Need Advice from Front End Devs

1 points by spicysugar 3 years ago | 1 comment

Hello, backend dev here. I want to build some very specific gui stuff for linux desktop and i am confused. Let me first tell you what I want to build. Then I will explain my confusion. So I want to build something like https://github.com/ricotz/plank and https://github.com/xfce-mirror/xfce4-panel. It is not supposed to be cross platform, specifically for linux x86 64 bit. For Xorg specifically.

So I am thinking about some sort of application, that does it and is fullscreen and borderless by default. Both these apps cannot be seperate windows. I want plank at the bottom screen to show pinned apps and apps that are currently running with their window preview on hovering over. The top panel needs to have a global menu like macos and an application tray for installed apps. Need to show icons for steam or discord running on top panel. So it needs to support systray icons.

I don't want to use vala+gtk or c+qt.

Can I use flutter, react native or tauri to do this? I don't want to use electron. I don't know dart rust or javascript right now.

akagusu 3 years ago |

These kind of applications you want to build require access to xorg api, dbus and many others.

Your best options here are gtk or qt.

If you don't want to use c/vala for gtk or c++ for qt, you can use python which have bindings for both libraries, just search for pyqt or pygtk.

And both qt and gtk offers unofficial bindings for several languages.

Beyond these, your best shot could be flutter, because Canonical is building lots of libraries to make flutter an alternative for Linux desktop application development.