Ubuntu Makes Flutter ‘Default Choice’ for Future Desktop Apps

Post by jjnoakes » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #20

riffraff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what is meant is that while some electron apps are popular in the developer demographic (i.e. VS Code) the average desktop user does not run many of then, and is more likely to use desktop apps written in non-web technologies (VLC, Transmission, Office, and whatever it is people use these days)

Slack, Spotify, Signal and Whatsapp desktop, Skype, Discord, MS Teams are all built on web tech. I think even Office 365 nowadays has a lot of the UI stuff written in react native. A lot of older linux software is non-web based but that's not the average desktop user.

Post by skybrian » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

SMFloris wrote: post #48

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, o…

Post by scaladev » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

ta988 wrote: post #12

adamcstephens wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron apps use more CPU and drain the battery faster on my Linux laptop. Users may not care what framework renders their apps, but if they were running more than one or two electron instances they may start to notice their battery life is awful. It’s worse on Linux already, there’s no reason to make it even worse.

Faster than? Do you compare applications that do similar things?

Post by zelon88 » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

space_ghost wrote: post #49

jeswin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Post by scaladev » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

zelon88 wrote: post #57

space_ghost wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since electron is basically a headless browser, you would be opening up any app with an XSS vulnerability to any other app running in the runtime.