Flutter for Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Flutter for Linux

#11

Post by cxr » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

colesantiago wrote: post #8

What is the off chance that Google will drop Flutter?

If the Vala folks and Gnome in general could be convinced to drop Vala in favor Dart, or move valac in the direction of accepting a language that looks like (a subset or a complex supersubset of) Dart, it could be an effective hedge against Google pulling out. It would also be an instance of Gnome and the various commercial vendors who rely on it being ahead of the curve—particularly for mobile, while proprietary vendors are still left dealing with the legacy of Android, Dalvik, and Java.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#12

Post by skratlo » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

Yay, Macromedia Flash for desktop is here, made in Google, Dart instead of ActionScript, wow, just wow.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#13

Post by jayd16 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

oaiey wrote: post #5

Microsoft really has to speed up the Xamarin.Forms / Maui development. The omission of Linux is a really a pity.

They said they'll have a preview by the end of the year. I'm excited to see it but I'd rather they do it right instead of right now.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#14

Post by l3s2d » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

olingern wrote: post #7

I haven’t dug into this, but I wonder what compatibility this will have with window managers, like i3

Just tested on sway, it draws the title bar, but otherwise seems to work.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#15

Post by axegon_ » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

I'm actually a great fan of flutter and imo it is the best cross-platform solution out there. Probably except for web: though it produces very good result performance-wise, the end result is never really "web" and doesn't act like traditional web. As for desktop applications(whether it be windows, linux or mac), it seems like it's too mobile-oriented. I see great potential for simple solutions like self-service operations where you need a basic UI and it would be great if it could easily target platforms like raspberry pi (arm processors running Linux). But at the moment, while possible, it is a very painful thing to tackle and I wouldn't rely on something like that for an end product. I would assume that this is why google is working on fuchsia but way too few devices are supported. And neither of them is cheap(which is what could be a game changer, going back to the raspberry pi).

Re: Flutter for Linux

#16

Post by k__ » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

me551ah wrote: post #9

The future of cross platform desktop development looks bright. Microsoft is coming up with .NET 6 and Google has flutter. I just hope that these frameworks can replace bulky electron apps.

Revery also looks nice.

I wish they had more funding, tho. I find Reason/OCaml more compelling than Dart.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#17

Post by sudhirj » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

colesantiago wrote: post #8

What is the off chance that Google will drop Flutter?

This matters only if Flutter is a closed source project – but it's not. You can fork it on Github right now and continue working on it even if Google pulls its engineers off. I'd assume that those of us (and there seem be a lot of people) invested in it will continue working on it.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#18

Post by sgt » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

Does this work well on RPi 4?

Re: Flutter for Linux

#19

Post by thomascgalvin » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

Does Flutter have a native HTML widget yet? It didn't when I first started poking around with Flutter, and a quick Google doesn't reveal anything first-party.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#20

Post by dathinab » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

cxr wrote: post #11

colesantiago wrote: post #8

What is the off chance that Google will drop Flutter?

If the Vala folks and Gnome in general could be convinced to drop Vala in favor Dart, or move valac in the direction of accepting a language that looks like (a subset or a complex supersubset of) Dart, it could be an effective hedge against Google pulling out. It would also be an instance of Gnome and the various commercial vendors who rely on it being ahead of the curve—particularly for mobile, while proprietary ven…

> Gnome in general could be convinced to drop Vala in favor Dart

I would be very surprised if that happens.

The last time I checked it seems that if anything changes then that bit-by-bit some components get replaced with new ones written in rust.

Also I honestly would be very surprised if Gnome would move from gtk-based UI to a flutter based UI interface.

I mean besides political reasons the amount of rework you would have to do is probably in a degree which makes it unpractical.

And in context of libre5 and some other developments there was a lot of effort to make gtk-based UI ready to be used with handheld devices.