Category: Flutter

proton mail desktop for linux

whbeebe

Proton Mail finally released a beta of its web application as a stand-alone application for the Linux desktop earlier this week. After being gently prompted by the website when I last opened web-based Proton Mail, I downloaded the stand-alone  deb file and installed it.

This is a beta release, so it’s not functionally complete. This means, for example, I can’t select a dark scheme for the application. I have done this on the web-based version. Being a beta there are other, minor (to me) missing features, but overall it works pretty much the same way as the web-based side of things, at least as far as I can tell.

The biggest issue for me is speed. The stand-alone Proton Mail is slower, and at times notably slower than the in-browser application, and I have to wonder if it’s because web browser Proton has the remote server doing most of the heavy lifting of mail processing. I’m also now wondering if Proton Mail is based on Google’s Flutter framework, and if the desktop version isn’t a recompile of the web-based version. I’ve dabbled with Google’s Flutter in the past and done something similar, i.e. built a web application using Flutter’s Visual Studio Code plugin and then flipped the switch to build a stand-alone version. I wasn’t all that impressed at the time. If this is how we got Proton Mail desktop then I’m still not all that impressed with Flutter.

This is the second mail desktop application I’ve installed and tried on the Linux desktop. The first is Thunderbird, the spin-off from Netscape Navigator’s web browser suite from back in the early 2000s.

As you can see with the Thunderbird example above, I like my dark themes. I also like with Thunderbord how I can compress folder listings into one mail entry per line, unlike Proton Mail (both web and application) that will only shrink down to two lines/entry, via what is called Density in the Settings panel. But that’s a minor nit, compared to other issues. While I still have Thunderbird installed and fire it up on occasion, my biggest complaint with Thunderbird and the reason I seldom use it is how much in resources it uses when it’s up and running on my system. I’m better off reading my Google mail in a browser than in Thunderbird, even though it means I have a browser with may open tabs being dragged along. My primary browser of choice on my Linux Mint desktop is Firefox (123.0.1), which in spite of the lies the many Firefox haters like to spew, runs quite efficiently and performant for me.

While I always recommend Proton Mail to whomever asks, I can’t recommend these newest Proton Mail desktop applications. In the third decade of the 21st century, working with mail in a browser tab is no longer the issue it was in the first decade of the 21st century. We have come a very long way in that regard. Going back to a stand-alone mail application wasn’t something I was asking for, and looks too much like a step backwards.

solving a clang++ compiler problem on linux mint 22.1

whbeebe

During my initial setup of Linux Mint on the Samsung Series 7, I installed the Flutter toolkit ( https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install/linux ). Flutter has additional application requirements, one of which is Clang. So I installed all the additional requirements, then installed Visual Studio Code, then within VSCode I installed Flutter plugin.

Note that I did not install support for Android (Android SDK and Android Studio) nor the Web (via Chrome). All I’m doing is writing Flutter desktop applications.

The Flutter plugin within VSCode automates quite a lot. Using the VSCode Command Palette, you can create an initial Flutter application (Flutter: New Project) that will create skeleton code and build files that compiles and runs the graphical equivalent of hello, world.

Visual Studio Code with the Flutter plugin and an initial Flutter application, running that application in debug mode.

As you can see, the Flutter tools for both the framework and the VSCode plugin provide an effortless on-ramp to developing applications. Creating the start of an application is ridiculously easy, and it’s capable of building and executing from the get-go. One feature this has and I use quite a lot is hot reload. When I make changes to the code, when I save the changes they’re rebuilt and the running application restarted immediately showing those changes. That’s why I use this setup.

Sample Flutter application running on the desktop.

And here is the initial application’s extremely simple desktop window. When this works well, it’s a little like magic.

Unfortunately I ran into a problem where Clang, one of Flutter’s dependencies, could not link a C++ application that is part of the Flutter application. The error message reported by the Flutter tooling was (with much superfluous reporting snipped away):

.../usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lstdc++: No such file or directory...

This really annoyed me because I have this same setup on my other Linux Mint system, the UM250. With a bit of googling I discovered what was wrong, and how I’d accidentally side-stepped the issue on the UM250. I solved the problem on the Series 7 with sudo apt install libstdc++-12-dev. After that the Flutter tool chain just worked.

Why didn’t I see this issue on the UM250? Because I’d installed gcc/g++ version 12 to support another small project I was working on. On the UM250 I have both versions 11 and 12. Then when I later updated an older installation of Flutter and ran the same simple tests, everything worked there as well. I don’t intend to install gcc/g++ version 12 on the Series 7 as there is no need.

What I don’t understand is how Clang and GCC got out of sync on Linux Mint 22.1. The version of Clang installed is version 14, and requires libstdc++-12. Unfortunately Linux Mint 22.1 installs GCC version 11, which means that if you wanted to build with Clang you’re out of luck unless you know of Clang 14’s dependencies.