Then you should give credit where credit is due: to Debian, not Ubuntu. I didn't mean to say Ubuntu, actually. I just meant that Linux is a great place for d

Then you should give credit where credit is due: to Debian, not Ubuntu. I didn't mean to say Ubuntu, actually. I just meant that Linux is a great place for developers because the tools are there (and fantastic). That said, making (say) my Ruby Unix utilities available to my typical audience (my boss... very much on Windows XP) just doesn't work. Instead my workflow goes something like... 1. code a nifty tool to process data, 2. realize that my boss probably doesn't know what a commandline is, and 3. shoot him an e-mail saying "send me your data files, and I'll have my program analyze them". There's a disconnect there that seems hard to break if we don't get a useful/clean UI system going. And not many developers are willing to add UI sugar to their solid open-source libraries. If your app is so dependent on GTK+ as to be unportable to other platforms, you're doing it wrong. I guarantee the typical Mac or Windows user is not going to install my GTK app on their computer, whether it's portable or not. Mac users will loathe the new interface and icons, while Windows users will not like the manual upgrades or quasi-FHS-compliant config file locations. If instead you're suggesting I recode my GTK app in Cocoa and .NET, I can't use my beloved Linux tools for that, so in that case, I'd stick to coding on non-Linux platforms.