could have chosen a better name considering the recent events and rumors...
To be fair the Pangolin is likely exonerated at this point.
Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
51–60 of 141 posts
Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#52This takes too many design cues from so-called "modern" web and mobile apps. What's with the lack of scrollbars in all the windows/dialogs? I can't tell that content has been truncated when a dialog opens up with the overflow ending on whitespace between two elements. There's also no fade or shadows, so everything is just suddenly cropped where a window ends. It's not even clear which elements have their own viewport…
Well they did get at least one thing right: actual discreet window title bars with usable controls.
Hopefully removable. I find window title bars to be a waste of space.
Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#53Demo: 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 complet…
I interviewed with one of the flutter engineers. After a casual talk with him on how they were doing the rendering, while interesting, I had a feeling that fluter will fail. It reminded me a bit of all the HTML 5.0 on mobile efforts back in 2011-2014, which mostly failed. (React Native, was an offshoot of those earlier efforts, but even that is being slowly abandoned by the industry now).
That's what you get your company hires only leetcoders.
Sometimes domain expertise comes at expense of general expertise. (some people are super strong in one area, but not so in others). Google hires generalists, which are good at the small leetcode style problems given during an interview, but which surprise surprise are not super strong at design well thought out rendering techniques.
Hence the continuous failures in many new products.
Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#54Please don't use or support Flutter. Its entire existence is to replace the web and force more ads to people. Do your research.
"Do your research" coupled with unsourced assertions is always an interesting argument :) As the product lead for Flutter, I can assure you that this isn't an accurate statement. The product is several years old now, and we only added ads support in the last three months, in response to customer requests ( https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/12114 ). Flutter is open source, welcomes non-Google contributors, and…
> Do your research" coupled with unsourced assertions is always an interesting argument :)
It’s worse than an argument because their comment is not an argument.
They themselves need to substantiate their claims first before demanding evidence from someone else.
Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think to say that its entire existence is a conspiracy to replace the web is a bit much, and I'm sure that the engineers creating it have good intentions. But that doesn't mean Google, the business, doesn't see the value to its bottom line. Google is and will always be an advertising company. Flutter may make UI development less painful for developers, but it takes control out of the users' hands. The web is great,…
Certainly Google sees value in Flutter, otherwise we wouldn’t fund it to the tune of 100+ engineers. But our motivations are less malevolent than you might assume. Here is our strategy doc, which we publish in the open (not many products can say that, I think): https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-in-2022-strategy-and-road...
I read your strategy doc, and it doesn't change anything I said. Front and center is your commitment to developer experience, which is great, but what seems woefully absent is consideration for the end-user. I'm sure that you'll eventually get around to things like accessibility and bring them up to par with what we already have. It's worth saying that nothing should be built for production using Flutter until that's taken care of, but enough people have already said it.
What's absent is a commitment to empower end-users in the same way that the web does now. Your doc puts the developer front and center, but "developer" can be read two ways: the person writing code who wants good tools that make their job a delight, or The Business that wants tools to enable them to deliver products that the end user cannot open open the hood and tinker with. A consistent UI toolkit that lets you develop once and deliver to six platforms is great for the coder, and if in the process it just so happens that the frontend is reduced to indecipherable pixels that can't be modified, ads that can't be blocked, and tracking that can't be escaped, well, that's just perfect for The Business.
I don't doubt you or your team's sincere good intentions. I really don't. But after pulling stunts like AMP, Tag Manager, FLoC/Topics, etc. Google, the business, doesn't deserve a charitable interpretation. It's like Prisoners of Geography. Google is an advertising company, and always will be. Regardless of the ideology or stated goals of the day, everything they do is to sell ads. If Flutter allows Google to display more ads and collect more data, and Google is funding the development of Flutter, it stands to reason that Google is purposefully pushing Flutter because Flutter will allow them to sell more ads and subvert user privacy.
Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#56Demo: https://web.dahliaos.io/#home The UI is still quite slow. Hard to get excited about Flutter.
But thats a web version, you have to test that running outside the browser.
Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm on a Framework running Arch with a 165 Hz external monitor, using Firefox, and it feels sluggish to me. It's usable, but feels like the performance I'd expect from a website. For example, grabbing a window and thrashing it around, it noticeably lags behind my mouse cursor. Resizing a window from the top is pretty bumpy. It lags behind the mouse and the repainting stutters.
You should try brave or chrome it's pretty smooth for me on a 5 year old Ryzen 1 system with 32GB memory. I don't even remember what my AMD card is, it was a mediocre card 5 years ago whatever it is.
Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Gnome is a UX mess, everything is huge, zoomed, desktop screens have more WIDTH then HEIGHT, and yet they waste a shit ton of HEIGHT and force us to constantly have to scroll to see more content Not even macOS went this far, Apple made the right call to develop a separate ipadOS, specific for touch screen UXs Gnome sure is a polished tablet OS mess
GNOME is the perfect DE for 2-in-1s like the Surface imo.
Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#59Re: Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter
#60This takes too many design cues from so-called "modern" web and mobile apps. What's with the lack of scrollbars in all the windows/dialogs? I can't tell that content has been truncated when a dialog opens up with the overflow ending on whitespace between two elements. There's also no fade or shadows, so everything is just suddenly cropped where a window ends. It's not even clear which elements have their own viewport…
It's annoying on phones too. I have a modern phone with a small display, and I've occasionally missed options in dialogs because of zero visual feedback that there is more content.
If I'm lucky, then a line of text will be half cut off and I can tell that way. Otherwise it's impossible.