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I am so excited about flutter ecosystem. Hopefully linux gets first class beautiful native apps now. I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as

I am so excited about flutter ecosystem. Hopefully linux gets first class beautiful native apps now. I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as a backend so KDE is not left out.

RivieraKid 6y ago
I wouldn't call Material UI on the desktop beautiful. Mac OS is beautiful. Gnome 2 too relative to other Linux DEs. It won't use Qt but Skia.
andrepd 6y ago
Judging by the example in TFA, we must have very different conceptions of what "beautiful" means. That is an atrocious application. * Ungodly amounts of whitespace (seriously, look at that sidebar, look at that search bar. WHY? too much optimisation for what "looks good on a screenshot", maybe?) * Undecipherable symbols where there's plenty of f#cking space to write labels god damn it * I bet bad/nonexistant keyboard support (remember alt-* to navigate menus?) * Ugly to look at (subjective)
- Spivak 6y ago
  You do know that none of that is really do do with Flutter, right? Like you're just taking it out on the designers of Flock.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    This isn't true: Google preloads their design conceptions, namely Material, into Flutter at the ground level, and Material is a terrible set of UI patterns, such as the ones the parent comment was complaining about.
    - satvikpendem 6y ago
      You don't have to use the material design stuff, you can just make your own components, all custom, just as you would on the web. Just replace MaterialApp with WidgetsApp at the root of the application tree.
      - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
        You don't have to, but it is the default, which means it sets the standard of design there. Unsurprisingly, most things you see made with Flutter tend to either be or be similar to Material.
  - lultimouomo 6y ago
    In defence of GP, the article says > we’ve seen more than 80,000 fast, beautiful Flutter apps published to Google Play thus somehow tying the app looks to the fact that they use Flutter.
- zelly 6y ago
  You can style the widgets however you like. You don't have to use the default Material toolkit, the same way you can design Qt widgets in QML and don't have to use those default 1990s-style gray box widgets. > remember alt-* to navigate menus? I do, but most people reading this probably won't, or there will come a time shortly when most people won't remember. I think most people are used to everything being a web/Electron app. Users do not expect a standard design language (like Win32/Swing/Qt) for desktop apps anymore (and indeed a Win32-style desktop app will soon look as foreign as a webapp since even the Windows shell looks like a webapp now). Flutter lets you create "webapps" (which is the new standard) but with native performance and ability to make syscalls (being native). The only alternative tech stacks to this end are QML/QtQuick, JavaFX, an embedded WebView, or embedded Chromium (e.g. Electron or Chromium Emebedded Framework)--all of which having some sort of baggage. Flutter's baggage is you have to use Dart. The alternatives all also require that you use some sort of DSL (QML (Qt), FXML (JavaFX), JS (Electron)) so that's not a unique disadvantage. (It really isn't a disadvantage--imagine the hell if there weren't a DSL for the View layer and every language had to have bindings.) GUI programming is downright suffering no matter which way you slice it. There are no interesting problems to solve, unless you're working on the GUI framework itself. Flutter makes this suffering slightly better. I don't see how it's not an absolute good.
zelly 6y ago
Flutter implements a bespoke renderer called Skia. It is its own backend. For Qt to be compatible with Flutter you'd have to port Qt to Dart. There's nothing wrong with running Flutter apps and Qt apps simulatenously. It would be an interesting project for someone to create a KDE type of desktop environment in Flutter. Can it be done?
- devxpy 6y ago
  There's an experiment from a flutter core dev -- running flutter on a raspberry pi without any desktop environment. https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-on-raspberry-pi-mostly-from-scratch-2824c5e7dcb1 https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-on-raspberry-pi-mostly-fr... A DE written in flutter sounds like a great accelerator/toy project for making flutter desktop polished and ready for the masses.
solarkraft 6y ago
> I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as a backend so KDE is not left out. Unlikely (GNOME market share) and I can't see why it'd be that important. Platform protocols can be implemented around GTK and as far as I understand GTK is just a vehicle for getting X11/Wayland compatibility, the rendering itself will always be done by Flutter's engine anyway.

I am so excited about flutter ecosystem. Hopefully linux gets first class beautiful native apps now. I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as a backend so KDE is not left out.

RivieraKid 6y ago

I wouldn't call Material UI on the desktop beautiful. Mac OS is beautiful. Gnome 2 too relative to other Linux DEs. It won't use Qt but Skia.

andrepd 6y ago

Judging by the example in TFA, we must have very different conceptions of what "beautiful" means. That is an atrocious application. * Ungodly amounts of whitespace (seriously, look at that sidebar, look at that search bar. WHY? too much optimisation for what "looks good on a screenshot", maybe?) * Undecipherable symbols where there's plenty of f#cking space to write labels god damn it * I bet bad/nonexistant keyboard support (remember alt-* to navigate menus?) * Ugly to look at (subjective)

Spivak 6y ago
You do know that none of that is really do do with Flutter, right? Like you're just taking it out on the designers of Flock.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  This isn't true: Google preloads their design conceptions, namely Material, into Flutter at the ground level, and Material is a terrible set of UI patterns, such as the ones the parent comment was complaining about.
  - satvikpendem 6y ago
    You don't have to use the material design stuff, you can just make your own components, all custom, just as you would on the web. Just replace MaterialApp with WidgetsApp at the root of the application tree.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      You don't have to, but it is the default, which means it sets the standard of design there. Unsurprisingly, most things you see made with Flutter tend to either be or be similar to Material.
- lultimouomo 6y ago
  In defence of GP, the article says > we’ve seen more than 80,000 fast, beautiful Flutter apps published to Google Play thus somehow tying the app looks to the fact that they use Flutter.
zelly 6y ago
You can style the widgets however you like. You don't have to use the default Material toolkit, the same way you can design Qt widgets in QML and don't have to use those default 1990s-style gray box widgets. > remember alt-* to navigate menus? I do, but most people reading this probably won't, or there will come a time shortly when most people won't remember. I think most people are used to everything being a web/Electron app. Users do not expect a standard design language (like Win32/Swing/Qt) for desktop apps anymore (and indeed a Win32-style desktop app will soon look as foreign as a webapp since even the Windows shell looks like a webapp now). Flutter lets you create "webapps" (which is the new standard) but with native performance and ability to make syscalls (being native). The only alternative tech stacks to this end are QML/QtQuick, JavaFX, an embedded WebView, or embedded Chromium (e.g. Electron or Chromium Emebedded Framework)--all of which having some sort of baggage. Flutter's baggage is you have to use Dart. The alternatives all also require that you use some sort of DSL (QML (Qt), FXML (JavaFX), JS (Electron)) so that's not a unique disadvantage. (It really isn't a disadvantage--imagine the hell if there weren't a DSL for the View layer and every language had to have bindings.) GUI programming is downright suffering no matter which way you slice it. There are no interesting problems to solve, unless you're working on the GUI framework itself. Flutter makes this suffering slightly better. I don't see how it's not an absolute good.

zelly 6y ago

Flutter implements a bespoke renderer called Skia. It is its own backend. For Qt to be compatible with Flutter you'd have to port Qt to Dart. There's nothing wrong with running Flutter apps and Qt apps simulatenously. It would be an interesting project for someone to create a KDE type of desktop environment in Flutter. Can it be done?

devxpy 6y ago
There's an experiment from a flutter core dev -- running flutter on a raspberry pi without any desktop environment. https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-on-raspberry-pi-mostly-from-scratch-2824c5e7dcb1 https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-on-raspberry-pi-mostly-fr... A DE written in flutter sounds like a great accelerator/toy project for making flutter desktop polished and ready for the masses.

solarkraft 6y ago

> I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as a backend so KDE is not left out. Unlikely (GNOME market share) and I can't see why it'd be that important. Platform protocols can be implemented around GTK and as far as I understand GTK is just a vehicle for getting X11/Wayland compatibility, the rendering itself will always be done by Flutter's engine anyway.