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In Windows creating perfect-looking GUI applications is just a piece of cake with VisualC# and WinForms. Is there something of this ease and power in GNU/Linux world? Gtk# looks too arcane compared to ordinary VisualStudio WinForms designer.

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3 Answers

If you want to drag the widgets around, you could use Glade to create user interface, and save it in GtkBuilder project, then load it with GTK+ bindings in your programming language.

It's pretty easy and you have those tutorials in Glade's website.

By the way, Linux is just the kernel of the system, although I think all modern GNU/Linux systems with graphical support are equipped with X. However it still depends on the specific library. Generally GNOME and KDE use GTK+ and Qt respectively.

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Or you can use multi-platform language. If you have experiences with C# / VisualC# then developing a Java application wouldn't be so hard. C# and Java are really similar languages based on similar principles.

In Java world you have a few GUI frameworks that you can use : Swing, Standard Widget Toolkit (eclipse), JavaFx

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I'm not a huge Java fan, for two reasons: 1) it's swing GUI's I use are still REALLY slow. This might be developers not knowing how to use it, but all I see is the end product. 2) It's much easier to use than C++, but I don't find it as expressive in tough situations. Nonetheless, you can do anything you want in it and I think people forget too soon about this good language and its frameworks in favor of .NET and C++ frameworks. –  San Jacinto Dec 12 '10 at 13:53
Desktop GUI is not a bright side of Java in my opinion. It's quite a young language focused on enterprise development where user interfaces happened to move from desktop to web. Java excels here. Developing enterprise apps having web based UI in something else then Java is a mistake imho. Especially since Google blessed Java and created Google Web Toolkit, enabled app engine for it etc. I abandoned .NET / C# 2 years ago...Java / JVM seemed to make much more sense –  Sloin Dec 21 '10 at 8:08
@lisak, can you name any commercial quality product coded in Java and being used a desktop app in linux as a client application. If you exclude netbeans and eclipse (which are the IDEs to code java programs), I doubt there is a single client famous application which uses java. Why is that? Simple, UI coded in java is bad in performance. Java is sluggish and not a very good choice for coding nice gui apps. –  Sumit Ghosh Jul 14 '11 at 3:52
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You could try Qt Good books on QT and Boost libraries

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And you could make this worth reading and elaborate a little bit. –  San Jacinto Dec 12 '10 at 13:49
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