Cross-Platform GUI Toolkits

Discussions center on the challenges, recommendations, and comparisons of cross-platform GUI frameworks like Qt, GTK, wxWidgets, and Electron, debating their native look, feel, and usability across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

πŸ“‰ Falling 0.4x Open Source
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Keywords

e.g QT JS SWT AppKit UI AWT WPF WxWidgets IMO gui qt native cross platform cross platform gtk widgets toolkit windows

Sample Comments

wbkang β€’ Feb 24, 2013 β€’ View on HN

Look how most cross platform GUI toolkits turned out :/

_iyig β€’ Dec 8, 2020 β€’ View on HN

What are some good alternatives for native, cross-platform GUI applications? Qt used to be my preferred solution.

dima55 β€’ Oct 13, 2025 β€’ View on HN

There are multiple cross-platform gui toolkits. What's wrong with QT?

ptx β€’ Jul 31, 2015 β€’ View on HN

Which cross-platform native desktop GUI toolkit would you recommend instead?

layer8 β€’ Aug 27, 2024 β€’ View on HN

That’s not accurate, there are cross-platform toolkits that achieve at least a close-to-native look&feel. This is very different from giving up on it entirely and going web-style UI.

srgpqt β€’ Mar 8, 2021 β€’ View on HN

Those GUI toolkits only look and behave acceptably on linux, because every other linux app uses those toolkits. They look horrible and incredibly jarring on windows and mac.Can still be fine for opensource/hobby work, anything professional needs better integration with the individual platform native UI apis.Which is one of the reasons Electron became so popular β€” nobody has any expectations from a webapp UI, yet they still look better than Qt/GTK/wx on average...

mod50ack β€’ Dec 29, 2019 β€’ View on HN

Why should I use this library over the more well-known free and open-source cross-platform GUI toolkits? With wx I can get fully native widgets on Win/Mac/GTK/Qt/even embedded systems. With Qt and Qt-quick I can have rapid development (and native enough widgets). Even GTK is at least well-documented. What's your edge supposed to be?

pshirshov β€’ Jul 1, 2024 β€’ View on HN

I had a similar struggle. I needed a truly cross-platform (Windows, Linux/Wayland, Mac, iOS, Android) GUI toolkit with rich controls library and reasonable theming. In fact, the only good option is QT and it's very hard to be productive with C++, it still lacks even basic features, like type deconstruction and ADTs/GADTs with exhaustiveness checks. QT bindings for other languages aren't mature enough.Apart from QT, there is Avalonia, which is full of bugs. Linux support is

cess11 β€’ Apr 18, 2024 β€’ View on HN

What cross-platform GUI framework do you use?

cageface β€’ Nov 2, 2024 β€’ View on HN

The cross platform desktop gui toolkits all have some very big downsides and tend to result in bad looking UIs too.