71–80 of 120 posts
Hopefully for Canonical everything will go well, I wish them good luck.
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?
This is also how Druid the Rust GUI framework works on Linux. Use GTK to start the window and the paint surface (Cairo).
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…
That's plain wrong. I recently upgraded my 7 years old mid range laptop and VSCode ran just fine on it, even with the required set of extensions for my projects. I upgraded because I had other issues, but VSCode wasn't one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't think it's safe to generalize "x is slow and electron, y is fast and native" to mean "native is fast". Electron lowering barrier to entry also means it's used by projects who aren't going to carefully profile their app no matter what, so the same app written as a native app would also be garbage. At least some of it is "correlation not causation" And for your chat example, when I was at IBM the Sametime chat…
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.
In theory I agree, but Canonical really seem to do it over and over. Whether it's NIH or something else, it seems every time technology starts shifting, Ubuntu goes its own way only to drop it a year or two later. Unity/compiz, Mir , Ubuntu One, Upstart, Bazaar. And currently baking are Snaps and LXD. This isn't to say any of these are bad products, but it has real effects to the end user, who invest time in somethin…
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…
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…
> it's fine if it takes up a significant proportion of a machine's resources I currently run 2 VScode instances and they literally total 70 MB. So no, it's not significant, on the contrary actually. And to be fair, even if it was 700 MB, I wouldn't care. Even older machines have at least 4 GB memory.
For the record, VSCode chugs like a MF on my Thinkpad running XFCE with 4gb of RAM. Meanwhile, Sublime Text flies
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.
And a universal way of accessing any published application for that runtime through some kind of address bar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's fine if it takes up a significant proportion of a machine's resources I currently run 2 VScode instances and they literally total 70 MB. So no, it's not significant, on the contrary actually. And to be fair, even if it was 700 MB, I wouldn't care. Even older machines have at least 4 GB memory.
I'm always puzzled by these kinds of retorts. It's wonderful that you've never experienced performance or resourcing issues with Electron apps. But just because you haven't, doesn't mean other people don't. For the record, VSCode chugs like a MF on my Thinkpad running XFCE with 4gb of RAM. Meanwhile, Sublime Text flies
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.…