In today’s era, the easiest GUI tools are probably game engines, iOS and web browsers.
I've also found Python + Gtk (in the Python 2 and Gtk 2 days) very simple and productive.
There are a ton of problems that you have in webdev that don't neccessarily exist in a local app. Mostly from the fact that you have state everywhere, in the client, on the server, and in the database, and you have to manage it asyncronously. React helps with it a bit, but in principle a desktop app can be "100% frontend" (I mean you still have something like MVC, but you don't have a separate server or a sandbox for window js where you have to communicate).
If my memory serves, this is also how WinForms worked.
Open VS -> New Project -> Winform/WPF -> Run
1. Open VS, wait a minute. 2. New Project 3. Run, wait 10 minutes for dependencies to download. 4. Want to use Sublime Text or VS Code, haha lol.
Why would you need 10 minutes?
>dotnet new winforms
>dotnet run
>app appears
takes a few secs
even on old .NET there was no such a thing like 10 min wait for dependencies to load
If you're used to developing on Linux where you can self-host entire repos, it's incredible how fragile and ephemeral the MS stack must feel.
>If you're used to developing on Linux where you can self-host entire repos, it's incredible how fragile and ephemeral the MS stack must feel.
I guess he's talking about restoring nuget packages, so of course you don't want to have all existing nugets in all versions on your disk.
You're playing on hard mode; try using Visual Studio for everything.
Compared to what? GUI programming has always been hard on all platforms I tried.