DEV Community

gholden
gholden

Posted on

4 1

Desktop Applications Development - what's out there!

I've recently been exploring (again) the creation of desktop applications. I'm not overly bothered about them being available for multiple operating systems, for the projects I want to work on I'd be happy to focus purely on Linux and Gnome.

I started playing around with Vala and GTK - and I liked it. Vala is a nice language to program in. I've found plenty of resources online to help when I hit issues. Also, as I've recently adopted elementary os - it works nicely with that.

I also wanted to try some other options. A while ago I built a small tool using Lazarus IDE. This was fine, it worked well and it had a nice visual environment for development. My only issue was it felt clunky to go back to programming in Pascal - something I hadn't done for about 26 years. I wasn't sure if I wanted to invest too much time relearning Pascal to become productive.

I recently looked into node-gtk. This looks neat. There is a big BUT. when I use nexe to produce a self contained executable - we have a file that's a massive 56mb (and that's just for a hello world type app!) - that's not acceptable for me.

Neither is Electron for similar reasons.

I think I'll carry on with Vala and GTK for the time being. If people have any other alternatives, I'd love to hear.

Image of Timescale

🚀 pgai Vectorizer: SQLAlchemy and LiteLLM Make Vector Search Simple

We built pgai Vectorizer to simplify embedding management for AI applications—without needing a separate database or complex infrastructure. Since launch, developers have created over 3,000 vectorizers on Timescale Cloud, with many more self-hosted.

Read more →

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
t00m profile image
Tomás Vírseda •

Hi there!

I couldn't live without Python and GTK.

At the beginning, I used to build the interface with Glade but after a painful experience trying to get an application working in Windows and Linux, I learnt the hard way, coding the interface line by line, widget by widget.

My editor of choice is Geany.

Long long time ago, I started with C and GTK, but I gave up. I have only one life :)

Have fun!

Collapse
 
mabhishek7081 profile image
abhishek maurya •

You can package Node-gtk app as flatpak. Use pkg to package node app as single excutable. And then use flatpak bundler.