I feel like the best option at the moment is egui. It's native. Works on the web too. Very easy to get up and running. The things I don't like about it:

I personally think the default style could do with improvement. Mainly it's way too cramped. There's a happy middle ground between no padding and bootstrap. I mean Win32/Qt/etc. got this basically right.
Immediate mode. Yeah it's easier, especially with Rust, but ... it's surely not how it's supposed to work.
The low level drawing API (like if you're making custom widgets) is surprisingly amateur. Not something I'd want to target if I'm spending a lot of time e.g. writing a custom map widget or git graph or something.

I also tried Slint. Like the author I think the license is pretty reasonable. But it is pretty involved to set up a project and since it compiles everything from source it can take a very long time for a clean build of hello world. It's like if you were using Qt but instead of a binary package the sources are just included in your app.

Also I have bad experiences from QML (Javascript 🤮, weird scoping rules, etc.) but hopefully they learnt from their experience.

Looking forward to the 2030 edition anyway!

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Interesting read though it's mostly a comparison on how well windows accessibility tools work on each gui framework.

[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 2 points 2 hours ago

Good.

Too many libraries/frameworks/products don't factor in accessibility from the start.

Along the same vein, too many open source projects don't factor in non-"gnu/linux" environments from the start.

It's a lot harder to tack on after the fact rather than just having it be a part of the base design from the beginning.

Making these front and centre in a survey should be a be a bit of a wakeup for people who don't consider what doesn't run on their machines.

[–] Busyvar@jlai.lu 1 points 14 hours ago

Excellent post, i already use Dioxus and is very interested to know future work on Freya.

[–] monogram -3 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

🤡 uses windows 🤡

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

I thought you were joking, but this dude seriously uses windows for development. No wonder he's running into so many issues. I can't imagine a big chunk of rust developers using that terrible OS.

Edit: I'm surprised at the number of things he tried though and how many worked.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

It's a GUI framework evaluation. I would imagine most users of a desktop application with a GUI would be Windows users. It would generally be a little weird to develop a professional product that does not work on Windows (or at least Mac). It's a lot easier to develop that natively than to cross-compile.

[–] monogram 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

There’s a difference between a framework that builds to an exe and one that can develop in windows

[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 3 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

I'll be honest, I'm not really sure what you're trying to say, but it sounds like cross-compilation to me? The article mentions several different GUI libraries that require dynamic linking and complicated build scripts, so even if you setup rustc to cross-compile (which isn't that hard but is an extra unnecessary step for your run-of-the-mill dev who just wants to get paid), getting the build scripts to cross-compile C++ libraries or testing the cross-compiled binaries with dynamically linked libraries is a pain, assuming your build scripts even let you do that.

All of this is avoidable by building from Windows. Or I guess you can not target Windows. That works too, but most businesses won't see that as an option.

[–] bunitor@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

as someone who used to develop a cross-platform (linux and windows) desktop application: the bulk of development took place on linux. i only ever booted to windows to build the app and make windows-exclusive adjustments, but never to actually develop any features

[–] monogram 0 points 9 hours ago

My past experience in desktop apps have been Flutter and Wails and have always cross compiled to an exe.

The less I need to touch windows the better.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev -2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Windows is fine. Get off your high horse.

[–] monogram -1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

If you’re going to defend a mega corp, please do so on MS Teams 🤡

[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 1 points 2 hours ago

Let's not conflate defending OSs (and their derivatives) with the organisations that produce them.

Ubuntu has always been a great entry for Linux users yet canonical has always had at least one thing going on to infuriate the community (flip-flopping around half-baked DEs and the transitions between them, snaps, etc...)

Arch has always been the most customisable, but the leads have shied away from including a little setup wizard/script to automate what 90% of all users end up installing anyway.

Fedora has always been a great middleground, but on the other hand: Red Hat

Windows and Microsoft are no different. Base install Windows 11 is a 5/10 experience, but with your set-and-forget open source fix of choice (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc...) becomes a solid 9/10 with next to no effort.