[nu11ptr]

I think after years of agreeing with you I might actually disagree in 2022. I also prefer native widgets, but the problem is native programs have changed. It used to be they all looked very sterile and had 80-90% of the same widgets as every other OS, but if you look at apps today they are all much more media centric. Whether electron or native it is very common to have things like a "side bar" and other very specific widgets. These don't translate well to cross platform native widgets. I think Flutter might have the right approach with its fluent UI and macos libraries. I suspect the resulting app would look much more native in this day and age.

[smasher164]

I agree that GUIs have gotten more complicated nowadays, but I don't think the existence of platform-specific APIs is mutually exclusive with cross-platform abstractions. If anything, you should be able to specialize behavior for a certain platform.

[nu11ptr]

I agree, but no one has done it successfully either. In wxWidgets any non-native widgets look very out of place. Some of the ones on Qt do as well. Neither of them that I've seen try to map to the more exotic widgets, but invent some of their own.