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Canonical enables Linux desktop app support with Flutter

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Google’s goal for Flutter has always been to provide a portable framework for building beautiful UIs that run at native speeds no matter what platform you target. To validate this capability, we started by focusing on the mobile platforms, Android and iOS, where we’ve seen more than 80,000 fast, beautiful Flutter apps published to Google Play.

To build on this success, for more than a year we’ve been expanding our focus to include desktop-class experiences, both for the web and for the desktop OSes: macOS, Windows and Linux. This work includes extensive refactoring of the engine to support desktop-style mouse and keyboard input as well as resizable top-level windows. It also includes new UI capabilities that adapt well to desktop, like Material Density support and the NavigationRail and experiments with deep integration into the underlying desktop OS with experiments in Dart:FFI and access to the system menu bar and standard dialogs. All of this work was to ensure that in addition to being suitable for mobile-style experiences, Flutter is ready to handle full-featured, full-sized desktop apps.

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.

Read more

Also: Must Read: Google & Ubuntu Team Up to Bring Flutter Apps to Linux

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Google and Canonical bring Flutter apps to Linux and the Snap Store

Canonical and Google Team Up to Bring Flutter Apps to the Linux

  • Canonical and Google Team Up to Bring Flutter Apps to the Linux Desktop

    Flutter, the open-source and cross-platform UI toolkit and portal framework created by Google is now available on Linux, thanks to Canonical’s Snap universal software deployment and package management system for GNU/Linux distributions.

    Flutter can be used to develop and deploy cross-platform apps for some of the major mobile and desktop platforms, including Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and even Google Fuchsia. And, as of today, it can also be used on Linux.

5 more articles

  • Google is teaming up with Ubuntu to bring Flutter apps to Linux

    Flutter is Google's cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create responsive apps for Android, iOS, and even macOS. The toolset has already been used by countless applications, including the mobile Stadia app, and now Google is teaming up with Ubuntu Linux to bring Flutter apps to desktop Linux.

    "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," Google said in a blog post. "Canonical is making a significant investment in Flutter by dedicating a team of developers to work alongside Google’s developers to bring the best Flutter experience to the majority of Linux distributions."

    Canonical is making a significant investment in Flutter.

  • Google partners with Canonical to bring Flutter apps to Linux

    Google has been hard at work creating and expanding Flutter for the past few years. When we last talked about Flutter, Google rebuilt DevTools entirely from scratch in Flutter for better performance, greater versatility, and to demonstrate their confidence in this app development framework. Google envisions Flutter as a programming framework that developers can use to build apps that target multiple systems, so the team is constantly working to improve Flutter’s support for platforms. Today, Google has announced that it is partnering with the Ubuntu Desktop Team at Canonical to bring Flutter apps to Linux.

  • Google Partners with Canonical to Bring Flutter to Linux

    Google announced today that it is partnering with Ubuntu maker Canonical to bring Linux desktop app support to its Flutter developer environment.

    “For more than a year we’ve been expanding our focus to include desktop-class experiences, both for the web and for the desktop OSes [like] macOS, Windows and Linux,” Google’s Chris Sells and Canonical’s Ken VanDine write in the announcement post. “This work includes extensive refactoring of the engine to support desktop-style mouse and keyboard input as well as resizable top-level windows, new UI capabilities that adapt well to desktop, and access to the system menu bar and standard dialogs. All of this work was to ensure that in addition to being suitable for mobile-style experiences, Flutter is ready to handle first-featured, full-sized desktop apps.”

  • Google and Canonical Bring Flutter Apps To Linux and the Snap Store
  • Google's UI toolkit Flutter comes to the Linux desktop with help from Canonical

    This might be quite big news! Flutter, the UI toolkit from Google that's used in tens of thousands of Android applications is coming to the desktop. Google and Canonical have announced their push for Linux too.

    Why is this a big thing? Well, anything that boosts easy cross-platform development is a great thing. It can make Linux more attractive to developers to work on, plus publishing onto Linux becomes easier again. Writing in a Medium post, Chris Sells (Google) & Ken VanDine (Canonical) talk a little about what's going on.

    They said that the goal for Flutter has "always been to provide a portable toolkit for building beautiful UIs that run at native speeds, no matter which platform you target" although initially starting on mobile. Now though, they announced "we are happy to jointly announce the availability of the Linux alpha for Flutter alongside Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu". On the Linux side, they've hooked it up with "a new GTK+ based host for Flutter apps on all Linux distros".

Flutter Can Now Be Used to Create Ubuntu Linux Apps

  • Flutter Can Now Be Used to Create Ubuntu Linux Apps

    Canonical and Google have partnered to add Linux as one of the target platforms for the Flutter framework.

    Flutter is a popular UI framework Google created to make it easier to develop cross-platform apps. Unlike some other cross-platform frameworks, such as React Native or NativeScript, Flutter does not use the target operating system’s (OS) native controls. Instead, it uses its own rendering engine to mimic native controls.

    Until now, Flutter primarily targeted Android, iOS, Fuchsia, macOS, Windows and web apps. While it could run on Linux and be used to develop Android and iOS apps, it did not target Linux. Still, for developers looking for a fast way to develop cross-platform apps, Flutter has been steadily gaining in popularity. Google’s latest move is sure to improve that popularity even more, as it has worked with Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, to bring full Linux support to Flutter.

Google Teams Up With Canonical To Announce Linux Alpha

  • Google Teams Up With Canonical To Announce Linux Alpha For Flutter

    Canonical, the company behind the most popular Ubuntu Linux, has partnered with Google to enable Linux desktop app support with the Flutter UI toolkit. Subsequently, Google has released Linux alpha for Flutter.

    With this release, developers can now easily install Flutter SDK via Snap (Ubuntu’s universal package manager), develop applications for Linux desktops, and distribute them through Canonical’s app store, Snap Store.

Google And Ubuntu Join Forces To Make Desktop Linux Even Better

  • Google And Ubuntu Join Forces To Make Desktop Linux Even Better

    Even the most beautiful, secure and intuitive operating system is effectively useless without a healthy assortment of useful apps to compliment it. Software is the holy grail. It’s the foundation of an ecosystem. It’s what primarily attracts users to iOS or Android on mobile, and Windows, macOS or Linux on the desktop. So what happened this week between Google and Ubuntu-maker Canonical is a massive step forward in improving the selection of software available on desktop Linux.

Canonical enables Linux desktop app support with Flutter

  • Canonical enables Linux desktop app support with Flutter

    Google’s goal for Flutter has always been to provide a portable toolkit for building beautiful UIs that run at native speeds, no matter which platform you target. To validate this capability, we started by focusing on the mobile platforms Android and iOS, where we’ve seen more than 80,000 fast, beautiful Flutter apps published to Google Play.

    To build on this success, for more than a year we’ve been expanding our focus to include desktop-class experiences, both for the web and for the desktop operating systems: macOS, Windows, and Linux. This work includes extensive refactoring of the engine to support desktop-style mouse and keyboard input, as well as resizable top-level windows. It also includes new UI capabilities that adapt well to desktop, like Material Density support and the NavigationRail, and experiments with deep integration into the underlying desktop OS with experiments in Dart:FFI and access to the system menu bar and standard dialogs. All of this work was to ensure that in addition to being suitable for mobile-style experiences, Flutter is ready to handle full-featured, full-sized desktop apps.

    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.

Google’s Flutter Apps are Coming to Desktop Linux

  • Google’s Flutter Apps are Coming to Desktop Linux Thanks to Ubuntu

    Flutter is Google’s open-source UI toolkit that helps developers build native apps tailored for Web, Android, iOS, and macOS (alpha stage). You might want to check out their GitHub page and documentation to learn more.

    As of now, there’s no proper support for Windows — but it’s something in-progress.

    But, the good news is — Canonical and Google are going to closely work together to bring Flutter app support to Linux distributions as per the official announcement...

Google and Canonical bring Flutter apps to Ubuntu Linux

  • Google and Canonical bring Flutter apps to Ubuntu Linux

    For all its benefits in security, performance, and openness, the Linux operating system is still avoided by many computer users because of its software catalog. It’s not that Linux lacks app but it lacks the sort of apps that people are used to on Windows and Mac or even on Android and iOS. There is no shortage of projects that try to bring some sort of compatibility with those apps, like WINE for Windows and Anbox for Android. A different strategy, however, is writing apps in a way that makes them run on all or most platforms. That’s the premise behind Flutter and it’s now coming to Linux, at least on the Ubuntu flavor of Linux.

Android 11 Beta 2...

  • SD Times news digest: Android 11 Beta 2, Instana rolls out granular role-based access control, and React Native 0.63

    This release achieves the Platform Stability milestone, which means that Android 11’s APIs and behaviors are finalized.

    From Beta 2, developers can release compatibility updates with confidence that the platform won’t change, according to Android.

    Developers can enroll to get Android 11 Beta updates over-the-air for Pixel 2, 3, 3a, and 4 devices.

    [...]

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

    “For more than a year we’ve been expanding our focus to include desktop-class experiences, both for the web and for the desktop operating systems: macOS, Windows, and Linux,” Flutter wrote in a blog post.

    The Flutter SDK for Linux is available as a snap in the Snap Store. Once the Flutter SDK is installed on a Linux machine, to build a desktop app users will need to upgrade to the Flutter dev or master channel and enable Linux desktop support.

...Flutter through snap

  • Canonical and Google enable Linux desktop app support with Flutter through snap

    I welcome any additional investment in Linux or other operating systems that aren’t the macOS or Windows, but this one has a major downside: it’s all tied to Canonical’s snaps and Snap Store. In case you are unaware – snaps are quite controversial in the Linux world, and Linux Mint, one of the most popular Linux distributions, has taken a very proactive approach in removing them. Their reasoning makes it very clear why snap is so problematic:

Google partners with Ubuntu to bring Flutter apps to Linux

  • Google partners with Ubuntu to bring Flutter apps to Linux

    Since the inception of Android, Google has always supported app development with its open-source Android Studio and also developed Flutter, more recently. Flutter is an application framework for the development of cross-platform applications that are compatible with Android, iOS, and macOS too.

    Flutter is being used by many developers these days because of its simplicity and the ease of coding only once to support on all platforms. There are so many applications developed using this framework but now, Google is now partnering with Ubuntu Linux aiming to bring Flutter apps to Linux OS. As we know Linux is not an application rich platform but if Flutter apps come to Linux then we may have a richer Linux experience.

Google joins Canonical to bring Flutter apps to Linux

  • Google joins Canonical to bring Flutter apps to Linux

    Google has announced that it is partnering with open source software operating system Ubuntu maker Canonical to bring its open-source UI software development kit Flutter to Linux desktop operating system.

    Google''s goal for Flutter has always been to provide a portable framework for building beautiful user interfaces (UIs) that run at native speeds no matter what platform.

    "To validate this capability, we started by focusing on the mobile platforms, Android and iOS, where we''ve seen more than 80,000 fast, beautiful Flutter apps published to Google Play," said Google''s Chris Sells and Canonical''s Ken VanDine.

Canonical Is Using Mir To Bring Flutter To Wayland

  • Canonical Is Using Mir To Bring Flutter To Wayland

    This week Canonical and Google announced they were working together to bring the Flutter application toolkit to Ubuntu/Linux. Flutter is the cross-platform, open-source UI toolkit developed by Google for use from Android to Linux and iOS and Fuschia as well as for web interfaces.

    Besides Canonical working on the Flutter Linux port to cater towards Snaps on Ubuntu, it also turns out they are working on bringing Flutter to Wayland... Through Mir, which in recent years has morphed into focusing on Wayland rather than as a competitor.

    This weekend William Wold of Canonical who has been on the Mir team for a while shared that the Flutter Wayland support is under development. While Flutter on Linux relies on GTK for windowing, right now it only supports usage on X11.

Flutter is Coming to Linux

  • Flutter is Coming to Linux

    Google and Canonical have joined forces to bring Flutter to the Linux desktop.

    Google’s open-source UI framework for building Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows has added another platform...Linux. And with over 500,000 developers working with Flutter (and over 80,000 apps built with the framework), this could mean a boon for apps on Linux.

    But that’s not all. Canonical (the creators and maintainers of Ubuntu) have dedicated developers to the task. In fact, Ken VanDine, Canonical engineering manager, said this of the move:

    Canonical is making a significant investment in Flutter by dedicating a team of developers to work alongside Google’s developers to bring the best Flutter experience to the majority of Linux distributions. Canonical will continue to collaborate with Google to further improve Linux support and maintain feature parity with the other supported platforms.

Google and Canonical partner to support Flutter-based apps

  • [Older] Google and Canonical partner to support Flutter-based apps on Linux

    Google LLC’s said today it’s forging a partnership with Canonical Ltd.’s Ubuntu Desktop team to support applications built using its Flutter framework on Linux-based computer systems.

    Flutter is a software framework that’s used by developers to build “native” apps on multiple operating systems, including Android, iOS, Windows and MacOS. The idea is that they can write their apps just once using Google’s Dart programming language and have them run perfectly across all of those platforms, without needing to tinker with the code for each version.

    The framework is designed to enable what Google calls “ambient computing.” That’s where people can access their favorite apps and services from any location, be it at home or at work, on any kind of device, using a consistent set of methods and commands.

    The partnership with Canonical means that developers who use the Flutter framework can now deploy their apps on the Snap store and other kinds of Linux app stores, said Chris Sells, a senior product manager at Google, and Ken VanDine, an engineering manager at Canonical.

    “It has long been our vision for Flutter to power platforms,” Sells and VanDine wrote in a blog post. “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.”

Devs can now use Google’s Flutter to build apps on Linux

  • Devs can now use Google’s Flutter to build apps on Linux

    A common developer’s dream is of a single programming framework and language that can be used to publish production-ready applications on just about every platform under the sun. Ideally, developers should be able to write one set of code, and then deploy it — with as few tweaks as possible — onto mobile (iOS and Android), the desktop (Windows 10, Mac, Linux) and the web.

    The magic word here is, of course, convergence, which several companies and organizations have tried (remember Windows Mobile?), and many still continue to strive for. The most recent example of work-in-progress is Apple’s decision to roll out “Apple silicon” (aka ARM processors) in its desktop and laptop Macs over the next few years.

Flutter now available for Linux desktop via Ubuntu Snap Store

  • Flutter now available for Linux desktop via Ubuntu Snap Store

    A typical designer’s dream is of a single programs structure and language that can be utilized to release production-ready applications on practically every platform under the sun. Ideally, designers ought to have the ability to compose one set of code, and after that release it– with as couple of tweaks as possible– onto mobile (iOS and Android), the desktop (Windows 10, Mac, Linux) and the web.

    The magic word here is, naturally, merging, which a number of business and companies have attempted (keep in mind Windows Mobile?), and lots of still continue to make every effortfor The newest example of work-in-progress is Apple’s choice to present “Apple silicon” (aka ARM processors) in its desktop and laptop computer Macs over the next couple of years.

LWN: Ubuntu invests in Google's Flutter and Dart

  • Ubuntu invests in Google's Flutter and Dart

    Flutter is Google's open-source toolkit to build cross-device (and cross-platform) applications. Based on the Dart programming language released by the company in 2013, Flutter promises developers the ability to write and maintain a single application that runs on all of a user's devices. Flutter applications support deployment on Android, iOS, Web browsers via JavaScript, macOS, and now Canonical and Google have teamed up to support Flutter applications in Linux. Promises of native speed, rapid development, and a growing community make it an interesting technology to take a look at.

    Flutter focuses on consistency and quality of the user experience it provides. Google has devoted considerable resources over the years in service of understanding how to build high-quality user experiences. These efforts have lead to projects like Material Design, with those principles being translated into Flutter's components and overall development philosophy. For developers who prefer an iOS-style interface, Flutter provides components for that as well.

    Flutter itself is billed by Google as a "UI Toolkit", and both Flutter and Dart are licensed under a permissive BSD 3-Clause license. Google declared Flutter "production ready" in 2018, and the company now claims over two million developers use the Flutter toolkit for application development. Since its release, Flutter has also built a significant open-source community of contributors and applications.

    Originally, Flutter was a toolkit focused on mobile application development targeting only Android and iOS platforms. With the version 1.0 release Google also started experimenting with using Flutter on traditional desktops. In the year and a half since then, Flutter now provides what the project describes as "alpha-quality features" for both macOS and Linux desktop environments. For Linux desktops, Flutter is implemented as a wrapper around GTK+ and according to the project, support for the Windows platform is still under development.

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