Titles says it all. Why are flutter apps hated on Linux ? What are it’s problems outside of the really petty ones like being non themable etc. ( I want to target the mainstream distros like Fedora Ubuntu etc and Linux normies and I want to learn what potential issues will they face )
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I dont know that anyone hates Flutter… I think its just new. The ability to write an app once and it work for both Android and iOS without having to rewrite it is tempting.
Id say most established android devs would pick Kotlin/Java while iOS pick Swift/C++… No one wants to be the first to switch over. But its very popular and many are adopting it. It could be at the top of the list in 5 years.
Code changes all the time with use case and hardware. Ask a mechanic what there favorite tool is and it will depend on what they’re working on.
I am not a fan of google - if I were to use flitter/Dart i would be avoiding google firebase - and that pretty much defeats the purpose I imagine… But I have not seen an outpouring of people hating flutter… Only that they hate babel fish.
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I am a flutter user. It is great! The Default config requires you to disable telemetry (which it prompt you to do) , and the default web engine is Chrome, but both can be changed, so fair enough.
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I know Ubuntu themselves is using Flutter for their new software store, so I don’t think it’s as widespread as you may have experienced.
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Maybe hate is indeed a strong word. And the issues with Flutter are not apparent. Flutter is not a community project, it’s a Google project. Being open source is required but not sufficient to be FOSS.
As a Google project, it may be abandoned at their whim, or it may go the way of Xamarin Forms (now .NET MAUI), in that it will mostly support (or be tied to) closed platforms/services. Not unlike AOSP does less and less without Google Play Services.
If you’re thinking, “why does it matter, it gets the job done”, as it seems to be the general opinion here, you may need to think about you locking yourself and your users into difficult to escape walled gardens. It’s the situation of very popular easy to use services like Firebase, or game engines like Unity. Firebase represents quite a privacy issue (especially for your users), and Unity comes with telemetry/analytics baked-in for most games, with no way to opt out (or even be aware they exist).
Using a development tools is a bit different than using a simple app like an image viewer which you can replace at any time. It requires a lot of upfront investment even before doing something useful with it. By the time you’re there, you start to feel different pain points than when you did Hello World. Take a look at some of Go’s gotchas from people who used it for a while. And speaking of Go, which is actually less tied to Google than Flutter or Dart is, see this debacle with their intent of making telemetry opt-out and the community backlash.
The pain you’re going through trying to disable telemetry or untie privacy invasive services now is not representative of the potential pain you’re going to suffer if/when Google decides it has acquired a sufficiently big user base and will make it much more difficult to divorce them. If you’ve been around a while, you see this pattern repeated all over in the cloud IT business nowadays. Even if you haven’t, a cursory look at the current situation of ad blocking in Chrome or YouTube should be a good enough wakeup call.
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Thanks for the extra context!
And thank you. Now that I glance over my previous post, it seems a bit abrasive for which I apologize. It’s hard to be impartial after getting burned yourself. Used to invest a lot into the .NET ecosystem and loved (still do, on a technical merit) C#. It just gets difficult with time to ignore the politics.
As for Canonical, I remember when they distributed compact discs with their Ubuntu OS into the world entirely free at their own cost (production and transport). They still play a big role in the Linux world, but you are also reminded that, like Red Hat and their CentOS debacle, they’re a for-profit company, and not everything they do is for the benefit of the community.
Canonical’s latest push for the Snap Store is not very far from Microsoft’s push for the Windows Store, or Google’s push for the Play Store. Of course, they don’t have the same pull the other companies have, hence the move of many distros (like Mint, Vanilla OS, and Trisquel) away from their products.