That doesn't seem very useful if it's Windows only.

I have switched half back to Windows (after a decade of 100% Linux) recently just because I finally accepted there is no way of making GUI apps as a single developer nearly as easy and pleasant as WinForms with VisualStudio. The result is virtually Windows-only (it can run on Mono but there are some quirks) but it feels worth that sacrifice.

Thats' a shame, and definitely something that the Linux ecosystem needs to address.

I lost any hope when GNOME developers decided to kill Glade and started suggesting that developers should code raw .ui files directly.

https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2020/11/19/glade-no...

Thankfully KDE is still around, but many seem to not appreciate the UI design tooling provided by Qt, because $$$$.

So I rather waste my time on Earth on platforms that value good UI/UX tooling.

Please don't assume bad faith. Glade was not "killed," there are technical reasons why Glade cannot be used for GTK4 (I can give more detail if you want). There is currently a new tool being developed by a Glade maintainer, catch this guadec talk later this month if you want to know more: https://events.gnome.org/event/9/contributions/191/

Nobody is particularly happy about having to edit the XML directly but it's the best option right now until the new tools stabilize.

Thanks for the link, I will watch it when the opportunity comes.

However it is like the sibling comments mention, this hasn't been properly managed as message to the UI/UX community.

So when someone used to Forms, WPF/Blend, Qt Designer, Interface Builder, Delphi, C++ Builder, Swift UI, Flutter, JetPack Composer,... sees blogs and tutorials where .ui files are written by hand and direct use of GtkBuilder is praised, eventually all interest is gone.

Anyway, thanks for the link and for jumping in

That blog is just one developer's opinion, not an official statement. Although I will say I share the opinion, Glade messes up my ui files and I can't recommend using it if you want to use any newer widgets. It has always had those problems, but now with GTK4 it's no longer really worth it to try to work around them.

Also, Glade is not really even used by GNOME designers that much, what they do is make mockups in some other tool (usually Inkscape) and then have the developers implement it. I don't know about other GTK based desktops, though I think some Elementary developers are working on this: https://github.com/akiraux/Akira