Canonical Aiming For A New Desktop Installer With Ubuntu 21.10

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Aiming For A New Desktop Installer With Ubuntu 21.10

Canonical has been working on developing a new desktop installer built around Google's Flutter toolkit and they aim to introduce it later this year in Ubuntu 21.10...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-21.10-New-Installer-Plan

[CTown]

Post deleted by user.

[dylanmtaylor]

Repair option looks quite nice, I imagine it will work by looking at users, installed packages, and removing all but /home then reinstalling and generating an install with the previous users and packages? Might not work right if there is a package conflict or something though - would be interesting to see multiple repair options like 'wipe everything except user files', 'reinstall with same packages and user files', and 'wipe everything and reinstall Ubuntu'

[archkde]

And in 2024, they write yet another installer in Electron? Or is that not hyped enough any more?

[skeevy420]

Repair option looks quite nice, I imagine it will work by looking at users, installed packages, and removing all but /home then reinstalling and generating an install with the previous users and packages? Might not work right if there is a package conflict or something though - would be interesting to see multiple repair options like 'wipe everything except user files', 'reinstall with same packages and user files', and 'wipe everything and reinstall Ubuntu'

Except that the image looks like a wrench stripped the head of an Ubuntu bolt. Because I actually work with wrenches and bolts, that was my first thought.

[davidbepo]

why not just use calamares?

[spockfish]

Pretty excited about this. We've been using Flutter as mobile development platform and always wondered what could be done for the Linux desktop.
Biggest 'feature' would be attraction of young people that want to stay away from C/C++.

[david-nk]

But why? The installer is one of the parts of Ubuntu that needs the least amount of work.
It has a nice clean design and is fast & reliable as far as I can tell.

[Jumbotron]

WOW !! Very cool ! And with Flutter no less ! I have been saying for some time that Ubuntu 22.04 was going to be the most important and consequential version of Ubuntu since 16.04. With a new installer based on Flutter, Gnome 42 and GTK4, and Wayland by default with a much improved and rock steady XWayland as well, not to even mention all the other FOSS app improvements that come with it all, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is going to be tremendous !! I, for one, am going to bang the hell out of 21.10 for bugs and issues to help out the cause !

[Jumbotron]

Along with the news of a Flutter based Ubuntu installer and Canonical's partnering with Google to bring full Linux support for the Flutter SDK, I would like to request that Gnome Builder quickly bring First Class citizen support to Flutter and Dart along with full GObject and Introspection support.

Here is a very nice write up of Canonical's work with Google to bring full Flutter support to Ubuntu.



" Canonical enables Linux desktop app support with Flutter

The Ubuntu team has produced a new GTK+ based host for Flutter apps on all Linux distros

It has long been our vision for Flutter to power platforms. We’ve seen this manifest already at Google with products like the Assistant, so now we’re thrilled to see others harnessing Flutter to power more platforms. Today we are happy to jointly announce the availability of the Linux alpha for Flutter alongside Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution.
Why Flutter for Linux?


Last year, when Google announced desktop-class application support with Flutter, Canonical saw an exciting opportunity to make Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, an attractive target platform for Flutter app developers. Flutter’s native cross-platform story is growing rapidly and Canonical wanted to be at the vanguard. By enabling desktop Linux support in Flutter, Canonical is making it very easy for application developers to publish their apps for Linux users via the Snap Store, the app store for Linux. By making Linux a first-class Flutter platform, Canonical is inviting application developers to publish their apps to millions of Linux users and broaden the availability of high quality applications available to them.

A number of things about Flutter were exciting for Canonical:

• Fast growing ecosystem of application developers
• Multiple platform support
• Highly optimized native applications
• Modern UI framework supporting declarative, reactive, and composable widgets
• Rich development platform using Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, and IntelliJ "

https://medium.com/flutter/announcin...l-19eb824590a9


Once again, Gnome Builder devs....let's make Gnome Builder a "Rich development platform" for Flutter and Dart just like Visual Studio Code, Android Studio and IntelliJ !!