[prince781]

> I'd love to use Elementary OS, but their use of Vala is just such a turn off. That language is dead except for a tiny gnome niche.

I'll go out on a limb and say that while this might have been closer to the truth 3 years ago, there has been an uptick in activity on the language recently, especially with improvements in tooling. If you look here (https://github.com/topics/vala), while you'll see it used in smaller projects, you'll also see there's a fair amount of high-quality software written in Vala. Clearly the language is capable for serious use.

As far as the language itself is concerned, I think it has a number of good points that aren't very common (outside of Swift or Rust): that is high-level abstractions with little to no runtime cost, easy to learn, C compatible and binds easily to practically every language under the sun thanks to gobject-introspection.