I am so excited about flutter ecosystem. Hopefully linux gets first class beautiful native apps now. I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as a backend so KDE is not left out.
Flutter implements a bespoke renderer called Skia. It is its own backend. For Qt to be compatible with Flutter you'd have to port Qt to Dart. There's nothing wrong with running Flutter apps and Qt apps simulatenously.
It would be an interesting project for someone to create a KDE type of desktop environment in Flutter. Can it be done?
Judging by the example in TFA, we must have very different conceptions of what "beautiful" means. That is an atrocious application.
* Ungodly amounts of whitespace (seriously, look at that sidebar, look at that search bar. WHY? too much optimisation for what "looks good on a screenshot", maybe?)
* Undecipherable symbols where there's plenty of f#cking space to write labels god damn it
* I bet bad/nonexistant keyboard support (remember alt-* to navigate menus?)
You can style the widgets however you like. You don't have to use the default Material toolkit, the same way you can design Qt widgets in QML and don't have to use those default 1990s-style gray box widgets.
> remember alt-* to navigate menus?
I do, but most people reading this probably won't, or there will come a time shortly when most people won't remember. I think most people are used to everything being a web/Electron app. Users do not expect a standard design language (like Win32/Swing/Qt) for desktop apps anymore (and indeed a Win32-style desktop app will soon look as foreign as a webapp since even the Windows shell looks like a webapp now).
Flutter lets you create "webapps" (which is the new standard) but with native performance and ability to make syscalls (being native).
The only alternative tech stacks to this end are QML/QtQuick, JavaFX, an embedded WebView, or embedded Chromium (e.g. Electron or Chromium Emebedded Framework)--all of which having some sort of baggage. Flutter's baggage is you have to use Dart. The alternatives all also require that you use some sort of DSL (QML (Qt), FXML (JavaFX), JS (Electron)) so that's not a unique disadvantage. (It really isn't a disadvantage--imagine the hell if there weren't a DSL for the View layer and every language had to have bindings.)
GUI programming is downright suffering no matter which way you slice it. There are no interesting problems to solve, unless you're working on the GUI framework itself. Flutter makes this suffering slightly better. I don't see how it's not an absolute good.
This isn't true: Google preloads their design conceptions, namely Material, into Flutter at the ground level, and Material is a terrible set of UI patterns, such as the ones the parent comment was complaining about.
You don't have to use the material design stuff, you can just make your own components, all custom, just as you would on the web. Just replace MaterialApp with WidgetsApp at the root of the application tree.
You don't have to, but it is the default, which means it sets the standard of design there. Unsurprisingly, most things you see made with Flutter tend to either be or be similar to Material.
> I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as a backend so KDE is not left out.
Unlikely (GNOME market share) and I can't see why it'd be that important. Platform protocols can be implemented around GTK and as far as I understand GTK is just a vehicle for getting X11/Wayland compatibility, the rendering itself will always be done by Flutter's engine anyway.
