Rust/WinRT Public Preview

As a former MFC/Winforms/WPF/Qt now turned Angular developer, this is really sparking my interest. I would love to back to writing great desktop applications. Problem is, most of my projects nowadays require a multiplatform GUI. Desktop is not enough, we also need web and mobile.

It is already available, it is called GObject, KParts, D-Bus.

If the community has embraced a proper desktop eco-system around them, like the component vendors on other platforms, they aren't going to start now.

I surely don't see job offers for Linux/BSD GUI toolkits as I see for Apple, Microsoft and Google ones.

WSL is only for those that use Windows to target GNU/Linux, the demography that used to buy macOS to do the same.

For traditional Windows developers it doesn't really matter. PowerShell + Windows Terminal is where the action is.

IMO the main issue with Linux desktop is that it keeps getting broken. Outside of X11, which itself doesn't provide much in terms of features so you need to implement a ton of things, there is no stable API. Both Gtk and Qt intentionally break backwards compatibility every few years and unintentionally in-between (mainly Gtk though), which means that projects that rely on those waste time on keeping up with the changes instead of adding features and fixing bugs.

And it isn't just Gtk and Qt, outside of a very very small set of libraries (e.g. libcurl and Cairo), most other libraries do the same thing and most developers do not even seem to see that as a problem - except if you sit down and consider how much time is wasted in total by the users of those libraries (ie. the people who would actually make the desktops and the desktop applications) it should be obvious how much of an issue is (and even then, because many programmers prefer theoretically "clean" code and believe that the only way to do that is to rid existing working code and replace it with new -and unknownly broken- code, they have a very strong bias against even trying to accept this).

A very big reason Windows is dominant is because when something lands on the OS itself, chances are you'll be able to use it decades later. macOS much less so, but they have an army of engineers to keep up and even then as time moves on you see many people disliking how macOS breaks things (see the latest 32bit disaster).

Outside of a few influential outliers, like Linus himself or Keith Packard (who works on Xorg and Cairo) there aren't many that care about not breaking things. And IMO it is a bit disconcerting that it seems to be mainly the "old guard" of Linux developers that seem to care about this. I hope this is only because they've been around enough to realize that unnecessarily breaking things isn't a good idea, otherwise we can only expect things to become more broken over time (and Linus had this stance for decades, so it might not have anything to do with wising over the years).

Honestly, the move fast and break things culture that the web has fostered doesn't work for anything that has to do with other stuff people rely on.

But this is most likely also why you do not see that issue as much in the non-GUI world: most of the non-GUI stuff on Linux are either very long running projects (e.g. Bash, Perl, etc) that just do not break or very young projects that are mainly used for web work that will be thrown away in a couple of years or so, so any breakage wont be felt as much (and people working on those are used to broken things anyway). Any exception to that has ramifications that are felt for a long time - see Python2 vs Python3 as an example (...of what not to do - and note how many will even consider such breakage as natural and unavoidable, as if it was some sort of force of nature).

Unless this mentality and culture of breakage changes so that we can build stuff on solid foundations, things wont change.

Yeah, that may be true, but on the other hand, had they made it useable, portabilith with other Unix would have been a simpler option.

Simpler than Win32 + Unix portability in any case. Or in some cases, software would have been ported to Win32 at all.