What would be a good choice for a programming language or environment to produce a GUI for Linux?
Looking to create UI like some of the existing Linux administration GUIs, for example some of the administration interfaces in YaST, such as the DNS or firewall GUI, etc. Also looking for ways to improve the user friendliness and functionality, best and worst features, etc., with the suggested language/framework.
Some sort of scripting language would be best IMO. I've done GUI programming in BASIC, Java, C and C++ as well as several scripting languages, and I was more productive by far with a scripting language like Python or Tcl.
python is a very good choice for a GUI language because it has several toolkits you can easily choose between. For example, Tkinter (based on tk) is probably already installed on your system. Two other popular choices are wxPython and PyGTK.
All three of those are roughly equivalent in power. Some are a little simpler to use, some look prettier, some are more stable than others, but any of them would be a fine choice for learning. Once you spend some time with one of them you'll have an idea of what they can or can't do, and that will be a good time to read up on the other toolkits to see if they meet your needs any better.
It's remarkably easy to write a GUI with Tcl/Tk. Some say the GUIs are ugly, but that's subjective and somewhat dependent on how much you pay attention to details and whether or not you use themed (ttk) widgets. And frankly, for personal use, looks don't matter all that much.
As an example, to display "hello world" in a window is just three lines:
package require Tk
ttk::label .l -text "Hello, world"
pack .l
The tk toolkit is available for many languages. For a little more on how it can be used with tcl, ruby, python and perl see http://www.tkdocs.com
Python with PyGTK is a very popular choice, using Glade 3 to construct the actual UI.
