7 ms·

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

by didip 5y ago

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.

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

by 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.