UIKit for macOS is an attempt to strike against Electron: encourage devs to adapt the iOS-only version of their native apps to Mac instead of making a cross-platform one that also runs on Linux and Windows.
Flatpak should help with the runtime situation though, by making the runtime you build against something that gets reused in the distribution. :)
I'd be curious to see if any of the major desktop environments can get wider adoption of their toolkits for native versions of cross-platform apps though. Most of the commercial apps I see are either Electron (works great, but reputation for bloat), Qt (works great, but good integration with a DE depends on effort), or ancient versions of GTK+ (eek!)
@brion I might prefer (or maybe not, I'm not completely sure, but the very fact that I'm not sure is telling already) no Linux app but a native Windows app I can run under Wine to no native apps at all & an Electron app.
@bugaevc I find that a strong position to take, but it's yours and I respect that. :)
Perhaps, but that preference usually results in having no Linux app at all.
Maintaining cross-platform distributions of binaries that work well with up to date distros and old weird random ones is *super hard* and most folks won't put up with it if they don't have to. I'd be strongly tempted to leave the binary dist issues to Electron upstream as well.