performance with chat clients in 2002 on hardware that was about 1% as fast as mine today. VS Code is also very slow, you just don't no…

I wouldn't say that is true. For something like React Native, the apps are plenty fast as JS is just used as an expressive control layer for the heavy lifting done in native code.

I think a well maintained React Native for desktop is a really good way forward.

People don't really care about a native "look and feel" any more so long as it's pretty, consistent, and integrates into the OS. Which is why electron is popular. I think the slowness of having everything rendered by a webview is the main drawback of electron, which is solved by React Native which only needs to run JSC or V8 somewhere.

Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#43

Post by antihero »

Would React Native not be a better choice and more open? It's based on existing widely used JS technologies, it is fast, and doesn't have the drawbacks of electron, and you can easily develop for mobile as well.

There are a couple actively maintained projects for RN on desktop such as:

https://proton-native.js.org/#/

https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/ (though this lacks Linux support at the moment).

There's also React NodeGUI, however I don't think people care about having native buttons etc as much (as evidenced by VSCode, Slack, etc, and the plethora of other successful Electron apps) any more.

https://react.nodegui.org/

Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#45

Post by ampdepolymerase »

jeswin wrote: post #36
preommr wrote: post #31

I am bringing some negative energy but I've been burned. I don't understand the hype about flutter - putting aside that dart is a tool that made more sense in a different timeline, or that some of the examples seem really slow/buggy, or that it's rendering behavior is a nightmare to guarantee consistency - putting all that aside, I've yet to see anyone build anything non-trivial with flutter. And then there's Ubuntu.…

> Canonical is just all over the place. We should encourage experimentation and risk taking. No company can always get things right. Phones are a duopoly, but I'm glad they tried. Unity was fairly decent, but in the end adopting Gnome benefitted everyone. Ads were the only bad idea I can think of; but hey I've been using their wonderful software for 15 years now at a total cost of zero.

There was literally nothing wrong with Canonical technology. They just kept cancelling projects to satisfy a vocal minority of Ubuntu users.

Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#46

Post by popey »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #45
jeswin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Canonical is just all over the place. We should encourage experimentation and risk taking. No company can always get things right. Phones are a duopoly, but I'm glad they tried. Unity was fairly decent, but in the end adopting Gnome benefitted everyone. Ads were the only bad idea I can think of; but hey I've been using their wonderful software for 15 years now at a total cost of zero.

There was literally nothing wrong with Canonical technology. They just kept cancelling projects to satisfy a vocal minority of Ubuntu users.

No, we didn't. Unity was cancelled when we downsized in 2017 (4 years ago). It wasn't due to any vocal minority at all. We just refocused our energy.

Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#47

Post by lights0123 »

ToddWBurgess wrote: post #32

As both a Flutter dev and an Ubuntu user, I am thrilled by the news. Looking forward to seeing how it all works out. In a nutshell, if anyone is interested how this works, the Flutter apps will be converted and compiled as GTK3 apps. Dart has the FFI package so it's fairly simple as a Flutter dev to do C system calls in Dart. This will of course stop your app from being cross platform out of the box (but I doubt this…

> converted and compiled as GTK3 apps

What do you mean by that? Isn't one of the goals of Flutter that it gives you pixel-perfect controls, and renders everything itself?

Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#48

Post by SMFloris »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I wish they would expand on what's wrong with Qt or GTK. Flutter support on both Windows and Linux is pretty bad. In my opinion, electron is a better choice for cross platform desktop UI--VScode is a shining example of what that can accomplish. And they're in for a lot of work if they want to customize Flutter so it doesn't look material or cupertino. Also, their big contribution to Flutter is getting it on the snap…

I didn't see it back when I was doing Qt, but writing a Qt app for every platform is hard. In theory you can have Qt apps on Android, iOs, Linux, etfc but in all fairness, it is just too much of a hassle. Big headache with toolchains, dependencies, it is just not worth it nowadays.

"Write once, run everywhere" was a nice motto for Qt and I even bought it for a while but yet again does not work in practice. Flutter, on the other hand, actually works. Sure it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of OS integrations, but it is getting there. I hate the language itself, but I can't deny that it works beautifully.

If you think about it, the Qt way of doing things was quite novel back in the days and had allot of promise, but I feel that the main thing that held it back was C++ (still no official package manager and no cool CLI tools in 2021!!). I am sad that I left Qt behind since it was an amazingly modern platform when I used it, but I am glad I don't do C++ anymore.

Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#49

Post by space_ghost »

jeswin wrote: post #39
candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I wish they would expand on what's wrong with Qt or GTK. Flutter support on both Windows and Linux is pretty bad. In my opinion, electron is a better choice for cross platform desktop UI--VScode is a shining example of what that can accomplish. And they're in for a lot of work if they want to customize Flutter so it doesn't look material or cupertino. Also, their big contribution to Flutter is getting it on the snap…

> VScode is a shining example of what that can accomplish I see this mentioned quite often here, but that's not a valid argument in favour of Electron Apps. VSCode is the primary focus for a user when it's active - so it's fine if it takes up a significant proportion of a machine's resources. Now if a bunch of background taskbar apps, calculators and notepads start doing the same, user experience is going to go downh…

The impact could reduced if a single Electron runtime is shared across apps. Imagine the various HTML5 mobile phone environments, like Palm's webOS, but in a desktop setting.

Re: Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

#50

Post by candiddevmike »

eulers_secret wrote: post #38

Time for me to move away from Ubuntu, then. This and apt randomly installing snaps isn’t what I want. I’ll give Arch a shot, it’s been the new hotness for a long time...

Debian is great and will be very familiar coming from Ubuntu. The next stable release is coming in June too.
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