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Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

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

#81

Post by the_other »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #63

Man, the HN crowd is tough. Folks here don't seem to like anything other than Win95 UI. I personally found the UI to be very slick and pretty. It seems very similar to Win11 and looks rather pretty. Would love to give it a try.

Not this reader. I thought W95 looked clunky in ‘95 and hasn’t aged well.

I much prefer the “open-ness” imparted by macOS’s border-free designs. It’s not perfect, and the “low colour, transparency in meaningless places” direction its taking isn’t its best look. It was better when it felt more “fun”.

I yearn for someone to take the pre-lion design goals and take them deeper i to more usable and more inviting directions.

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

#82

Post by hulitu »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #62
uberduper wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you know what application you're looking at without a title bar? /s

You’re joking about the lack of a title to tell you the name of the app, but not knowing which window has focus (thanks to titlebar shading) is a real problem. Microsoft completely disabled the coloring of the active window in Windows 10, then caved and re-added it as an off-by-default option. I can’t live without it on.

And in taskbar is the same issue. It's like some people like to suffer when using window systems.

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

#84

Post by vladvasiliu »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #62
uberduper wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you know what application you're looking at without a title bar? /s

You’re joking about the lack of a title to tell you the name of the app, but not knowing which window has focus (thanks to titlebar shading) is a real problem. Microsoft completely disabled the coloring of the active window in Windows 10, then caved and re-added it as an off-by-default option. I can’t live without it on.

Well, in my admittedly limited experience of Windows 10, sometimes windows that look active, down to the blinking cursor, don't actually have the focus. So if all windows look the same, maybe people will get in the habit of clicking 10 times where they want to type, just to be sure.

I'm thinking mostly about the UAC window asking for a password.

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

#85

Post by tommica »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #5

This 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…

Agreed with the scrollbars - they should absolutely be there. I would also like to see a light-theme version, at least I need to squint a lot more with this dark theme.

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

#86

Post by hulitu »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #63

Man, the HN crowd is tough. Folks here don't seem to like anything other than Win95 UI. I personally found the UI to be very slick and pretty. It seems very similar to Win11 and looks rather pretty. Would love to give it a try.

> It seems very similar to Win11 and looks rather pretty.

This sentence contradicts itself. Some people say that there is a certain beauty in ugliness, but i don't think it applies to windows 10 and 11.

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

#87

Post by DrBazza »

xedrac wrote: post #21
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

Perhaps we have different ideas of what constitutes "buttery smooth". I find the performance usable but sluggish. I think many people have become accustomed to this kind of performance though. Regardless, I find the design of the UI quite appealing. AMD® Ryzen 9 5950x, 32 GB RAM, Linux/Fedora 35, Firefox 97.0, Chromium 96.0.4664.110

I worked on a proprietary trading app using flutter for mobile and we had zero issues whilst rendering both ticker prices and charts in real time. How is desktop so different?

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

#88

Post by KronisLV »

eikenberry wrote: post #52
bityard wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I find window title bars to be a waste of space.

Here's a possibly controversial take: why couldn't we do the opposite of mobile "notches" but for the elements of title bars that actually matter?

So instead of having 20% of the window width be taken up by the title (which might as well act as a draggable window handle or allow opening window menu) and another 10% by the action buttons with 70% remaining empty, why couldn't we simply cut out the 70%? Sure, that might complicate the UI of some apps and you'd certainly need to consider how to not create awkward layouts (allow the titlebar to automatically be hidden until hovering over the edge of the window, like some panels do at the edge of the screen in XFCE and other *nix DEs), but surely we can have the best of both worlds?

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

#89

Post by KronisLV »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #16
didip wrote: 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.

Here's the web demo link, in case anyone missed it: https://web.dahliaos.io/

Current machine: Edge (closest thing to Chrome that i have apart from Firefox) or Firefox, Ryzen 5 1600, RX570.

The performance is passable for a graphically intensive application but entirely unacceptable for a desktop environment of any kind. In addition, it seems like it is a bit worse optimized on Firefox than it is on Chromium based browsers.

Opening 1 window and dragging it around leads to ~25% of the GPU usage (albeit i power limited mine to 50% of the total capacity), which feels insane when you consider that games running at 60 FPS use maybe ~50%. Opening up more windows, anywhere between 5-10 and dragging them around yields a similar load to rendering tens if not hundreds of thousands of polygons on screen.

Thus, i have to agree with the folks that say that this is entirely unacceptable as a desktop environment for any device, apart from when you are inclined to waste your hardware resources for no good reason. Admittedly, Flutter is better suited for this than it is for web development (in which it can be downright hostile and cause accessibility issues) and if nothing else the UI looks good, but personally that's not something that i care about.

In summary: i don't think that this would ever be an acceptable desktop environment, especially for devices that are running on battery power. Its resource usage would cripple any graphically intensive tasks in the background, unless you have really powerful hardware, which isn't the case for much of the world. Then again, in my eyes the perfect DE is somewhere along the lines of XFCE/LXDE/LxQt, so YMMV.

Edit: tested it out on my notebook as well, which has a N4000 Celeron and Intel UHD 600 integrated graphics. Even opening 1 window lagged everything considerably (on Firefox) and i have to guess that the FPS was somewhere between 10-20.

So, once again: unacceptable as a desktop environment, even with any given browser overhead. Of course, being able to run software like this in the browser reflects positively upon its portability, if nothing else, which is cool to see.

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

#90

Post by spockz »

aidenn0 wrote: post #60
ComputerGuru wrote: post #5

This 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.

This is why I adopted the habit to try to scroll in many places. Just to see whether there might be something else.
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