14 ms·

Pangolin desktop environment for Fuchsia and Linux written in Flutter

189 points by kaladin-jasnah 5y ago

didip 5y ago
Demo: https://web.dahliaos.io/#home https://web.dahliaos.io/#home The UI is still quite slow. Hard to get excited about Flutter.
- gutino 5y ago
  But thats a web version, you have to test that running outside the browser.
  - tonis2 5y ago
    Yes flutter performance is horrible on web, but not bad on mobile and as native app
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > 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.
  - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
    It's also perfectly smooth for me on Firefox on Linux, although my hardware is pretty performant (Ryzen 9 5900X), although normally Firefox detracts significantly from performance.
  - xedrac 5y ago
    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
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > AMD® Ryzen 9 5950x, 32 GB RAM, Linux/Fedora 35, Firefox 97.0, Chromium 96.0.4664.110 Same CPU in my Windows workstation and it's plenty smooth. Not just usable, but smooth. This is at 4K. Do you have a modern GPU, or something quite old? Or do you have browser hardware acceleration disabled? If not for your GPU, it's also possible that Linux simply performs significantly worse than Windows for whatever reason.
      - xedrac 5y ago
        Yes, I have a recent and powerful GPU with hardware acceleration enabled. I also tried this on my Windows box (i7-9700k, Nvidia GTX 1070), and if anything, it performs a little worse than my Linux box. It's definitely usable. I just have a low tolerance for sluggish software.
      - iamlemec 5y ago
        Just another data point here: I'm running a relatively high-end workstation on Linux/Fedora 36, and it is quite smooth in Chrome but somewhat sluggish in Firefox.
    - sli 5y ago
      5950X, 32 gigs of RAM, Win10, Firefox 98, 3080Ti (if it's GPU accelerated, I didn't look) and it's super jittery for me. It's usable, but it's not smooth at all. Dragging windows around is pretty bad.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - DrBazza 5y ago
      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?
  - von_lohengramm 5y ago
    I'm on a 2019 16" MBP 2.6GHz i7 with a 5300M. This machine isn't a powerhouse, but it can drive 1080p240Hz + 1440p144Hz buttery smooth for a million Firefox tabs and a couple IntelliJ projects (if everything's all indexed...). On this site, I get like 10fps while doing things, clicking, moving around, etc. It doesn't even look like motion. I threw it into Firefox's profiler and it has consistent "janks" between 100ms to over 200ms. No thanks.
  - cdash 5y ago
    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.
    - ChrisRR 5y ago
      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
  - eloisius 5y ago
    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.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      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.
  - somethingwitty1 5y ago
    On both my Windows laptop (Ryzen 7 + 1080Ti) and Windows Desktop (Ryzen 9 + dual RX 5700 XT) machines, it is really slow. Dragging windows is unbearable and the other apps are quite laggy (such as switching views in the "media" app). Both have hardware acceleration enabled.
  - paavohtl 5y ago
    On my Windows workstation with a Ryzen 5800X and an RTX 3080, it is a stuttery mess on Firefox. Dragging windows happens at maybe 10 FPS, and there's half a second of input latency on everything.
  - qzio 5y ago
    I'm on a a (14" 2021) macbook pro with the apple M1 Pro cpu and 32gb ram. I've tried both firefox and chrome. This would NOT be a viable desktop environment. The performance is WAY worse than anything I've used for the last 15 years. And this includes shitty 10-yearold no-name laptops using gnome/compiz.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    Here's the web demo link, in case anyone missed it: https://web.dahliaos.io/ 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.
    - Cloudef 5y ago
      Flutter on web is completely different beast from when it runs native. Flutter on web is basically rendering everything on a canvas.
      - KronisLV 5y ago
        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.
- modeless 5y ago
  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 completely new UI framework from scratch in 2015 and not make fluid animations and fast touch response latency an absolute priority?
  - ardit33 5y ago
    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.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      > not super strong at design well thought out rendering techniques. Can you expound on this?
  - pkphilip 5y ago
    It may have something to do with the fact that Flutter state management of the UI requires the UI to repaint completely whenever there is a change. This makes no sense whatsoever because it goes exactly in the opposite direction of optimised graphics programming - where the ideal was to repaint the smallest portion of the screen as possible for any change.
    - 5y ago
- dekhn 5y ago
  Is there a way to get a terminal to work? I'm interested in Fuchsia and this if I can get a terminal and run make/gcc.
  - fdjm 5y ago
    There is a shell in Fuchsia, but it's not a unix, so neither make nor gcc will run natively on it.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      My windows machine can run make and gcc natively. You don't need to be unix to run those platforms. I haven't watched fuchsia closely (last interfaced about 6 years ago, talked to a team member, who said that eventually it would be able to emulate unix enough to build and host a compiler). I guess I should have put my question in a more useful way: why would I want to use this desktop, given its limitations compared to existing desktops? Is it ever going to be a development system? If not, I can't see how it would grow beyond being a device environment- in which case there probably shouldn't be a terminal anyway. Probably I'm asking for something which is not a goal of fuchsia, but in that case, I really can't get exicted about something that's supposed to replace Android and other OSes.
- harel 5y ago
  My first impression upon opening this was about how fast and responsive this feels (chrome/linux)... Which actually now makes me more concerned that this experience is not consistent across users and platforms, because this leads to the dangerous "but it works for me" attitude.
- yesimahuman 5y ago
  Agreed, pretty unusable on my beefy Windows desktop on Firefox
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Flutter has some performance issues on the web but it's much better when running natively. There's still some jank caused by shader compilation but they have plans to fix that. It's not inherent to the design of Flutter - it's actually an issue with Skia. That said, I've only used it for smallish apps. Would be interesting to see how it works for a whole desktop.
ozaiworld 5y ago
Flutter for Web feels incredibly sluggish and drops frames whenever I do any interaction. I’m not sure why that’s happening when most of the WebGL and WebGPU demos run at high frame rates.
gigglesupstairs 5y ago
Design language looks very similar to Windows 11? Not sure if it was intentional since it must have been in development for a while. Anyways, it’s a very elegant looking environment.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  I'll agree—it's elegant. The animations are a bit "Flutter-y" and I'm not a fan of Flutter animations in general, but it does look quite nice: https://web.dahliaos.io/ https://web.dahliaos.io/.
  - tmccrary55 5y ago
    Wow, yeah. That's horrible.
- amanzi 5y ago
  Feels like Android to me.
- bityard 5y ago
  I thought it looked more like a random mashup of iOS, Android, and Chrome OS.
- von_lohengramm 5y ago
  To be fair, Windows 11 did directly rip a ton of its design too, especially from Chrome OS of all things.
  - zamalek 5y ago
    It's not a bad thing to rip off good ideas, though that was not the case with Win 11.
- pram 5y ago
  Reminds me of Ubuntu Unity personally, haha
forgotpwd16 5y ago
Discussion from 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842859 Performance still bad for me.
ComputerGuru 5y ago
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 viewports and which are scrolled together (so I missed extra elements in the settings toolbar/toolbox on the left). All the windows open up very small (too small to fit their content) even though there's room for bigger. (All tested on the online demo here: https://web.dahliaos.io/#/ https://web.dahliaos.io/#/ )
- bityard 5y ago
  Well they did get at least one thing right: actual discreet window title bars with usable controls.
  - eikenberry 5y ago
    Hopefully removable. I find window title bars to be a waste of space.
    - uberduper 5y ago
      But how do you know what application you're looking at without a title bar? /s
      - ComputerGuru 5y ago
        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.
        hulitu 5y ago
ducktective 5y ago
could have chosen a better name considering the recent events and rumors...
- adolfojp 5y ago
  I'm out of the loop. What am I missing?
  - soperj 5y ago
    Covid-19.
- notacanofsoda 5y ago
  It could be confused with Ubuntu Precise Pangolin, if people search "Pangolin Ubuntu"
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    As well as System76's Pangolin laptop, which also runs Ubuntu.
    - EnderNightLord 5y ago
      pangolin originated before system76 brought out the laptop
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
        Thanks for the clarification
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tjpnz 5y ago
  To be fair the Pangolin is likely exonerated at this point.
angryasian 5y ago
I think its pretty impressive that this is being built in Flutter.
Shadonototra 5y ago
Nice, already better than Gnome!
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  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.
  - Shadonototra 5y ago
    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
    - malermeister 5y ago
      GNOME is the perfect DE for 2-in-1s like the Surface imo.
E2EEd 5y ago
Very exciting. As this works on Fuchsia, a capabilities-based OS with a security-first design goal, is there any writeup on the security architecture for this project? Is it correct to say that a convergent desktop environment exposes a large surface area via monolithic access to the underlying OS? It seems that the desktop environment is one of the hardest things to build securely, if embarking on such a journey. Also, somewhat related: In light of forthcoming capabilities-based hardware (see: ARM Morello), is it a bit hasty to embark on a security-first rewrite of the entrenched Von Neumann / Harvard basis for incumbent OS environments?
The_rationalist 5y ago
intrasight 5y ago
I get a blank page in Firefox
matchbok 5y ago
Please don't use or support Flutter. Its entire existence is to replace the web and force more ads to people. Do your research.
- Osiris 5y ago
  Do you have any citations to support this claim? Flutter is open source.
  - zerr 5y ago
    How it being an open source would help ad blocking on the client side? It certainly won't be as easy as current blocking methods for html/css/js.
    - colesantiago 5y ago
      You know it’s ok to say “I’ve made an emotional baseless assertion backed up with no evidence”. I hate google as much as next person on HN, but at least have some evidence.
      - zerr 5y ago
        Not OP, and can't comment on Google's hidden intentions, but it does have a point - any such open source Flash replacements would make ad blocking harder.
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    So is AMP
- timsneath 5y ago
  "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 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/12114). Flutter is open source, welcomes non-Google contributors, and is led by a group of hackers who think that UI development shouldn't be as painful as it is. One might have thought this would be attractive to the kind of developers who hang out on HN :)
luckydata 5y ago
I took a quick look at the repo and the most important piece of info is missing: why? What's the point of this project? More generally, open source projects should really get into the habit of spending a few words on WHY they exist, so people driving by don't have to wreck their brains figuring out why would you care.
- wetpaws 5y ago
  Probably either just a cool poc or devs sniffing crack
Yhippa 5y ago
Jeez, am I one of the few people here who liked the demo? I thought the performance was comparable to my aging Pixelbook. I liked the design too.
rishav_sharan 5y ago
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.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  The Win95 UI was the result of pretty thorough formal-ish user studies. How many design iterations after that went through the same process ? Fairly close to 0 I believe.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    Microsoft did a lot of usability research on Vista: https://news.microsoft.com/2007/01/29/large-scale-research-project-aims-to-make-windows-vista-useful-fun-for-all/ https://news.microsoft.com/2007/01/29/large-scale-research-p...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- the_other 5y ago
  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.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > 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.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  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.
the100rabh 5y ago
jjice 5y ago
Looks very nice, but what is like more is a DE that is concrete stable. I've been told by people across the internet that I need to try DE #36 and that it's actually good, or that Gnome is awesome now. They're always at least broken enough to impede a bit. I use Gnome now, but after my machine has been on for a few days, all text associated with the Gnome shell disappears and only comes back on restart. MacOS works pretty well in my experience, but I don't want to be part of that ecosystem. Windows GUI is fine for the most part in my experience, but I want to use a Unix (WSL is good, but not a replacement for me). For now, I'll hold out and keep rooting for the Linux desktop, but it's got a ways to go. Can't blame them though, Apple and Microsoft have tons of money being concentrated into a single GUI environment. Linux has a million different small projects paid for with some dedicated contributor's time.
- Loic 5y ago
  I am surprised with your Gnome issues. I am running Ubuntu 20.04 with the stock Gnome and restart only for the kernel updates. It is my daily work system and I just put it to sleep at the end of the day. My issues on Linux are normally always coming from non open source software (VMware, Zoom, ...). What I found helpful is to do a full reinstall of the OS instead of an upgrade and carefully bring back the "dot" folders with my configurations.
  - jjice 5y ago
    I can absolutely agree with non opensource software being the worst experience on Linux. I can't blame the companies for not spending less time and effort on the Linux versions due to the percentage of their users that use those platforms, but it's unfortunate as a Linux user. One of the things that makes me actually use Electron programs is that they usually work fine on Linux out of the box (sometimes there are deficiencies if it needs webcam/mic usage). That said, I hate having to hand over a precious few hundred megabytes of RAM on an old machine just to use a messaging app.
atdrummond 5y ago
I am extremely excited about Dahlia and the work your team is doing. HN has a significant cohort of people who are extremely opinionated about how OS UI/UX should work. Don't take that to mean there aren't people who are interested in what you are developing; keep us abreast of your progress and I will make sure to repeatedly check up on your subsequent developments.
rupinderjeet 5y ago
Stormlight be with you.
anentropic 5y ago
The website could do a better job of explaining what it is and why I should use it instead of some other OS
mijoharas 5y ago
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/ https://dahliaos.io/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aluminum96 5y ago
It's a beautiful desktop! The animations are pretty janky though, at least in the online demo. This is a performance issue I've seen with Flutter before, so there might not be much you can do, unfortunately.

Demo: https://web.dahliaos.io/#home https://web.dahliaos.io/#home The UI is still quite slow. Hard to get excited about Flutter.

gutino 5y ago
But thats a web version, you have to test that running outside the browser.
- tonis2 5y ago
  Yes flutter performance is horrible on web, but not bad on mobile and as native app
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 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.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  It's also perfectly smooth for me on Firefox on Linux, although my hardware is pretty performant (Ryzen 9 5900X), although normally Firefox detracts significantly from performance.
- xedrac 5y ago
  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
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > AMD® Ryzen 9 5950x, 32 GB RAM, Linux/Fedora 35, Firefox 97.0, Chromium 96.0.4664.110 Same CPU in my Windows workstation and it's plenty smooth. Not just usable, but smooth. This is at 4K. Do you have a modern GPU, or something quite old? Or do you have browser hardware acceleration disabled? If not for your GPU, it's also possible that Linux simply performs significantly worse than Windows for whatever reason.
    - xedrac 5y ago
      Yes, I have a recent and powerful GPU with hardware acceleration enabled. I also tried this on my Windows box (i7-9700k, Nvidia GTX 1070), and if anything, it performs a little worse than my Linux box. It's definitely usable. I just have a low tolerance for sluggish software.
    - iamlemec 5y ago
      Just another data point here: I'm running a relatively high-end workstation on Linux/Fedora 36, and it is quite smooth in Chrome but somewhat sluggish in Firefox.
  - sli 5y ago
    5950X, 32 gigs of RAM, Win10, Firefox 98, 3080Ti (if it's GPU accelerated, I didn't look) and it's super jittery for me. It's usable, but it's not smooth at all. Dragging windows around is pretty bad.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - DrBazza 5y ago
    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?
- von_lohengramm 5y ago
  I'm on a 2019 16" MBP 2.6GHz i7 with a 5300M. This machine isn't a powerhouse, but it can drive 1080p240Hz + 1440p144Hz buttery smooth for a million Firefox tabs and a couple IntelliJ projects (if everything's all indexed...). On this site, I get like 10fps while doing things, clicking, moving around, etc. It doesn't even look like motion. I threw it into Firefox's profiler and it has consistent "janks" between 100ms to over 200ms. No thanks.
- cdash 5y ago
  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.
  - ChrisRR 5y ago
    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
- eloisius 5y ago
  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.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    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.
- somethingwitty1 5y ago
  On both my Windows laptop (Ryzen 7 + 1080Ti) and Windows Desktop (Ryzen 9 + dual RX 5700 XT) machines, it is really slow. Dragging windows is unbearable and the other apps are quite laggy (such as switching views in the "media" app). Both have hardware acceleration enabled.
- paavohtl 5y ago
  On my Windows workstation with a Ryzen 5800X and an RTX 3080, it is a stuttery mess on Firefox. Dragging windows happens at maybe 10 FPS, and there's half a second of input latency on everything.
- qzio 5y ago
  I'm on a a (14" 2021) macbook pro with the apple M1 Pro cpu and 32gb ram. I've tried both firefox and chrome. This would NOT be a viable desktop environment. The performance is WAY worse than anything I've used for the last 15 years. And this includes shitty 10-yearold no-name laptops using gnome/compiz.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Here's the web demo link, in case anyone missed it: https://web.dahliaos.io/ 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.
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    Flutter on web is completely different beast from when it runs native. Flutter on web is basically rendering everything on a canvas.
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      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.
modeless 5y ago
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 completely new UI framework from scratch in 2015 and not make fluid animations and fast touch response latency an absolute priority?
- ardit33 5y ago
  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.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > not super strong at design well thought out rendering techniques. Can you expound on this?
- pkphilip 5y ago
  It may have something to do with the fact that Flutter state management of the UI requires the UI to repaint completely whenever there is a change. This makes no sense whatsoever because it goes exactly in the opposite direction of optimised graphics programming - where the ideal was to repaint the smallest portion of the screen as possible for any change.
  - 5y ago
dekhn 5y ago
Is there a way to get a terminal to work? I'm interested in Fuchsia and this if I can get a terminal and run make/gcc.
- fdjm 5y ago
  There is a shell in Fuchsia, but it's not a unix, so neither make nor gcc will run natively on it.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    My windows machine can run make and gcc natively. You don't need to be unix to run those platforms. I haven't watched fuchsia closely (last interfaced about 6 years ago, talked to a team member, who said that eventually it would be able to emulate unix enough to build and host a compiler). I guess I should have put my question in a more useful way: why would I want to use this desktop, given its limitations compared to existing desktops? Is it ever going to be a development system? If not, I can't see how it would grow beyond being a device environment- in which case there probably shouldn't be a terminal anyway. Probably I'm asking for something which is not a goal of fuchsia, but in that case, I really can't get exicted about something that's supposed to replace Android and other OSes.
harel 5y ago
My first impression upon opening this was about how fast and responsive this feels (chrome/linux)... Which actually now makes me more concerned that this experience is not consistent across users and platforms, because this leads to the dangerous "but it works for me" attitude.
yesimahuman 5y ago
Agreed, pretty unusable on my beefy Windows desktop on Firefox
IshKebab 5y ago
Flutter has some performance issues on the web but it's much better when running natively. There's still some jank caused by shader compilation but they have plans to fix that. It's not inherent to the design of Flutter - it's actually an issue with Skia. That said, I've only used it for smallish apps. Would be interesting to see how it works for a whole desktop.

ozaiworld 5y ago

Flutter for Web feels incredibly sluggish and drops frames whenever I do any interaction. I’m not sure why that’s happening when most of the WebGL and WebGPU demos run at high frame rates.

gigglesupstairs 5y ago

Design language looks very similar to Windows 11? Not sure if it was intentional since it must have been in development for a while. Anyways, it’s a very elegant looking environment.

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
I'll agree—it's elegant. The animations are a bit "Flutter-y" and I'm not a fan of Flutter animations in general, but it does look quite nice: https://web.dahliaos.io/ https://web.dahliaos.io/.
- tmccrary55 5y ago
  Wow, yeah. That's horrible.
amanzi 5y ago
Feels like Android to me.
bityard 5y ago
I thought it looked more like a random mashup of iOS, Android, and Chrome OS.
von_lohengramm 5y ago
To be fair, Windows 11 did directly rip a ton of its design too, especially from Chrome OS of all things.
- zamalek 5y ago
  It's not a bad thing to rip off good ideas, though that was not the case with Win 11.
pram 5y ago
Reminds me of Ubuntu Unity personally, haha

forgotpwd16 5y ago

Discussion from 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842859 Performance still bad for me.

ComputerGuru 5y ago

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 viewports and which are scrolled together (so I missed extra elements in the settings toolbar/toolbox on the left). All the windows open up very small (too small to fit their content) even though there's room for bigger. (All tested on the online demo here: https://web.dahliaos.io/#/ https://web.dahliaos.io/#/ )

bityard 5y ago
Well they did get at least one thing right: actual discreet window title bars with usable controls.
- eikenberry 5y ago
  Hopefully removable. I find window title bars to be a waste of space.
  - uberduper 5y ago
    But how do you know what application you're looking at without a title bar? /s
    - ComputerGuru 5y ago
      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.
      - hulitu 5y ago

ducktective 5y ago

could have chosen a better name considering the recent events and rumors...

adolfojp 5y ago
I'm out of the loop. What am I missing?
- soperj 5y ago
  Covid-19.
notacanofsoda 5y ago
It could be confused with Ubuntu Precise Pangolin, if people search "Pangolin Ubuntu"
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  As well as System76's Pangolin laptop, which also runs Ubuntu.
  - EnderNightLord 5y ago
    pangolin originated before system76 brought out the laptop
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      Thanks for the clarification
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tjpnz 5y ago
To be fair the Pangolin is likely exonerated at this point.

angryasian 5y ago

I think its pretty impressive that this is being built in Flutter.

Shadonototra 5y ago

Nice, already better than Gnome!

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
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.
- Shadonototra 5y ago
  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
  - malermeister 5y ago
    GNOME is the perfect DE for 2-in-1s like the Surface imo.

E2EEd 5y ago

Very exciting. As this works on Fuchsia, a capabilities-based OS with a security-first design goal, is there any writeup on the security architecture for this project? Is it correct to say that a convergent desktop environment exposes a large surface area via monolithic access to the underlying OS? It seems that the desktop environment is one of the hardest things to build securely, if embarking on such a journey. Also, somewhat related: In light of forthcoming capabilities-based hardware (see: ARM Morello), is it a bit hasty to embark on a security-first rewrite of the entrenched Von Neumann / Harvard basis for incumbent OS environments?

The_rationalist 5y ago

intrasight 5y ago

I get a blank page in Firefox

matchbok 5y ago

Please don't use or support Flutter. Its entire existence is to replace the web and force more ads to people. Do your research.

Osiris 5y ago
Do you have any citations to support this claim? Flutter is open source.
- zerr 5y ago
  How it being an open source would help ad blocking on the client side? It certainly won't be as easy as current blocking methods for html/css/js.
  - colesantiago 5y ago
    You know it’s ok to say “I’ve made an emotional baseless assertion backed up with no evidence”. I hate google as much as next person on HN, but at least have some evidence.
    - zerr 5y ago
      Not OP, and can't comment on Google's hidden intentions, but it does have a point - any such open source Flash replacements would make ad blocking harder.
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  So is AMP
timsneath 5y ago
"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 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/12114). Flutter is open source, welcomes non-Google contributors, and is led by a group of hackers who think that UI development shouldn't be as painful as it is. One might have thought this would be attractive to the kind of developers who hang out on HN :)

luckydata 5y ago

I took a quick look at the repo and the most important piece of info is missing: why? What's the point of this project? More generally, open source projects should really get into the habit of spending a few words on WHY they exist, so people driving by don't have to wreck their brains figuring out why would you care.

wetpaws 5y ago
Probably either just a cool poc or devs sniffing crack

Yhippa 5y ago

Jeez, am I one of the few people here who liked the demo? I thought the performance was comparable to my aging Pixelbook. I liked the design too.

rishav_sharan 5y ago

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.

jcelerier 5y ago
The Win95 UI was the result of pretty thorough formal-ish user studies. How many design iterations after that went through the same process ? Fairly close to 0 I believe.
- webmaven 5y ago
  Microsoft did a lot of usability research on Vista: https://news.microsoft.com/2007/01/29/large-scale-research-project-aims-to-make-windows-vista-useful-fun-for-all/ https://news.microsoft.com/2007/01/29/large-scale-research-p...
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the_other 5y ago
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.
hulitu 5y ago
> 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.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
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.

the100rabh 5y ago

jjice 5y ago

Looks very nice, but what is like more is a DE that is concrete stable. I've been told by people across the internet that I need to try DE #36 and that it's actually good, or that Gnome is awesome now. They're always at least broken enough to impede a bit. I use Gnome now, but after my machine has been on for a few days, all text associated with the Gnome shell disappears and only comes back on restart. MacOS works pretty well in my experience, but I don't want to be part of that ecosystem. Windows GUI is fine for the most part in my experience, but I want to use a Unix (WSL is good, but not a replacement for me). For now, I'll hold out and keep rooting for the Linux desktop, but it's got a ways to go. Can't blame them though, Apple and Microsoft have tons of money being concentrated into a single GUI environment. Linux has a million different small projects paid for with some dedicated contributor's time.

Loic 5y ago
I am surprised with your Gnome issues. I am running Ubuntu 20.04 with the stock Gnome and restart only for the kernel updates. It is my daily work system and I just put it to sleep at the end of the day. My issues on Linux are normally always coming from non open source software (VMware, Zoom, ...). What I found helpful is to do a full reinstall of the OS instead of an upgrade and carefully bring back the "dot" folders with my configurations.
- jjice 5y ago
  I can absolutely agree with non opensource software being the worst experience on Linux. I can't blame the companies for not spending less time and effort on the Linux versions due to the percentage of their users that use those platforms, but it's unfortunate as a Linux user. One of the things that makes me actually use Electron programs is that they usually work fine on Linux out of the box (sometimes there are deficiencies if it needs webcam/mic usage). That said, I hate having to hand over a precious few hundred megabytes of RAM on an old machine just to use a messaging app.

atdrummond 5y ago

I am extremely excited about Dahlia and the work your team is doing. HN has a significant cohort of people who are extremely opinionated about how OS UI/UX should work. Don't take that to mean there aren't people who are interested in what you are developing; keep us abreast of your progress and I will make sure to repeatedly check up on your subsequent developments.

rupinderjeet 5y ago

Stormlight be with you.

anentropic 5y ago

The website could do a better job of explaining what it is and why I should use it instead of some other OS

mijoharas 5y ago

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/ https://dahliaos.io/

deleted 5y ago

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aluminum96 5y ago

It's a beautiful desktop! The animations are pretty janky though, at least in the online demo. This is a performance issue I've seen with Flutter before, so there might not be much you can do, unfortunately.