> To this day Mac OS X is the only UNIX with SDK tools that can rival the likes of VB and Delphi in native development offered already in Windows 3.x.

If the Gnome foundation would focus on Gtk+Vala+Glade it could have been a fantastic development platform. I don't know much about the state of Vala today though, too bad because it's blazing fast and can use any Gobject library. Unfortunately the docs are just bad compared to Apple or MSDN, the need to find a better way to organise the information on their site or move to a new CMS...

I honestly still don't understand why MS didn't push their version of 'interface builder' they had with VB6 after they went .net. In my view .net was such a step backward - a huge library to load even though the OS comes from the same vendor, way more boilerplate than VB. Why not give VB6 decent networking and database capabilities instead?

The problem with free UNIX clones is that everyone does its own thing, as such you don't have a nice SDK that the community at large can enjoy and effort get scattered all over the place.

Picking Gnome as example, not only do you have what you have mentions, but you also have Anjuta and Builder.

Although Ubuntu now kind of has an SDK based on top of Qt/C++.

However none of them close to the developer experience that Delphi and C++ Builder used to have. Or nowadays the .NET and UWP stack have.

>To this day Mac OS X is the only UNIX with SDK tools that can rival the likes of VB and Delphi in native development offered already in Windows 3.x.

cough Lazarus cough.

Does Lazarus enjoy some kind of component eco-system as Delphi used to have?

Most definitely - admittedly not to the extent of the Delphi halcyon days, but nevertheless still extant.