FlatLaf VS Windows UI Library

JVM UI isn't so bad. I've written some pretty modern looking UI with it. The sophisticated controls are all there.

Modern JavaFX theme: https://github.com/mkpaz/atlantafx

Modern Swing theme: https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

And these days Compose Multiplatform: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/

I tend to use Kotlin rather than Java but of course Java is perfectly fine too. You can also use Clojure.

If you use any of those frameworks you can distribute to Win/Mac/Linux in one command with Conveyor. It's free for open source apps and can do self-signing for Windows if you don't want to pay for the certificates or the Store (but the Store is super cheap these days, $19 one off payment for an individual). Also supports Electron and Flutter if you want to use those.

From those frameworks you can then access whatever parts of the Windows API you want. Flutter even has WinRT bindings these days! So it's not quite so bad.

FlatLaf, a modern open-source cross-platform Look and Feel for Java Swing desktop applications, brings exciting new features in versions 3.0 and 3.1 🎉 😀

Here’s the link to the “extras” subproject, and there you’ll find a section on the “UI Inspector” tool.

Swing with FlatLaf - https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

Take a look at FlatLAF:

https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

They have done a great job bringing a modern appearance to the Swing components.

Creating your own Look and Feel is a huge task (just look at the size of e.g. the FlatLaf code.

I too find it a bit frustrating at HiDPI. Best I've come up with is to use https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

And as far as Swing's aesthetics, I only agree with the sentiment that 'it's ugly' if a custom LAF isn't used, like one from flatlaf.

I wish that was true, but even the new stuff, like their new frameworks, performs poorly while their older frameworks perform really well. That's brand new code, with no legacy codebase to care for.

The reason why I don't recommend Winui is the million bugs it has. See the github issues page. All Microsoft ui stuff sucks currently. But if you use WPF why not FluentWPF

Development for WinAppSdk and WinUI 3 is also very slow and Microsoft seems to not want to push it and invest more developers into it for some reason. They try to improve the framework, is just it's a small team. For example it was a headacke to apply the Mica backgrop and required unmanaged code, they made it simpler and reduced it to a line of code but it took months. I have 2 out of 7 issues fixed on WinAppSdk repository and 0 out of 8 issues fixed in the WinUI 3 repository (some of the older than a year). This are just my issues, there are many other opened by other developers. So yeah, it wasn't fun at all. PoweshellSDK had an issue with the Import-Module command and it wasn't fixed for more than a year and probably won't be ever fixed, but I'm glad I found a workaround, even more clean and more safe, otherwise I couldn't have added the posibility to uninstall and change Store apps.

Compared to UWP or WPF, WinUI 3 is somewhere between 100-200% slower and consumes 7-20 times as much RAM as the old frameworks (for certain operations).