Building a Flutter desktop app: Tutorial with examples

Flutter, an open-source cross-platform application development framework, enables developers to create natively compiled applications for various platforms, including mobile, desktop, and web, using the Dart programming language. The framework has gained popularity due to its ability to maintain a single codebase for multiple platforms, which facilitates rapid feature delivery and minimizes the need for platform-specific code. Flutter's performance advantages stem from rendering UI controls via the Skia graphics library rather than a web browser, distinguishing it from frameworks like Electron, which often suffer from resource inefficiencies. Since becoming stable for Windows and Linux, Flutter supports creating production-grade desktop applications, exemplified by a tutorial on building a simple text editor called TextPad. The tutorial outlines the process of setting up the Flutter development environment on Windows and Ubuntu, creating and debugging a Flutter app, and implementing cross-platform functionalities. Despite some challenges, such as an unfamiliar programming language and widget toolkit, Flutter offers impressive performance compared to other frameworks, making it a compelling choice for modern software development.