Developer Rewrites Flutter Linux App as C++ Daemon After Three Silent System Bugs
A developer building a Linux screen-capture tool in Flutter encountered three distinct silent failures involving the tray icon, global hotkey registration, and window compositor rendering that produced no errors or logs. The tray menu stopped responding after the first click due to an interaction between GNOME 46's ubuntu-appindicators extension and the older appindicator activation pattern used by Flutter plugins. A separate Flutter hotkey plugin silently reported success even when the underlying keybinder_bind call failed, leaving hotkeys unregistered with no exception to catch. A third issue caused hidden Flutter windows to reappear with frozen, stale frame content under certain show/hide timing with the Mutter compositor. To resolve all three, the developer split the app into a long-running C++ daemon handling tray, hotkeys, and IPC natively, and an on-demand Flutter UI launched only when a window is needed, communicating over a Unix domain socket.
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