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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

#111

Post by jiofih »

thiht wrote: post #70
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…

> 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.

You’re not looking at the right processes. The real work happens in “VS Code helper” child processes which take at least 500MB total, usually more. That memory is not sitting idle either, it means your CPU is churning a lot more, and its not nice when you realize your code editor is using 20%.

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

#112

Post by jiofih »

wetpaws wrote: post #99
toastercat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sublime Text has been consistently slower for me than VSCode.

That’s simply not possible unless you mangled it with a broken extension. Sublime has its own native rendered with much, much lower latency.

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

#113

Post by jiofih »

hillelcoren wrote: post #107
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.…

Flutter deserves the hype it's getting. I've been developing apps for 20 years, it's the real deal. We're using it at our company to rebuild our app and now have a single front-end codebase which compiles to web, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and macOS. You can try the demo here: https://demo.invoiceninja.com

Scrolling is not the smoothest, and that’s on the latest iPhone, but overall pretty good. I can see it working if it becomes as responsive as web / native.

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

#114

Post by hillelcoren »

jiofih wrote: post #113
hillelcoren wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter deserves the hype it's getting. I've been developing apps for 20 years, it's the real deal. We're using it at our company to rebuild our app and now have a single front-end codebase which compiles to web, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and macOS. You can try the demo here: https://demo.invoiceninja.com

Scrolling is not the smoothest, and that’s on the latest iPhone, but overall pretty good. I can see it working if it becomes as responsive as web / native.

Thanks for trying it out!

I'll be the first to admin that the performance is currently not quite as good as a plain HTML/JS/CSS webapp, however as a small team being able to compile one codebase to every platform is game changing.

The performance issues of Flutter Web are more apparent on mobile however users can install our native mobile app which performs much betters.

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

#115

Post by mark_l_watson »

trash3 wrote: post #108
mark_l_watson wrote: post #15

As a non-UI developer (I specialize in NLP, deep learning, and knowledge graphs), I like Flutter because it is so easy to make cross platform apps that someone like me can get started quickly. I would expect that experts would still prefer native Android, iOS, desktop, etc. frameworks.

Any pointers from someone with DL/AI background in Python? I was looking to do web development with flask, postgresql,HTML/CSS... Does flutter just replace front end and interact with the flask rest api instead of things like jinja templates?

Flutter supports server side dev also.

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

#116

Post by sofixa »

greatgib wrote: post #85

This is very very sad news, but consistent with the slippery slope that Canonical is following in the recent years. They look like to not care about users anymore, as with snaps, but behave like any other business of the silicon valley without real value. Flutter does not even make sense with desktop apps. It is like electron mediocre apps. What I see here is Canonical following whatever they can get from the biggest…

Okay, a few things here.

Canonical are a UK-based company, nothing to do with the Silicon Valley.

Flutter compiles to native code and uses Qt behind the scenes. Electron uses an embedded Chrome to render stuff with web tech. How are they even remotely alike? They're cross-platform, yes, and Dart is supposed to be a better JavaScript, but that's it.

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

#118

Post by wayneftw »

I tried it out the other day after seeing this announcement.

So, I created the default app and it ran fine. Then I wanted to add a menubar to the window, so I found the Flutter menubar plugin, installed it and got it working.

My first menu items were _File -> E_xit. The Alt+ keyboard acceleration indeed worked on my system (Manjaro/XFCE) without any problem! However, as soon as I wanted to handle the "Exit" action I got stuck.

I searched around a bit but I could not find an answer. How do you exit a Flutter desktop app programatically?

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

#119

Post by axaxs »

snicker7 wrote: post #101
axaxs wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bazaar and snaps came before git and flatpak. Unity came about with the Gnome 2 to 3 transition (and earlier versions of Gnome 3 were widely agreed to be a step backwards). Upstart has a very different design philosophy than systemd. Hard to say its NIH when it was different tech. NIH apparently means "not adopting whatever RedHat develops/supports".

Bzr and Git started at about the same time, but Git moved much faster and its 1.0 was way before bzr(not that that matters much, honestly).

Flatpak was known about and talked about before snaps, as another pointed out.

Upstart - that's fair, upstart was something new that didn't get replaced by systemd for a couple cycles.

Like it or not, Red Hat controls gnome which is a huge ecosystem. Your best bet for effecting change there is collaboration, not hacking together your own UI for yourself. I mean, sure they are free to do that, but the writing was on the wall before it even started.

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

#120

Post by mikewhy »

antihero wrote: post #43

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). Th…

Canonical already went down this route, but I'm not sure why it was abandoned: https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/react-native
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