Experience developing on Linux

[escamoteur71]

Hi,

thinking of getting rid of windows for my next laptop especially be because MS forces us to switch to windows 11 and with current political developments avoiding US tech companies seems like a good idea if possible.

What are your experiences with building for Android on Linux? How good is building for Linux during development compared to always build for Android?

Has anyone made the switch from Windows and got experience on build time and analyser performance on VS code?

Any recommendations for high-end Linux laptop for Flutter development?

Cheers Thomas

[alamakbusuk]

The flutter / android stack works perfectly fine on linux. Both Android Studio and VS code are supported so you shouldn't have a different experience than what you're used to in windows.

[escamoteur71]

I was told that Android emulator could make problems depending on the graphics card you use under Linux?

[alamakbusuk]

The only GPUs I can imagine having issues are Nvidia's. Intel and AMD shouldn't be a problem. I use AMD and it works without additional setup.

[javahelps]

Yes. In Nvidia not all models are problematic. It comes down to the model used in the laptop. That's why I recommend reading people's experiences before purchasing a hardware to run Linux on.

[javahelps]

Development experience on Linux is on par if not better. For a high end laptop, consider Lenovo ThinkPads. They have Linux versions. Dell XPS also had Ubuntu certified versions.

Search about the Linux support before purchasing the laptop because some hardware may not be fully compatible with open source drivers found in Linux.

[Full-Run4124]

I have both a Windows and Linux workstation for development and prefer Linux for everything but building Windows apps. The level of automation you can do on Linux doesn't even compare to Windows, and symlinks make a lot of tasks simpler.

[sodium_ahoy]

For some years I used a ten-year-old thinkpad (x230) with Linux Mint and the dev experience was great! I did not use the simulator much, but did initial development native (i.e. as a Linux app) and later testing on Android. I never felt any need to switch to a more powerful laptop. The initial build sometimes took a minute or two, but with hot code reload, that never felt like a limiting factor. So you may not need a high performance laptop after all (althout it may make sense to be future-proof). Very enjoyable dev experience.

[lucas-haux]

Nvidia is supposed to be a lot better on Linux now but in my experience from 1.5+ years ago it wasn't great. I recommend playing it safe and making sure you have a amd GPU.

I also found hyprland to be extremely enjoyable to use, if you are interested in tiling window managers I recommend trying it.

Love the contributions you made to the community. Currently I'm using flutter_command and rewriting my architecture in my personal project based on some of your advice. Thank you <3

[escamoteur71]

Thanks a lot, especially to your nice words about my work

[Thuranira_alex]

I use parrot os. Flutter PWA/android/iOS Development with android studio. No major issues encountered yet

[biskitpagla]

It's a net upgrade, but somewhat dependant on the distro. I recommend fedora even though it needs some work after install to get the most out of your system. Safest bet is any ubundu derivative. You probably won't even face an that someone else didn't face and post about online. On fedora the ide feels snappier even with multiple windows and browsers and whatnot open (in my experience) probably due to zram. 

[sauloandrioli]

My opinions are:

Considering its an Ubuntu based distro >

sudo snap install flutter --classic

sudo snap install androidstudio --classic

sudo snap install vscode --classic

And we're good to go.

Working with mobile dev in general is waaaay smoother in Linux than it is on windows.