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Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

github.com

11–20 of 141 posts

Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

#14

Nice, already better than Gnome!

Personally, I think GNOME has more polish than this—the margins are correct in GNOME applications (eg. in the "Search settings" text box in the Settings application). GNOME typically doesn't have those kinds of issues.

Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

#16
post #15

Demo: https://web.dahliaos.io/#home The UI is still quite slow. Hard to get excited about Flutter.

> The UI is still quite slow.

Can you share your computer specs and what browser you're using?

It's buttery smooth on both my Windows desktop and Mac laptop, though both are relatively new.

On my 5+ year old 1.1GHz MacBook it's still entirely usable. Dragging windows around isn't entirely fluid, but it's not that bad for such an underpowered machine.

Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

#17
Very exciting. As this works on Fuchsia, a capabilities-based OS with a security-first design goal, is there any writeup on the security architecture for this project?

Is it correct to say that a convergent desktop environment exposes a large surface area via monolithic access to the underlying OS? It seems that the desktop environment is one of the hardest things to build securely, if embarking on such a journey.

Also, somewhat related: In light of forthcoming capabilities-based hardware (see: ARM Morello), is it a bit hasty to embark on a security-first rewrite of the entrenched Von Neumann / Harvard basis for incumbent OS environments?

Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

#19
post #15

Demo: https://web.dahliaos.io/#home The UI is still quite slow. Hard to get excited about Flutter.

I agree. Every Flutter app I've ever used has been noticeably janky. The absolute worst is the UI for the Google Home Hub which runs at about three frames per second and is incredibly unresponsive to touch and button input. It's as frustrating to use as the touchscreen navigation system displays in old cars, the ones with resistive touchscreens.

I like a lot of things about Flutter, but how did they develop a completely new UI framework from scratch in 2015 and not make fluid animations and fast touch response latency an absolute priority?

Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

#20
post #15

Demo: https://web.dahliaos.io/#home The UI is still quite slow. Hard to get excited about Flutter.

> The UI is still quite slow. Can you share your computer specs and what browser you're using? It's buttery smooth on both my Windows desktop and Mac laptop, though both are relatively new. On my 5+ year old 1.1GHz MacBook it's still entirely usable. Dragging windows around isn't entirely fluid, but it's not that bad for such an underpowered machine.

It's also perfectly smooth for me on Firefox on Linux, although my hardware is pretty performant (Ryzen 9 5900X), although normally Firefox detracts significantly from performance.
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