Future standard GUI library

[Beinan Li]

Not sure if this is the right place to talk about this. Even less sure if I
can
move this discussion to tkinter list, so here I am...

I know this may sound a silly question because no one can see the future.
But ...
Do you think tkinter is going to be the standard python built-in gui
solution as long as python exists?

I couldn't help but wonder if wx or PySide receives better py2 and py3
support, or anything else that prevent
them from getting into the standard python distributions, whether or not
this scene could start to shift ...

I believe this "which one of tkinter, wx, qt, is the best gui toolkit for
python" flame war has been going on
for ages. I love the fact that python ships a built-in gui solution which
makes shipping a pure-python desktop
application a viable choice. But tkinter does not appear to be the most
time-saving way to write a gui app.
The layout designer support, for one, is next to zero. I tried many
3rd-party designers
and loved PAGE (http://page.sourceforge.net) for a few minutes, then came
the author's comment:

"For release 4.0, I spent about two months working with the “Theme” part of
Ttk and have had only partial success. I now believe that the “Theme” part
of Ttk is really a very poor piece of software at all levels - concept,
implementation, and especially documentation. My guess is if it had been
well documented it would have been recognized by even the author as junk. I
find it hard to believe that the people who control Tcl/Tk allowed it in
the code base. I continue to support ttk because of the paned window,
notebook and treeview widgets."

And ttk seems to be a major attraction that keeps people coming back to tk
for the looks. This worries me very much
about whether I should start a gui app using python. Because if ttk is not
a "mature" technology, I'd avoid premature adoption.
If ttk is out of the question, tkinter will be too. I'd then be forced to
use a 3rd-party solution like wx or qt, which I really don't want to see.

Anyways, this is just some concerns that I hope someone may give his/her
opinions about.

Thanks!
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