Cool. I'm running Linux on a Dell Vostro I purchased during their quarterly business sale as my daily driver -- I can't believe the machine I got for the price, and strongly encourage people to look at these sales..
How big of an issue is it to target iOS as a platform on a PC these days with the rise of Flutter, etc? I'm looking to get into app development, but don't have a Mac, nor would I like to buy one if I can avoid it.
"How big of an issue is it to target iOS as a platform on a PC these days with the rise of Flutter, etc?"
Flutter is nice. Yes, a single codebase typically works both on Android & iOS (sometimes, a little tweaking on each platform is needed).
The problem is: you can't avoid iOS SDK for iOS development. This is not Flutter-specific, BTW, but everything: React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, Pascal etc etc. So you need to have either a Mac machine, or access to Mac cloud server.
I vote the former, because it makes debugging easier.
You need a Mac to build for macOS / iOS, yes, but it doesn't have to be your Mac. There are services like Codemagic that have free CI/CD macOS build services [0].
Depends on the app I guess, but you can get far without needing a Mac with flutter etc. Sadly I think there still is some restrictions for some Apple hardware for the developer part of the app store. I'm not super familiar with that part, but we had some issues with some Apple legal terms which could only be accepted on a authenticated device, which means you need Apple hardware.
Whatever solution you pick for iOS dev: Flutter, React Native, Xamarin etc etc, in the end we will always meet the same thing: iOS SDK. And iOS SDK only runs on Mac, unlike Android.
Unless Apple decide to port their SDK to Windows/Linux (which I believe will not happen), you can't practically avoid Mac.
A Mac is required to build to an actual device or Simulator. You'll definitely want that to test out any device specific differences.
You can count on the framework to abstract away big significant parts of your app (business logic, UI) but some of the nuances you will probably have to tweak yourself. Launcher icons, handling notches, device specific features, and other weird oddities.
At least in the React Native community, you can often get away with building to the device only once every native dependency change. This becomes a better experience with Expo though
If you want to get into mobile development there isn't really much choice but to own a mac. You could pick up a used or refurbished mac mini at a reasonable price.
How big of an issue is it to target iOS as a platform on a PC these days with the rise of Flutter, etc? I'm looking to get into app development, but don't have a Mac, nor would I like to buy one if I can avoid it.