I've used fyne a couple times, and it couldn't handle something very basic: it couldn't render glyphs outside the built-in font and optionally, exactly one custom font (FYNE_FONT). Which means you're screwed or at least severely crippled if you want to support any kind of user-created content for an international user base. This problem has been brought up a million times on the issue tracker, and I don't think it has meaningfully advanced: https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne/issues/2572#issuecomment-154...

wxPython is somewhat simple for at least small apps. You need to know and install Python. One plus is that it has many example apps showing use of various widget and features of the toolkit.

Hate to say it. Electron.

Looking at the electron documentation, it doesn’t seem nearly as beginner friendly.

It mentions this…

>this tutorial assumes you are generally familiar with Node and front-end web development basics. If you need to do some background reading before continuing

Then goes on to say you shouldn’t just know web dev and Node, but also the CLI and git, as well as installing node.js and npm.

Those are a lot of barriers to entry for a beginner who is looking for a quick win to get them to keep going.

Tauri: https://tauri.app/

Flutter? Dart seems interesting, although the fact that it wanted to track my usage, while very on-brand for Google, was a big turn-off.

If you're specifically looking for something like Shoes, here are two similar projects in Ruby.

Scarpe, a WIP revival of Shoes: https://github.com/scarpe-team/scarpe

Glimmer: https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer

Since you didn't explicitly mention Ruby, I would dare to suggest Lazarus, which is Free and open source, multi platform and produces compiled native code everywhere.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

That is the quickest and most straightforward way of making GUI applications I'm aware of, with the only drawback that it uses Object Pascal as supported language, but being it Open Source I can hope one day we'll see some support for other languages too.