[lazypenguin]

The road is filled with dissatisfaction. I love desktop apps and developing at that layer but it’s clear that the segment has stagnated over the years.

QtWidgets - decent experience, lots of functionality out of the box. Rapid iteration is lackluster compared to web dev. Great docs. Less obvious “best practices”. Works well from C++ and Python. Distribution is annoying.

QML - Not much experience, didn’t attract me since less advanced widgets available.

Dear imgui- very fun to program using this lib. Can get decent visuals and functionality. Breath of fresh air to remove a layer of complexity. Start to miss some QoL features (animations, undo/redo, etc.). Low level, no docs (examples + reference docs), hard to style. C++ but has bindings in tons of languages.

WPF - decently powerful. Kind of stagnated and windows only. Can still produce solid UI. C#

Alternatives: Godot, Webview2, GTK, fltk