Hot take: The OS should provide declarative GUI APIs for the type of data an application wants to render instead of giving it graphics access and relying on a billion GUI toolkits with incompatible styles. Way easier for sandboxing too.
I get this limits what apps can do and giving access to raw graphics is important, but it being the default makes it more of a pain for both making apps (especially cross platform) and trying to have a consistant experience as a user. Let alone the accessibility issues when apps decide they should reinvent rendering without thinking about screen readers or high contrast themes or magnification etc.
@mauve god yes, the GUI app landscape on linux is obscene. The sheer annoyance I feel when I want to download one small utility and it has to also install the entire KDE backend to render it to the screen. As much flak as I give Windows for all the things it does wrong, at least the windows API is consistent enough that you can still (often) run win3.1 apps on win10. That provides a stable target for everyone from app to driver developers, vs the current linux situation where it's like "oh you wanna write to the screen? Would you prefer qt, GTK+, writing directly to xlib and reinventing everything yourself, KWayland, or some number of wayland compositors with their own rules and expectations? Btw there IS a wrong answer, but it's up to you to find out what that answer is :)"
inb4 "but more options is good, this is the FOSS way": yes! more options are good! But some kind of barebones gui subsystem that's a little bit newer and more fleshed out than writing to bare xlib would be a GREAT thing for cross-compatibility.
@Dio9sys I think one thing that's tough is that the Linux desktop is actually mostly GNOME or KDE apps fighting for dominance and assuming they're in their preferred env, and then a bunch of apps struggling to be in between them or also trying to work for MacOS/Windows.
Maybe with Wayland becoming more of a thing there's space for a new thing which has a minimal UI to customize which will use native GTK/QT when it detects the right desktop?
@mauve Honestly, having something translate between GTK and QT depending on desktop is a REALLY cool idea
@Dio9sys I've mostly been thinking of it as a way to replace browser rendering pipelines, but tbh native apps in general could take advantage of it too
@mauve There is some very preliminary SwiftUI for Linux now with Adwaita - SwiftUI for Gnome. https://github.com/AparokshaUI/adwaita-swift
the linux ecosystem is probably the worst example of whete this fails. I have like 6 totally different app styles to deal with at any given momebt because of all the toolkits and the fact that flatpack makes it even more annoying to get the app to just use your preferred kde/gnome/etc theme 😭