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by gkya 2921 days ago
Hi, thanks for writing this article, it was a nice read!

WRT Macs, well, I use a Unixy laptop since time immemorial, one way or another (stuff I spent >1yr with: Ubuntu, Arch, FreeBSD, Xubuntu, and finally and currently Debian; in that order), and being quite content with what I have at hand, I'd be reluctant to switch anyways. But AFAIK the App Store is where the money is, so I want to get in to it ASAP.

I'm in a rare situation where I'm a long time amateur/semi-professional programmer, but I study and plan an academical career in humanities. I need to write up a couple apps to help interacting with documents (what's available on mobile is basically sub-par), so I'll code them up anyways, but I'd be glad if I could share them FOSS but also get some amount of money from the app stores. Even a hundred or two hundred dollars a month would help as a serious amount to complement scholarships or loans as I do masters and a PhD. And I'd be ecstatic if I could avoid scholarships or loans! And flutter would render possible writing such cross platform apps and maintaining them while studying, whereas learning, writing and maintaining two codebases, and spending money on premium hardware up front would be a very big obstacle for me, and also unmaintainable in the long run (I can't write a thesis and maintain compatibly two distinct codebases with such diverging paradigms, let aside multiple apps).

So I guess I'll end up in some time with a setup similar to yours, which I think is optimal: use my favourite setup, test on target platforms. A bit like cross-compiling.

edit: grammor