The good things about Python which make it a very ubiquitous language worthy of learning (platform agnostic, elegant syntax, portable standard library and ecosystem packages, etc.) unfortunately...
The good things about Python which make it a very ubiquitous language worthy of learning (platform agnostic, elegant syntax, portable standard library and ecosystem packages, etc.) unfortunately also has this weird side-effect of causing tremendous pain when it comes to choosing which library or toolkit to use for say, a side project for a Desktop GUI app.
It seems as if researching about these Python GUI toolkits, finding out their pros and cons and nuances has itself become a dedicated project of its own and I have almost forgotten about the actual app and user story for which I was looking them up in the first place!
Though I'm almost certain at this point that Kivy isn't something I'm going to use. I don't want my app to run on android, at least not presently. And even if a need arises in future, a more efficient path there is to use something like Java with an Android IDE.
Plus a 100% pure python toolkit means some sacrifice in performance. With PyQt and PyGtk, you can get the raw performance of underlying C++ and C runtimes respectively which they wrap.
Now tkinter and PyQt is where I'm really confused and not able to decide which one to use. The pros of tkinter are highly appealing to me, to be honest. The fact that it comes built-in with python and right out of the box - which incidentally also frees you of all the licensing hassles unlike PyQt/PySide stack is also a great plus. Though this particular project is going to be open source anyway, so it shouldn't matter much. But in the long run and generally speaking, it's clear that one has the licensing advantage here.
Secondly, tkinter also has the advantage of being smaller in size. Since it comes built-in, the final portable EXE size would perhaps be as small as that of just the portable python interpreter using PyInstaller or something?
But on the other hand, smaller size doesn't really matter in the age of gigabyte high-speed Internet, does it? And I've seen some PyQt projects too that seem to create smaller bundles with efficient packaging, wonder how they are able to do that!
One criticism of tkinter I came across is that while getting started with a Hello World GUI is easy, making something non-trivial soon leads you down a rabbit hole which is filled with messy and hacky workarounds. For example, there isn't a native or built-in support for creating a system tray icon for your app which is considered pretty much a standard feature for desktop GUI apps these days. Even for adding this trivial feature to your app, you must install a third party package called pystray which isn't a very thrilling experience at all. Imagine what all you'll be going through if you want to implement say a complex data grid with dropdown widgets or a complex tree view widget.
But PyQt, on the other hand, also has its own set of criticisms. For starters, since the core toolkit is written in C++, the Pythonista must hack their way through all the object orientedness mandated by the core libraries in ways that don't seem very pythonic. For example, you can't pass a simple tuple with (x,y) co-ordinates for a widget location or size, you must find the corresponding widget class such as QtSize or whatever to be able to do that.
This is what I got from my reading and youtubing so far. I don't know how hard this usually is in practice. Coming from a C# and Java background, I don't think it should be for me. But I'd like to know from more experienced Python programmers who have traversed both these paths (tkinter and PyQt) - which path is better as a learning investment in the long run?