Yes, I've dabbled in gtk, wxWidgets and several other systems. All of them are meh.
The big player these days seems to be web-based (Electron and friends), though the JVM stack with a native theme for Win/Mac is certainly usable in an environment where you can rely on Java being around.
I think the best option would be some kind of cross-application client-side HTML etc. renderer that apps could use for their user interaction. We could call it a "browser". That avoids the problem of 10 copies of the whole electron stack for 10 apps.
Years ago, Microsoft had their own version of this called HTA (HTml Application) where you could delegate UI to the built-in browser (IE) and get native-looking controls. Something like that but cross-platfom would be nice, especially as one motivation for this project is that Chrome apps are no longer supported so "Web Server for Chrome" is going away. So the "like electron but most of the overhead is handled by Chrome" option is actively being discontinued.
The big player these days seems to be web-based (Electron and friends), though the JVM stack with a native theme for Win/Mac is certainly usable in an environment where you can rely on Java being around.
I think the best option would be some kind of cross-application client-side HTML etc. renderer that apps could use for their user interaction. We could call it a "browser". That avoids the problem of 10 copies of the whole electron stack for 10 apps.
Years ago, Microsoft had their own version of this called HTA (HTml Application) where you could delegate UI to the built-in browser (IE) and get native-looking controls. Something like that but cross-platfom would be nice, especially as one motivation for this project is that Chrome apps are no longer supported so "Web Server for Chrome" is going away. So the "like electron but most of the overhead is handled by Chrome" option is actively being discontinued.