I don't think it is lack of investment necessarily, so much as not building the right thing.
What we need is a framework that is easy to use, cross platform, open source, and ideally can be used from your programming language of choice.
What we need is a framework that is easy to use, cross platform, open source, and ideally can be used from your programming language of choice.
There's at least Qt, GTK, umm, and, I guess Juce and wxWindows, right? Oh, I see there are more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G...
Can you explain what's deficient about the first two I mentioned?
Arcane build system. I mean, I guess it technically supports CMake these days, but I have never been able to get anyone else's Qt project to build without much gnashing of teeth.
Emulated native widgets try for pixel-perfect, but tend to feel wrong somehow.
> Gtk
Outside of a Linux/Gtk native environment, Gtk applications are awful. Take GIMP on macOS, for example: it's had window focus issues (export dialog getting lost behind the main application window) literally ever since Gtk on macOS dropped the XQuartz dependence. And that's the flagship application for the toolkit.
I looked at this: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html ... and I'll admit they seem to be hiding some nasty stuff under the hood. But it still seems workable. I guess the devil is in the details?
Granted, not the best measure of memory usage. But the GTK 2 version was 30mb.
That's one word that should never been used in an design meeting. None of the GUI I've used has managed to do this right. Even Emacs and Firefox. The platform are totally different (and in the case of Linux/Unix, there's a lot of different HIG competing). So trying to be cross platform is a good illustration of the lesson in https://xkcd.com/927/
The best bet should be a core with the domain with a UI shell. And then you swap the shell according to the platform.
So why would you want Discord to be consistent, when you're mostly using the same desktop (or switch between at most two) for hours.
The thing is when HIG were followed instead of everyone trying to create their "brand", everyone knows where the common actions were. You learned the platform and then can use any app. With the new trend, you would only have one computer, but any new app is a new puzzle to figure out.
Two apps can have different CSS while being easy to understand because the core flows and ideas are the same. While many older native apps feel like junk draw UI with crap thrown everywhere and weird app specific quirks and patterns. Even if it all does use native inputs and windows.
I've rarely seen that turn out very well. Typically it works ok on whatever desktop main developers use, and not so much on the others. That means using multiple frameworks, witht their own idioms and quirks and having to repeat a lot of work. Unless your UI is very simple it is pretty expensive to maintain multiple separate versions of it.
Yes. It’s more work than dumping Electron on users. Quality often is.
I think we'd all be better off if we just declared qt the standard gui library and rid ourselves of the chaos we find ourselves in