Because of sheep effects and state of things: Big&Powerful want all to be web, to be hosted on their datacenters, with the maximum lock-in possible, so they pus

Because of sheep effects and state of things: Big&Powerful want all to be web, to be hosted on their datacenters, with the maximum lock-in possible, so they push desktops toward classic mainframe dumb terminals. The outcome of such push is: - we do not have anything really cross platform, at least in look&feel terms, there are classic, old, and nearly ignored by most (T)Tk but not much more. Windows have it's own GUI, OSX it's own as well, Qt have derailed long time ago toward a bloated monster with an uncertain future, GTk have derailed since GTk3, and both still do not have a real "native look&feel" on all platforms; - developers fear having invested a big amount of time and resources on something and then being forced to reinvest time and effort just because at a certain point in time a dependency they used vanish or substantially changing imposing a almost total rewrite of the UI. WebUI then seems to be the "safest" way to go, at least they can "float" between various platforms as needed and people know them and like their colored style... However chosen a classic local server for a localhost webapp is longer than just grabbing something already made and then... IMVHO the real alternative is say STOP. Witch means for now ok-ish to develop locally served WebUIs or classic Tk/fltk/OpenGL (depending on the kind of GUI) but certainly not in the Electron/node sauce, only the UI and as much detached as possible from the core logic for the narrow target. For the broad target push back toward a real desktop model. Push networked applications that are not web thing, like pushing again emails with a local MUA, not a webmail, a local maildir not on a remote IMAP, locally indexed to have GMail like search (notmuch/mu for instance), file sharing apps like SyncThing/Retroshare, Jami for audio/video communications etc.