Is there any way besides Shoes to develop and distribute cross-platform GUI desktop applications written in Ruby?
I come to believe that general bugginess of _why's applications is exceptionally crippling in case of Shoes, and anything more complex than a two-button form is a pain to maintain.
RubyGTK, wxRuby, etc seem to be promising, but they do not solve the issue of distributing an app in a way that doesn't require Ruby pre-installed on users' computers — and libraries like ruby2exe seem to be horribly out-of-date and incomplete.
Generally — what is the current fad?
BTW: if there is a really easy solution to this in Python, I may consider redoing the stuff I'm up to in Python.
The state of affairs is pretty bad.  The most reliable method at present is probably to use JRuby.  I know that's probably not the answer you want to hear, but, as you say, ruby2exe is unreliable, and Shoes is a long way off (and isn't even intended to be a full-scale application).  Personally, I dislike forcing users to install GTK or Qt or wxWidgets, but the JVM is fairly ubiquitous.
Distributing Ruby/Python desktop apps