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Flutter Desktop compatibility is getting worse?

2 points by rustdesk ↗ HN
Lately I received more and more bug report in my repo about

glGetString(GL_VERSION) failed`

on all platforms.

Also, new Flutter desktop can not work on mac vm totally. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/108304

This embarassed me so much, because we spent almost one year to migrate from an old sdk to Flutter. Now we have to maintain both the old sdk and Flutter together because Flutter's poor compatibility.

5 comments

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ivanmontillam
Sorry to hear about that.

If you're up to a rewrite I recommend Tauri or Sciter.

Both are lightweight, and Microsoft Edge's WebView2 is also fine as well.

rustdesk
My old sdk is Sciter, Frankly, it is super buggy though it is light-weight. Currently, we maintain Sciter version and Flutter version both, I can not wait to discard Sciter.
rustdesk
I have used Tauri also, it does not seem having better compatibility, though it is supposed to, but the fact is not.
lucasyvas
I can't answer your question, nor am I in a position to pitch Tauri however it has been suggested and it sounds like you investigated it. However, I can suggest an alternative if you are super unhappy with the stack and can't rely on the frameworks that is controversial - Rust core plus Electron for GUI.

1Password does this. It's not sexy but it works, and if you're building a product you need something that is mature and works. It's probably an easier port from Sciter than Flutter.

You didn't really ask, but this combination is likely a reliable path forward. If you keep web technology maybe Tauri would mature to the point you are happy with it and could switch one day. Not really easy to suggest someone rewrite parts of their product but if the tech is not doing it for you then it's nice to at least have a card to play.

Having something purely in Rust would be nice but GUI wise it just isn't widely used enough. egui and iced are mentioned a lot - the latter is at least adopted by PopOS, but that's not enough for me to bet on yet.

Alifatisk
According to the issue [1]:

"Support for the following hardware will be dropped:

    2009-2010 MacBook
    2010-2011 MacBook Pro
    2010-2011 MacBook Air
    2010-2011 Mac mini
    2009-2011 iMac
    2010 Mac Pro (unless GPU been upgraded to a Metal-capable GPU)
"

1. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/114445

Are you running an older hardware?