place seems to be a nice and easy way for positioning, but it's not often used. e.g. think of what happens if you want to make some little changes to the GUI. You have to change all coordinates of (mostly) _everything_ you positioned

BTW, you can use a combination of layout managers. I often do the following: separate the main window into frames and position them with pack. Then, fill these frames with widgets using pack or grid, depending on the complexity of the layout.