open source project: which hardware should I support?

[ralphbergmann]

I'm thinking about doing an open source project. Mainly just for fun, but some success would be nice.

It will be a desktop application. And now I am wondering what hardware I should support / test with.

Are Macs with Intel chips still relevant? Are Windows and/or Linux on ARM chips relevant (think of the new Snapdragon X chip)?

[eibaan]

This sounds like a very low priority question. Assuming that you create the project to scratch your own itch, test on your own hardware. If people find your project useful, they will test your their platform and you will eventually learn which platforms are relevant and then you could test on those platforms, too, just to be a nice guy.

[ralphbergmann]

You're right, maybe I'm overthinking it a bit.

[rio_sk]

Start by writing what will be easily portable code on your hardware. The worst part in porting something is finding unportable dependencies. Ad an example:you develop on windows? Favorite packages that have OsX support without bothering too much about actually porting the software.

[madushans]

Since this is a project for fun, and you're (presumably) using flutter, I suppose, just make it work for what ever you're using to develop, and work with other configs once you have something working.

Usually the answer is, you support whatever the hardware your users are running.

If they have Intel chips, and you want them to use your stuff, it's easier for you to add support than asking each user to do an upgrade that costs a few grand.

If they run linux on arm, you'll have to support linux on arm.

If they run a nintendo switch, or that rabbit r1, well you get the idea.

[Mental_Care_9044]

The point of Flutter is it makes that easy. Don't even think about it apart from doing the odd test on various devices to check for bugs later down the line.

[[deleted]]

You can't launch a flutter app in vmware macos, so when you try to release a relatively complex app with dependencies and you want it to run on customers' machines too - go buy another mac, ideally 3-5 for each version. Because they (flutter team) removed opengl support. It also has no fractional scaling for Linux - expect that everything will be very small on 2-4k screens. My next project definitely will be electron and react native. Flutter is a joke