> The thing is, are those alternative toolkits better? IME, yes. Most of those toolkits also have thousands of hours invested to work well across platforms, no

> The thing is, are those alternative toolkits better? IME, yes. Most of those toolkits also have thousands of hours invested to work well across platforms, not consistently but natively, or at least a close facsimile of native. > In that situation, you suddenly realise just how much power the web platform give you. You can style any element, any way you want. You have you have a complete, out-of-the-box object model for your whole UI, plus developer tools to help you debug it. You have advanced typography control. You can drop a canvas element in and get an immediate-mode 2D or 3D graphics API. You can layout stuff in flexbox or grid, or just as a plain old document (which most toolkits would delegate to an embedded web browser anyway). So nothing that hasn't been true of desktop apps for decades then? If you want power then nothing beats being able to overide the paint method of a widget, you have complete and total control. If you're interested in seeing how easy desktop apps are I built the canonical todo list in Gtk (https://gitlab.com/flukus/gtk-todo/blob/master/main.c https://gitlab.com/flukus/gtk-todo/blob/master/main.c), the goal is a demo that's a bit more complex than hello world. This is in a language not known for it's terseness, uses one of the nastiest parts of the framework (GtkTreeView) yet it still comes in at less than 100 lines of fairly straight forward and simple code.