> Why wouldn't I be able to run GTK apps on their ICE powered desktop?

Of course you would be able to, just don't expect the theming to match, the menus to have similar structures, dialogs having buttons in predictable places, etc.

> isn't the purpose of WASM to make possible in web environments that which is possible on desktop environments?

I don't think so. I think this is the purpose of all the new Web APIs more than WASM. The sandboxing and the inability to call out to the system is crippling for GUIs in WebAssembly. It works well if you control the drawing and are able to output raw data to a <canvas>, but it's a hassle. WASM works the best for things like opencv or dlib, but I think the GUI for the apps compiled to WASM will need to be written in JS for quite some time, if not forever.

> Of course you would be able to, just don't expect the theming to match, the menus to have similar structures, dialogs having buttons in predictable places, etc.

I think nearly all Linux users - and most Mac/Windows users who don't remember how things were back in the XP or classic Mac era - don't realize these are even goals or something that has ever existed.

I remember exactly how things were with Windows going back to Windows 3.0. This never existed on Windows.

It does feel like an odd complaint. I have had mismatched desktop elements for a very long time now. What's another oddball entry on the list?

Rest assured that anyone with experience with a GTK3/4 application is going to have an easy time with the COSMIC designs. A lot of aspects will be similar. Maybe even a bit more standardized in some ways.

Maybe they mean aesthetically? KDE basically makes a clone of their Breeze theme for GTK to try to make all apps have a consistent look on KDE. I believe the reverse is true with an Adwaita theme for KDE/Qt apps, but don't quote me on that.

You can find versions for both "toolkits" even in custom themes. For the end user it's mostly a non issue. Even with different backends it looks more consistent than Windows.

That's true, but the Iced theme that they're showing in the images looks like it would be very difficult to recreate in GTK and Qt. That's not mentioning the increased amount of time and effort in maintaining those themes. Perhaps this is an area that the community will contribute to though.

Color palette adjustments alone would bring it pretty close. We can automatically generate them on the fly.

The same is true with an Adwaita theme for KDE/Qt Apps. I used to do this on both, Plasma and GNOME.

These days I style my Qt/KDE apps all Breeze on GNOME and vice versa when I am on KDE, because unfortunately icon sets just don’t match up and I've run into 'invisible buttons' issues way to often.

As long as both are in dark/light mode I find this way less annoying than having to hope for a good enough tooltip on mouse over (or just tap and see on mobile).