There is a lack of good documentation but that is not the whole story. Both the Gnome and KDE desktops have a huge amount of software running on them despite th

There is a lack of good documentation but that is not the whole story. Both the Gnome and KDE desktops have a huge amount of software running on them despite the barriers. Writing for a modern native GUI strongly favours an OO language like a c#/Dart/Swift/Vala/Java. And it isn't just the language but the ABI. A java or gobject or c++ gui library doesn't always map well onto another language. There is a lot of code out there where adding a GUI isn't trivial or fun. Tk used to fill this gap a bit but it fell out of fashion. It is trivial to output formatted text to a terminal from any language with some ANSI escape codes. It also easy to do templating and html to provide a web interface.