I don’t think Vala is the problem. The problem is GObject, and if you are tied to GObject, Vala is probably as good as or better than the alternatives. The only

I don’t think Vala is the problem. The problem is GObject, and if you are tied to GObject, Vala is probably as good as or better than the alternatives. The only language that is clearly better than Vala is Go (better tooling and type system, quite a lot simpler, etc), but its bindings weren’t mature (and still aren’t terribly mature) when elementary kicked off. Linux really just needs a better GUI toolkit than GTK and Qt, but these things are tremendously complex to build and as shitty as the web is, it’s quite a lot less shitty than these toolkits. This is why I think the ChromeOS model is the right way to go—every app’s UI is a browser app with a local daemon running on the backend, maybe in a container (but do away with ChromeOS’s custom modified kernel and prohibition against native code execution). In the worst case we’re writing JavaScript/TypeScript/etc on a browser instead of Vala on GObject, but WASM may well mean that we can write in any language.