[HN Gopher] Pangolin UI, a Desktop Shell, Written in Flutter, fo...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Pangolin UI, a Desktop Shell, Written in Flutter, for Linux and
       Zircona
        
       Author : denysvitali
       Score  : 144 points
       Date   : 2021-04-17 09:26 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (web.dahliaos.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (web.dahliaos.io)
        
       | agloeregrets wrote:
       | It's a pixel perfect copy of ChromeOS? Really it is.
        
       | yegle wrote:
       | I tried it on Pixel4XL and the performance is definitely not
       | 60fps but acceptable. Moving window around seems smooth to me.
        
       | flohofwoe wrote:
       | Hmm... on my mid-2014 13" MBP (which is completely fine
       | otherwise) performance is so bad that this doesn't really make me
       | confident that Flutter is "the future". Even just dragging
       | windows around stutters (it feels like somewhere between 5 and 10
       | FPS). Is "native performance" comparable to the web version or
       | dramatically better?
       | 
       | Flutter... stutter... maybe the Flutter team was trying to tell
       | us something all along ;)
        
         | dmos62 wrote:
         | I really wish app developers would throttle their prototypes.
         | They tend to run overpowered machines, but then they're
         | oblivious to performance problems their apps have. As a
         | consequence, users have to keep playing catchup with
         | developers' computers. I feel strongly about this. I can't say
         | with a straight face that the growth in apps' resource
         | consumption over the last ten years reflects in improvements in
         | their feature-set. Feels a bit like how gold fish get big if
         | you put them in big aquariums.
        
           | mimixco wrote:
           | Software will always outrun hardware, and ginormous software
           | drives the entire existence of the hardware business. It's
           | just how the system works. Are we getting benefits? I can
           | think of lots of software we didn't have 10 years ago that we
           | wouldn't want to give up just so we could keep old, slow
           | boxes.
        
           | dan-robertson wrote:
           | If you want to work on something like flutter, which will be
           | optimised for the hardware of the day when it is done, and
           | therefore the hardware of the future when it is being
           | developed, then surely it makes sense to start with a
           | prediction of how future hardware will be (eg gpu more
           | important, possibly more pixels to push, more (not faster)
           | processor cores, possibly higher framerates), and then try to
           | approximate that with a powerful present-day computer.
           | 
           | Though in this case it feels like problems might be due to
           | running in a web browser and not being optimised.
        
           | vendiddy wrote:
           | Any guides or tools for doing this? Some devs on our teams
           | now now have M1s. I worry they won't feel the pain of slow
           | apps if they develop with such fast computers. Meanwhile
           | we've got a number of customers who use computers that are 5+
           | years old.
        
             | calvinmorrison wrote:
             | Buy old laptops and routinely test on them. We keep a lot
             | of old devices around solely as test devices
        
             | dmos62 wrote:
             | I don't have experience doing this, but I'd experiment with
             | VMs and their performance settings. It would be a pretty
             | ergonomic solution. Rpi or some x86 single board computer
             | might make sense too. I guess what's viable depends on the
             | stack and the software itself.
        
           | EvilEy3 wrote:
           | It's not about throttle. It is incapable to run faster at the
           | moment.
        
           | RedShift1 wrote:
           | This 100x. I've always said, developers should get a Pentium
           | 3 500 MHz and 128 MB of RAM to test their software. And yes I
           | am following my own advise, I use an old Dell with a Core 2
           | Duo T8100 and 2 GB of RAM to test my software on (oldest I
           | could find at work).
        
             | anthk wrote:
             | Today I'd choose a Pentium 4/Athlon with SSE2 and 512MB of
             | RAM as the minimum.
        
           | throwaway894345 wrote:
           | I don't think it's developers' devices that are driving the
           | trend as much as economics. Resources get cheaper so people
           | get faster computers and developers can release faster by
           | forgoing optimizations all while delivering the same levels
           | of performance. Of course, this excludes potential customers
           | who can't afford to update, but those are probably not the
           | folks off of whom app devs are making their money. Of course,
           | this doesn't legitimize the decision to forego optimizations
           | --I'm only noting that it's probably not the performance of
           | developer machines in particular.
        
             | dmos62 wrote:
             | I've considered that, but I don't have the impression that
             | app development has gotten faster over the last decade. I
             | bet there's people who can chime in here.
        
               | throwaway894345 wrote:
               | If we're not spending the time optimizing, it must be
               | going somewhere. If it's not going into faster, more
               | frequent releases it might be going into improved quality
               | (though I doubt that as well, from experience) or perhaps
               | even just employing cheaper developers (and QA and
               | management and design and etc) such that they produce
               | software of the same performance in the same amount of
               | time.
        
               | kodah wrote:
               | It certainly has. Frameworks like Rails or Django didn't
               | exist, pre-built component libraries weren't even a dream
               | yet, and everyone was trying to get software to run
               | consistently on each other's machines.
               | 
               | These days there's worlds of abstraction between you and
               | those problems. Those abstractions are in transpilation,
               | libraries, etc which all take more power to get over the
               | problem of time.
        
               | regularfry wrote:
               | >> last decade
               | 
               | > Frameworks like Rails or Django didn't exist
               | 
               | You... might want to check the git histories. And a
               | calendar.
        
           | andrepd wrote:
           | Oh absolutely. And internet speed as well.
           | 
           | Have them use their shitty 5MB webpage over a spotty 500kbps
           | on a phone with 1GB RAM. Maybe they'll see what it feels like
           | to have the page load bit by bit over a minute with stuff
           | jumping around all the time. Maybe they'll reconsider if they
           | need 5 megs of js to display text and images then.
        
         | 0-_-0 wrote:
         | Do you have HW acceleration enabled in your browser? It makes a
         | huge difference.
        
         | t8y wrote:
         | I think this is using the HTML renderer. On any other platform
         | it would be using Skia and should be faster. The author could
         | compile the app using Skia on WebGL potentially giving a speed
         | boost.
        
         | jeroenhd wrote:
         | My experience with Flutter has been a lot better than what this
         | website demonstrates. I'm not sure how much of the stutter is
         | to be blamed on Flutter and how much is to be blamed on the
         | code architecture of this website.
         | 
         | This website is definitely running at 20-30fps max on my phone,
         | whereas 60fps seems perfectly maintainable on my own Flutter
         | experiments with web apps.
         | 
         | Having said all that, I'm still miffed about the extreme
         | reliance on Javascript modern web applications have. With the
         | ease of use Flutter promises for making web apps, I can only
         | fear the slow, janky mess that websites will become if the
         | platform ever gets taken up as quick as Flutter seems to hope
         | it will.
        
           | tenaciousDaniel wrote:
           | There are at least two projects I know of that are using WASM
           | to implement web applications without JavaScript. Personally
           | I think that's the future:
           | 
           | https://vugu.org
           | 
           | https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor
        
             | dathinab wrote:
             | The problem is flutter (web) also doesn't use html/css...
        
               | tenaciousDaniel wrote:
               | They re-implement everything in canvas I assume? If so,
               | wow, that's pretty awful.
        
               | dvdkon wrote:
               | Why? At this point, the browser is mostly an app runtime,
               | so I don't think avoiding HTML and CSS is necessarily a
               | bad thing. With some tuning it could even be faster,
               | although I don't think any project has gotten to that
               | point yet.
        
               | tenaciousDaniel wrote:
               | Because of the sheer amount of effort that browsers have
               | put into solving all sorts of tricky problems, such as
               | internationalization and accessibility. Once you try to
               | render your own text inputs, you're committing to
               | replicating a mountain of functionality. HTML is
               | deceptively simple.
        
               | vbsteven wrote:
               | HTML, the dom, css and JS in browsers are far from
               | simple. IMHO we've been tacking on more and more
               | "application stuff" on top of a document viewer since the
               | mid 90s. The whole reason React and other virtual dom
               | frameworks exist is to wrangle the original document
               | viewer into an application platform.
               | 
               | Yes, after all those years browsers are top notch when it
               | comes to accessibility, but it comes with lots of
               | additional complexity.
               | 
               | I am hopeful that with things like WASM and Canvas we are
               | finally starting to move away from this document-based
               | paradigm towards more app-focused paradigms.
               | 
               | Although there is still lots of work to be done to make
               | approaches like this work with accessibility tools.
               | 
               | Sometimes i think that we are deliberately not adding dom
               | support to wasm in order to not make the same mistakes we
               | did when trying to make html/css/js suitable for apps.
        
               | dathinab wrote:
               | I can understand you, but IMHO for most websites a
               | document focused paradigm is just the right fit.
               | 
               | I mean e.g. a news site is just a collection of documents
               | in the end, blogs are just documents, so is wikipedia.
               | Search machines are basically like external indices,
               | which fit well as documents and even things like booking
               | sites are in the end just fancy formulars.
               | 
               | Sure there are a lot of more "app" like usage, and for
               | them having a different base is very important.
               | 
               | But I'm not the biggest fan of "turning" document use
               | cases into apps (as many sites already try to do today),
               | as this in my experience adds a lot of overhead and
               | includes a massive bucket of behavioral differences which
               | can make it very hard for some people to use the
               | internet.
               | 
               | If everyone would agree of how roughly apps should behave
               | for the roughly same UX aspect it would be fine. But
               | people don't I mean look at the massive UX divergence
               | which slowly creeped in between Android(Stock) and iOs.
               | Worst this is a very subtitle creep at many places and it
               | often seems as many designer doesn't realize that what
               | they think is innovative (and might be innovative for
               | e.g. a iOs) user isn't necessarily innovative for a lot
               | of other people (e.g. all the Android users). Or in other
               | words the whole concept of what is innovative diverged
               | between different grubs of people even if they belong in
               | the same "culture"/country/etc..
               | 
               | Anyway still for the places where it does make sense
               | having a alternative to HTML/CSS is nice but I believe it
               | must be browser native, non vendor specific, standardized
               | and have first class accessibility support.
               | 
               | Non of which applies to Flutter (web) in the way it
               | currently is.
        
               | vbsteven wrote:
               | Yes, we definitely want similar things. Maybe it was not
               | clear from my original reply but I'm not saying the
               | document paradigm is bad and we should move away from it.
               | 
               | The document paradigm has evolved for 25 years and it is
               | the right fit for most "websites".
               | 
               | The problem is that we're trying to build apps on the
               | same base as well and that is where the mismatch is.
               | 
               | If you look at cross platform GUI toolkits like Gtk, Qt,
               | Flutter and Druid, what most of them have in common is
               | that they are typically abstractions on top of a graphics
               | rendering library (cairo, skia, canvas) with integration
               | into platform accessibility and window APIs.
               | 
               | That makes them easily portable to Linux, Windows,
               | Android, iOS etc.
               | 
               | The problem with the web browser as a target platform for
               | these toolkits is that the accessibility support is
               | currently coupled too tightly with dom/html/css.
               | 
               | The graphics drawing toolkit is there (canvas) and most
               | of the above toolkits have abstracted over it already.
               | The missing link is standardised accessibility APIs in
               | browsers that can be used with canvas instead of dom.
        
               | tenaciousDaniel wrote:
               | That framing makes sense. I've always thought the
               | document model was poorly suited for modern applications.
               | I'm still not sold on canvas itself being the solution -
               | I'd rather open up the underlying accessibility/i18n tech
               | so that developers don't have to reinvent the wheel. But
               | yes, otherwise agree with you.
        
               | vbsteven wrote:
               | My ideal solution would be that we can add accessibility
               | apis to canvas. That means we can write GUI toolkits in
               | any language compiling to wasm using canvas apis. Those
               | toolkits gain accessibility support through canvas.
               | 
               | edit: some toolkits already have wasm/canvas support
               | (like Flutter and Gtk I think). The missing link is the
               | ability to integrate accessibility.
        
               | dathinab wrote:
               | Not just that. There is quite a bunch of thinks you
               | simple can't do (in reasonable high quality) with canvas
               | rendering without it undermining the users privacy.
               | 
               | E.g. you can do _a lot_ to reduce the fingerprint-ability
               | of canvas (Google doesn 't care) but doing so will lead
               | to potentially slightly slower rendering and in turn
               | potentially less fluid animations.
               | 
               | You can't have links as in a website without getting
               | access the the whole browser history.
               | 
               | You can't take advantage of the GPU in the same way the
               | browsers can.
               | 
               | You always have quite a bit of size and (potentially)
               | load time overhead (I mean just look a Pangolin UI for a
               | good example for this).
               | 
               | And "everyone" potentially ships their own copy of a
               | whole UI framework (not just some layers on top of it
               | like it's common in the web). So if there is a rendering
               | but normally it get's fixed by you browser but now it
               | needs to be fixed by library authors and then the fix
               | needs to be used by the website which had a problem.
               | 
               | I think a non document based base would be nice, but it
               | needs to be browser native, standardized, not vendor
               | specific and with first class accessibility. At least at
               | the core. And let's be honest flutter is non of this. And
               | given some decisions like making text non selecteable by
               | default I don't see it ever coming to that point tbh.
        
               | dvdkon wrote:
               | Yes, it's a lot of work to create a good GUI toolkit. But
               | it's not impossible either, and Flutter developers have
               | already put in a lot of work into getting things just
               | right on mobile, so I think they have a good shot at
               | doing the same on the web.
        
               | EvilEy3 wrote:
               | > just right on mobile
               | 
               | If by "just right" you mean sticking out like a sore
               | thumb on iOS, then sure.
        
               | miohtama wrote:
               | It is impossible because on web you do not get access to
               | low level UI primitives like input controls as you would
               | on mobile. They cannot e.g. read clipboad, access native
               | context sentive menus and such.
               | 
               | Flutter on web can do Flash applications of 2020, but for
               | most web use cases it is not possible to "get it right".
        
               | dvdkon wrote:
               | I don't think Flutter uses native UI primitives anywhere,
               | but you're right that web APIs have been designed for
               | HTML documents/apps and will need modification for non-
               | HTML apps. We aren't there yet, but I'm convinced we'll
               | get there at some point.
        
               | ridethebike wrote:
               | Flash and Silverlight were unavailable to comment
        
               | EvilEy3 wrote:
               | Good luck with accessibility and compatibility with
               | browser plugins.
        
               | dathinab wrote:
               | The main reason: Accessibility in _many_ variants.
               | 
               | E.g. I need to change font's/font colors/background
               | colors from time to time because they are extremely
               | exhausting for me to read, I can't do so with Flutter.
               | 
               | Screen readers know how to process HTML, CSS. But how are
               | they supposed to know what some "arbitrary" painted pixel
               | are supposed to mean. And yes they already have to do a
               | awful amount of trick due to people incorrectly (one
               | higher semantic level) use HTML & CSS.
               | 
               | Many of the defaults of Flutter (Web) are horrible, at
               | least the last time I checked. E.g. text is unselectable
               | by default instead of it being an opt in some site which
               | have problems with stolen text content have use (and you
               | still can steal it anyway just screenshot + OCR, duh).
               | 
               | Lastly (some) browsers optimized for good (e.g. fast or
               | battery friendly) HTML/CSS rendering, non of this applies
               | to Flutter. E.g. Firefox has a pretty need
               | parallelization of layout and rendering allowing quite
               | awesome usages of CSS animations, non of this will ever
               | be possible in Flutter without replacing DOM with Flutter
               | natively, at which point we have then a Google web
               | instead of an internet. (Through tbh. replacing HTML+CSS
               | with some proper abstracted API of flutters inner
               | workings is tempting, it has some quite need aspects,
               | that is if Accessibility works by then.)
        
               | dvdkon wrote:
               | A lot of work has been put into accessibility on the web,
               | and the "semantic HTML" document model that works so
               | poorly for apps helped too. There's no reason
               | accessibility needs to be bad for anything non-HTML, at
               | least not with supporting screen readers.
               | 
               | I also think text not being selectable by default is an
               | OK default _for apps_ (actual desktop-grade apps, not
               | websites with interactive elements).
               | 
               | Right now, in 2021, it's probably a bad idea to create a
               | web app with Flutter or any other non-DOM-based toolkit,
               | but I don't think that will be the case forever. The
               | native apps I use are all as good as or even better than
               | browsers at being fast and battery-friendly. They might
               | achieve that by being more limited and not supporting all
               | the features and usecases of HTML5, and that's perfectly
               | fine. It's not impossible that we'll see similar high-
               | quality GUI frameworks inside browser runtimes.
        
               | domano wrote:
               | There are 2 modes you can choose from, one is using html
               | but is less performant.
        
           | namuol wrote:
           | > I'm still miffed about the extreme reliance on Javascript
           | modern web applications have.
           | 
           | Flutter is written in Dart, which needs to compile to JS or
           | WASM to run on the web, but can compile to native code. I'm
           | guessing the native app is a lot faster.
        
         | jchw wrote:
         | I'm confused. It runs smoothly on my iPhone.
        
           | flohofwoe wrote:
           | That's not necessarily surprising, unless your iPhone is also
           | from 2014 ;)
        
         | nethunters wrote:
         | On my mobile dragging windows is smooth. Could be hardware
         | acceleration not being enabled or browser specific.
        
         | Shadonototro wrote:
         | the problem is not the tech, flutter is perfectly fine
         | 
         | it's the developer that uses the tech, or rather misuses the
         | computer
         | 
         | you jump to conclusion rather quickly, that's fishy
        
         | forgotpwd16 wrote:
         | >Is "native performance" comparable to the web version or
         | dramatically better?
         | 
         | Tried their latest ISO[0] on QEMU and... no, it's mostly the
         | same. But based on the release notes VM lag is a known issue.
         | Maybe someone can try it baremetal and tell us how it went.
         | 
         | [0]: https://github.com/dahliaOS/releases/releases
        
           | swiley wrote:
           | It's probably because they haven't paid attention to software
           | rendering. Many people don't seem to appreciate how well most
           | popular UI toolkits work if your GPU drivers are incomplete
           | or missing. (or if you just don't have hardware that supports
           | modern OpenGL APIs.)
           | 
           | This, among other more Googly reasons, is why I'm personally
           | not a flutter fan. It's not like there aren't other decent
           | cross platform UI toolkits anyway.
        
         | stephc_int13 wrote:
         | With the serious slowdown of Moore's law, we should not
         | continue to build apps in such a way that they run like a dog
         | with one leg.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | No stutter on Chrome/Windows on an older Dell Laptop. Maybe
         | it's not doing well with Webkit?
        
           | flohofwoe wrote:
           | It's also on Chrome (for Mac), latest Big Sur Beta. Firefox
           | and Safari doesn't work at all (white screen). One reason
           | could be overdraw, the Intel GPUs in older MBPs barely have
           | enough fillrate to render one layer of pixels on a Retina
           | display. E.g. many WebGL demos which render at Retina
           | resolution and either use lots of alpha blending or complex
           | pixel shaders are also stuttering on this setup.
           | 
           | Still, an UI framework should never eat away so much
           | performance. Even at full display refresh rate it should only
           | consume a small percentage of available computation power.
        
             | tyingq wrote:
             | Ah, so back to the old "runs best on <browser>" approach :)
        
         | tluyben2 wrote:
         | On my $200 android phone it is actually rather smooth after the
         | initial download to my browser. Surprisingly so. It performs
         | more fluent than the most apps on my pinephone and so: are
         | there plans to make a native distro? This would make for a nice
         | change as wm.
        
         | ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
         | yes same... lag feels so bad... reminds me of the slack app...
         | at least this one is a whole desktop...
        
       | stephc_int13 wrote:
       | Tried it, found it unresponsive, unpleasant first-time user
       | experience.
       | 
       | Won't do.
        
       | nitinreddy88 wrote:
       | Wait for Google to shelve it in 2021.
        
         | virmundi wrote:
         | I'm worried about that. I might be starting a medical
         | application. I want a single language to teach to on-devs for
         | front end and backend work. Dart looks good however, I don't
         | trust Google.
        
           | ohgodplsno wrote:
           | Have you considered Jetpack Compose ?
           | (https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose) Despite it
           | being a Google project, it also has backing from Jetbrains
           | (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose/). Having access to the
           | full JVM environment of libraries is an infinitely better
           | state than Dart, and Kotlin is also a much more pleasant
           | language. Testing cycle is sliiightly slower, but Compose
           | previews make it easy.
        
             | arthur_sav wrote:
             | I wouldn't be using such experimental technologies for
             | anything else than toy projects.
        
             | alskdj21 wrote:
             | I've been playing with compose and it looks really good.
             | Note that it's still on beta(api should be considered
             | stable) with a release this year. Previews are kinda wonky
             | for now. Sometimes it wouldn't refresh. How hard is it to
             | implement hot reload?
             | 
             | And like I mentioned before, with my low-end laptop its
             | hard to run full Android Studio. Tho Dart's not that
             | pleasant compared to Kotlin, the tooling outside a single
             | IDE was enticing for me.
        
           | nsonha wrote:
           | > I want a single language to teach to on-devs for front end
           | and backend work
           | 
           | if that's what you want then you should support things like
           | kotlin multiplatform, react-native or SwiftUI, dart is a very
           | meh language comparing to those above with established back-
           | end ecosystems.
        
           | hajile wrote:
           | I think you don't need to worry about that. They've probably
           | invested around fifteen years of time into the language.
           | 
           | They want it because it gives them control over their future
           | in a way that Kotlin or Java and the JVM do not.
           | 
           | The "bundle the whole world in your app" isn't space
           | efficient, but it's efficient enough and sidesteps a large
           | part of the outdated Android issue. Meanwhile the react-style
           | components are very popular among devs with UI know-how. The
           | rapid uptake of Flutter also speaks to the hole it is
           | filling.
           | 
           | Then there's FuschiaOS where they're seemingly intent on
           | making it the primary dev language.
           | 
           | Lots of good reasons to continue support and not many reasons
           | not to. Sounds like a decent bet to me
        
         | z5h wrote:
         | I get the sentiment. But it seems Google is "all in" on Dart
         | and Flutter. https://insights.dice.com/2019/03/27/fall-rise-
         | dart-google-j...
        
           | mkl wrote:
           | Google was all in on Google+ too. Probably moreso.
        
           | joezydeco wrote:
           | Until the next shiny thing. Don't fall for it.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | muterad_murilax wrote:
       | Is "Zircona" a project related to Zircon (the core platform that
       | powers the Fuchsia OS) or just a typo?
        
         | denysvitali wrote:
         | Just noticed, sorry, definitely a typo
        
       | preommr wrote:
       | oof hard to be positive about flutter when this is the result
       | considering that...
       | 
       | * There's a massive company like Google behind it
       | 
       | * Google has experience with app dev
       | 
       | * It's been 3+ years
       | 
       | * The project has been hyped up a lot, and has a lot of
       | supporters
       | 
       | * has a programming language that basically exists to support
       | this one dev kit.
        
         | orangecat wrote:
         | Currently Flutter is much more suitable for native mobile and
         | desktop than for web. If you have the Flutter dev environment
         | installed, you can check out the repo and run it as a desktop
         | app for a far better experience. The unpolished web support may
         | be doing more harm than good, because people looking at demos
         | like this can understandably end up with a negative impression.
        
         | tjpnz wrote:
         | Some of these arguments once could've applied to Angular. That
         | doesn't inspire confidence.
        
       | forgotpwd16 wrote:
       | Looks like the web desktops that used (are?) to be popular about
       | a decade ago. Otherwise no information is provided or can be
       | found. How does one run this on Linux or Fuchsia? Is this open
       | source or proprietary? Maybe another link should be used instead.
       | 
       | Edit: Submitter shared the repo link in another comment:
       | https://github.com/dahliaOS/pangolin_desktop
        
       | marczellm wrote:
       | Doesn't seem to work on Firefox. I get an empty white page.
        
         | flohofwoe wrote:
         | Same on macOS Safari.
        
           | samat wrote:
           | works on latest stable safari on big sur arm
        
           | read_if_gay_ wrote:
           | Same on iOS which is maybe not a surprise?
        
             | mysterydip wrote:
             | If you wait a minute stuff comes up on iOS, at least for
             | me. Could use some kind of progress bar or other indication
             | it's loading.
        
               | read_if_gay_ wrote:
               | Ah, thanks for that. So it was just my ADHD kicking in I
               | guess.
        
         | adrift wrote:
         | Works on mine.
        
         | NullPrefix wrote:
         | Have you tried enabling JavaScript?
        
         | MayeulC wrote:
         | WFM on Firefox 87 on Linux
        
         | oftenwrong wrote:
         | You probably just need to wait for it to load.
        
       | xg15 wrote:
       | > _Pangolin UI_
       | 
       | Tagline: "So good, it'll go viral"?
        
         | paultopia wrote:
         | RIGHT? Too soon, y'all. Too soon.
        
         | soperj wrote:
         | They think that the intermediate animal might be mink now.
        
       | Atomskun wrote:
       | Reminds me of something we had more than 10 years ago.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS
       | 
       | It certainly ran better than this.
        
       | arzel wrote:
       | Extremely smooth on Mac M1. Very cool.
        
       | hadrien01 wrote:
       | What are we looking at? All I see is a reproduction of an OS with
       | abysmal performance, where everything is fake: the text editor is
       | fake, the terminal is fake, the web browser is fake. The only
       | thing working is the clock...
        
         | einpoklum wrote:
         | Well, it's a mock-up, isn't it?
         | 
         | (If not, then ouch...)
        
         | NullPrefix wrote:
         | Calculator looks real to me. Unwieldy and ugly, but still real.
        
           | cmrdporcupine wrote:
           | Nope, you can enter numbers but the operations don't do
           | anything :-)
        
         | diegocg wrote:
         | But it uses $TRENDY_FRAMEWORK!
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | not new, comments and discussion from 6 months ago:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24976732
        
       | anthk wrote:
       | Google, please, leave the Flutter back and create a GUI for GO
       | based on Inferno or an enhanced (dumbed down for the causal user)
       | Plan9 UI with pulldown menus for the user, micking allegro or XAW
       | and a simple file dialog a la TK.
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | Inferno used Tk, not really what I would like to see on modern
         | computers.
         | 
         | http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/screenshots.html
        
           | anthk wrote:
           | That's just a matter of style. Android could have native
           | widgets, and desktops another exact set. Instead of a
           | hamburger menu, an automatic horizontal one. And so on.
        
             | pjmlp wrote:
             | I used Tcl/Tk in 2000, just re-styling isn't enough for a
             | 2021 GUI toolkit.
        
               | anthk wrote:
               | I used that too, but Google could adapt Inferno for
               | modern standards. No, not material, that's atrocious. At
               | least for a desktop.
        
       | GekkePrutser wrote:
       | It looks way too "Google" to me :( All the material design and
       | flatness, the iconset, it's basically Android in terms of design
       | language.
       | 
       | I wouldn't want my Linux distro looking like something from
       | Google tbh :)
        
       | malkia wrote:
       | I just inspected the page, and saw that this version does not use
       | canvas (e.g. "canvaskit") but <flt-xxx> elements - e.g. the HTML
       | flutter web output. This may or may not make things slower.
        
       | dathinab wrote:
       | White Page without content for me.
       | 
       | Please don't use flutter web, it's a unacceptable accessibility
       | nightmare.
        
         | still_grokking wrote:
         | It "worked" for me on FF 87 on Linux.
         | 
         | But that's not even a click-dummy "desktop". Also, form the
         | tech perspective, it seems pre-alpha state. At least the web
         | version renders with maybe 10 fps on a pretty decent machine,
         | and every click has at minimum half a second latency. No clue
         | why someone put up a website marketing this thing to end-users.
         | It looks like 3 to 6 years of hard work form usable, imho.
        
         | g051051 wrote:
         | It takes a while to load and display, possibly being hugged to
         | death. Leave the tab open for a few minutes and check back in a
         | bit.
        
         | MaxBarraclough wrote:
         | > White Page without content for me.
         | 
         | Same here. I'm using Firefox.
        
           | ognarb wrote:
           | Same here but it work on firefox for Android.
        
       | XorNot wrote:
       | Urgh, I don't get having start-menu like buttons which pop up a
       | fullscreen display on non-phone format devices.
        
       | zeandcode wrote:
       | Really no comment at all?
        
         | denysvitali wrote:
         | Sorry, here is the repository. I just found the project and it
         | seems really interesting:
         | https://github.com/dahliaOS/pangolin_desktop
         | 
         | Their OS, dahliaOS is using it: https://dahliaos.io/
         | 
         | Honestly, never tried it myself, but it definitely looks cool
         | and I wanted to share the web version ;)
        
           | onli wrote:
           | Something is wrong with the web version and also with the
           | website https://dahliaos.io/, links don't open. JS sites that
           | don't work in Firefox, right? That's not a great start.
           | 
           | It does look interesting though. It's an UI for Fuchsia or
           | Linux, with containers for the other system?
        
             | Ygg2 wrote:
             | I opened it on Firefox Android, so maybe it's something
             | else?
             | 
             | Edit: It doesn't seem to work really good, but it kinda
             | works.
        
         | theginger wrote:
         | To be honest i don't know what i am looking at, it looks like
         | it might be something fairly impressive but sort of could do
         | with a link to a page explaining what it is rather than
         | straight to it
        
           | denysvitali wrote:
           | Please see my comment bellow: here is the link to the project
           | https://github.com/dahliaOS/pangolin_desktop :)
        
       | still_grokking wrote:
       | Just an imho related post form the front page right now:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26845037
       | 
       | How smooth that is compared to this here...
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Is there a way to test the Linux version of this (since the title
       | says Linux)?
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | pabe wrote:
       | It looks just like a GUI demo but from the information in the
       | repo there seems to be more behind it? Is this a real GUI for a
       | real OS?
        
         | denysvitali wrote:
         | Exactly, check out the project at
         | https://github.com/dahliaOS/pangolin_desktop
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-17 23:03 UTC)