Canonical Continues To Talk Up Google's Flutter UI Toolkit

[Mez']

I still feel the best thing that happened to the Linux Desktop was KDE 3.10. It was a very stable and seamless experience, relatively lightweight still, had a highly integrated browser and file manager which nothing has come close to matching since.

In those days I was developing in Kate with Konsole embedded, designing with Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender, and doing almost everything else entirely in Konqueror... everything from playing Flash and Java games, to watching videos, messaging, editing documents, managing local and remote files and archives...

Back then Konqueror was one of the most compatible browsers on the planet, with Chrome and Safari adopting its web engine KHTML, Apple and Google contributing to the Webkit fork, and Konqueror bringing that back home to KDE.

There was great remote desktop functionality both as server and client, the KMail email client had features I still sorely miss to this day, like auto-classifying mail into folders, expiring mail from one folder to another based on rules so you could have folders "Today, Yesterday, Last Week" etc and with IMAP you could even have it migrate mail between accounts on different remote servers for groupware, or just to keep chintzy accounts within quota.

KWin's window management was second to none, but you could also run Compiz for wobbly windows if you were into that. KWin's compositing was fast and flicker free, didn't incur multi-frame latency like GNOME still does today. And it played well with multi-monitor, even with rotated/scaled displays and custom resolutions.

GNOME 3's multi-monitor support is caca. If you rotate a monitor and scale it, scaling is engaged for all displays, with huge performance consequences. It also breaks vsync so there's tearing and the mouse just plain disappears in some regions of the screen.

Having said that I'm using Gnome 3.38.3 today because Xfce is a hot mess on Ubuntu 20.04+, KDE Plasma's docks won't play well with my multi-monitor setup, Trinity's support apps are painfully outdated...

I'm seriously considering going back to Ubuntu 18.04 for the much more stable Xfce version, and to get this heavy-and-buggy-albeit-well-featured GNOME off my back lol. Ah but then I would lose AV1 and HEIF support. Sigh.

The last time I used KDE was around 2005-2006 because the looks have never appealed to me. But I like their philosophy to empower the user with options and let them decide what's best for them. This is something Gnome should take lessons out of.
Yes, Gnome 3 multi-monitor handling is pure crap. Many use the multi-monitor add-on extension to circumvent that.

Wobbly windows have made their come back to Gnome last June, and the new extension works extremely well. It's smooth, soft and as soothing as a water fountain. When going back to Windows (forced for work) or to Budgie, moving monolithic window blocks feels like a game stuttering for fps. Along with Unite and GS Connect extensions, it's the only hindrance left for me to move entirely to the more flexible Budgie (they have a 1/100th of Gnome's resources and they manage to maintain 10x more options).

[lyamc]

The choice of flutter isn't strange. It's prepping the way for Google's next OS attempt.
Without applications, you won't have users, and without users, you won't have developers.

Sometimes you have to spend a bit to gain a lot.

[linuxgeex]

Along with Unite and GS Connect extensions, it's the only hindrance left for me to move entirely to the more flexible Budgie (they have a 1/100th of Gnome's resources and they manage to maintain 10x more options).

TY I will give Budgie a try to see how its multi-monitor works out.

I heard you, it's basically how I felt about Xfce... its one big flaw is the various components constantly in a various states of being ported between GTK 2, 3, and 4 over the last 5 years. It was rock solid on 14.04 and 16.04, and installing GNOME but not using it brought support for most of the GNOME features one might miss like all the plugins for the aggressively un-named standard apps.

I gotta feel sorry for new users trying to use GNOME... what's that app called? Photos? hmm... let's try to run that from the shell. $ photos [enter] "... Command 'photos' not found, did you mean: command 'protos' from deb irpas (0.10-7) Try: sudo apt install <deb name>" Yeah super helpful lol. Let's try terminal. Or files. Or text editor. Nope. Ok well lots of GNOME apps start with gnome right? So let's try gnome-files... nope... gnome-text-editor... nope.

Pah... consistency is for lusers who can't use google to find out what the commandline invocation of their apps might be! And anyone who thinks GNOME devs are wrong are r@cist soc1opaths.... lalala not listening!!! GNOME RULEZ!

[mppix]

What part of the word IPO you didn't understand ? Why bring Google into the equation there ?

Reading comprehension 0?

[MaxToTheMax]

I am witholding judgement on this move until

1. I've tried developing something for flutter, and
2. I actually see what Canonical's implementation looks like

I'm not immediately hostile to this move from Canonical. It's a far, far better option than something like Electron. It also seems like a more developer-friendly and more performant platform than Web standards. If Canonical can make good on its promise to support theming in a first-class way, and doesn't try to tie its Linux desktop integration to its own infrastructure like Snap, I can see myself getting behind this.

[cynical]

I wish these idiots would use proper tools, or to put it another way, actual systems programming languages. Web technologies suck. GC sucks.

Actually web gui programming is way ahead of almost everything in the desktop world, which mostly sticks to the same OO paradigm its always had. Android is finally trying to do declarative UI with jetpack compose, but most are stuck in the past. There’s a reason people stopped doing desktop applications and migrated to the web. It’s because for the most part the web platform is superior.

[tuxd3v]

For me it seems that Enlightenment, with its EFL toolkit, its the Last sane one available today.
Its a pity that no one pick it up, and develop a sane Desktop..

[billyswong]

The real problem isn't webtech itself. It's the fact that it's not integrated into the OS. Instead, it's implemented as it's entire own operating system, and each app you run boots its own OS. And each copy of the OS that's spawned is dynamically built, so there's next to no shared memory between apps - it's all anon memory. That means that even two copies of the same app running will thrash the CPU caches when they're on the same core because they have nothing in common.

...

We had MSHTML in Windows in the past. Why Electron Apps don't utilize Chromium engine via dynamic linking are their own issue, not the fault of web technology itself.

[curfew]

I wonder why they decided to choose Flutter. I doubt it's for performance, GTK4 has an excellent GL backend and a Vulkan experimental one.

What the hell does a renderer have to do with toolkit performance? Kiddies talking out of their asses yet again.

[computerquip]

We all know it's a troll, but I'll bite.

They've proven competent time and time again. Ubuntu is still from a long way the most used distro, Unity was better than Gnome (imo) and 10 years ahead of Gnome Shell as some Gnome recent improvements show (some of them in the original Unity), Ubuntu One was better than Google Drive (imo). They are user-centric, pulling the design from the users, hence why it's so popular and growing. They're the only one to oppose Red Hat and have the guts to impose another direction if they feel their suggestions were wrongly dismissed or that they weren't listened to towards users' best interests (as opposed to developers), and it's better for them to pursue their own path. Sure, they did some NIH but it was often justified for these reasons. Like the Gnome ecosystem is full of NIH apps for their own reasons.
They're the counterweight that the Linux world needs for getting at least 2-3 solid visions so people can freely decide and not be imposed one. Of course, they fail sometimes and take bad decisions, or some projects outgrow their financial means and they have to pull the plug, like it happens for any company.
I'm using Manjaro but I personally would follow the direction of Canonical (never blindly though, like the lobotomized 144hz here with Gnome) rather than any other as the directions they've taken have often proved to be more pragmatic for users and the decisions for their benefits.
They're currently growing in the shadows of the corporate world, far from the spotlight of the desktop, a bit hidden, but I'm sure it'll bring them the financial means to succeed in their future projects this time around. The calm before the storm.

When Gnome 3 started, Unity was better... because Unity came before Gnome 3. Unity was still some hot fiery garbage. Blatant bugs that lasted for months to years, the CLA requirements, slow clunky UI, lack of basic flexibility (plugins, modularity in the code, lack of quality integration with applications, etc.), and the list just never seemed to stop. People didn't drop Unity for Gnome because Gnome was great. They dropped Unity because it was shit software from both a user and developer perspective, to the point users would go out of their way to find alternative ISOs for Ubuntu that didn't install Unity by default.

NIH isn't the problem. The problem is that when they push software, they push their ridiculous licensing requirements onto anyone who adopts them. If they end up getting the masses to acclimate to said software, they end up with an imbalance of power where they can sweep the rug out from the Linux community on a whim. Anything that they created that had a technical advantage was immediately squandered by the fact that anyone contributing to said software would have to give up rights of their contribution to Canonical. I can't stress enough how dangerous that is for open-source software. If Sun had this requirement with Solaris or ZFS, both of those would be absolutely gone. We wouldn't have OpenZFS or Illumos right now. So even *if* they made some software that wasn't complete garbage, their marketing and licensing completely obliterates the want for anyone who matters to give a shit. There are some exceptions to that CLA such as Bazaar and Launchpad but those are outliers.

You really might as well treat anything with that ridiculous CLA as proprietary software because it can change its stance at any point in time, regardless of how many contributions you've made as an individual or a community.