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Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

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91–100 of 141 posts

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

#91

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.

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 bro…

Flutter on web is completely different beast from when it runs native. Flutter on web is basically rendering everything on a canvas.

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

#92

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.

Seems like around Windows 95 was the last time designers put a thought to designing for usability and around the actual constraints in the medium.

Most modern UIs seem to focus almost entirely on clean aesthetics, usually mindlessly drawing on conventions that serve limitations that exist in mobile, such as being really conservative about using screen space.

I think desktop Firefox is an excellent example of this. A lot of very useful features are hidden behind an additional click on a minuscule ≡-button (What does that symbol even mean? Why doesn't it have a label?) All, it appears, to save hundreds pixels of screen space, while desktop displays are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You can't even use full screen windows on many desktop displays, you'll get neck pain from literally having to turn your head to read.

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

#94
Can someone give a little more information on what dahliaOS[0] is?

It seems to be the OS that has created this desktop environment, but the website for it doesn't seem to go into much detail. How is it related to fuschia? is it a google initiative, or something simply targeting the open source bits of fuschia that have been released? (there are some links at the bottom of that page[0] that sound like they'd answer my question, such as "the goal" but they all just seem to link straight back to the top of the page.)

[0] https://dahliaos.io/

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

#95
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bro…

Flutter on web is completely different beast from when it runs native. Flutter on web is basically rendering everything on a canvas.

I wonder where we could get benchmarks that compare the low level rendering performance of the web vs native targets per platform. Having something like that would probably be immensely useful to be able to reason about the differences between them.

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

#96

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…

The lack of scrollbars on desktop is a modern trend that annoys me

Desktops aren't short of width, so why try and hide the scrollbars all the time, but programs seem happy to pack everything into navigation bars at the top where height is limited.

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

#98
post #27

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.

Probably a case of having hardware acceleration turned off in the bowser, which at least for me is necessary due to issues with casting chrome windows in things like discord.

I think that may be my issue too. People are describing it as sluggish. My computer is taking a second to respond to every input

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's basically what apps like Chrome that have "no titlebar" (at least on macOS) do. They incorporate the title bar controls into the window itself which allows them to render other things (like tabs) on the same row.

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

#100

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.

Seems like around Windows 95 was the last time designers put a thought to designing for usability and around the actual constraints in the medium. Most modern UIs seem to focus almost entirely on clean aesthetics, usually mindlessly drawing on conventions that serve limitations that exist in mobile, such as being really conservative about using screen space. I think desktop Firefox is an excellent example of this. A…

Worth mentioning that you can turn the pull down menus back on in Firefox.
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