What does HackerNews think of vgtk?
A declarative desktop UI framework for Rust built on GTK and Gtk-rs
Language:
Rust
A pretty fun Rust GUI experienc is vgtk[0], which is doing a bunch of macro magic to give a "we're coding in React" vibe to GTK+. I don't really have a specific thing I want to code in a native GUI at the moment but if I did I think this would be the most tempting for me.
To give another opinion, I also thought GNOME 3 was not good, until around a few years ago. It's a lot better since then, they really ironed out a lot of the issues so you see the contributions start to raise up again recently. The extension API is also getting a lot more stable, but it's not totally there yet.
One area where I think KDE does a lot better is with QML. At the moment GTK doesn't have anything as nice as that to build apps, and that hurts contributions. There's some neat new declarative UI things like vgtk [0] that are looking promising though.
I haven't tried it out seriously yet, but vgtk (https://github.com/bodil/vgtk) seems to be an interesting approach to GUIs in Rust.