[DeathArrow]

I do not think Windows desktop is a niche. It doesn't have the same percent of development it used to, but in absolute numbers it didn't decline. Many people are using the Windows desktop and many old and new software is being developed.

Speaking of which, I feel the need to rant a bit: developing for Windows using QT is much more nicer than with any MS framework. MFC is a nightmare. Windows Forms was deprecated in favor of WPF which no one cares about. From C# you can't use Direct X or Vulkan with ease.

Maybe MAUI will bring a better experience. But they need to do something for C/C++, too. Maybe buy the rights to use QT and integrate it with Visual Studio if they don't want to develop a good framework. Or buy the framework from Embarcadero (the one used by C++ buulder). But don't force people into MFC mess. I presume that even their own developers hate MFC with passion.

Winapi was ok in the 80s. MFC was ok in the 90s but we are in 2020s.

[oneplane]

That's probably why people 'like' certain tools, they are still working inside that context or environment and then there are no other tools that do that thing well.

But that doesn't make the tool a great tool in absolute terms. That is also the problem with this type of comparison, some people come up with arguments that are tangential at best. If you use literally anything else (anything that is not winapi, win32, forms, mfc, wpf or some legacy xaml) then Visual Studio is just a limited experience at best, and a steaming pile of crap in most cases.

This goes for more software obviously, if you want to write C# but try to do that in Xcode, you're going to have a bad time. Same for when you need to write a Kubernetes controller in Go, that's going to suck really badly in VS or XC.

There are a few remaining systems that really benefit from unmanaged languages and strong OS-integrated tooling (the niches that were mentioned), but the mass development practises going on today are basically non-desktop and specifically non-windows-desktop. This means that a tool that was designed to be specifically for windows-desktop (or macOS-desktop for that matter) is unlikely to be optimised for anything else.

Windows Desktop as-is might not be a niche, but building local native desktop applications is. Even if you target Windows Desktop right now for a new application, it's likely that it's going to be some crappy CEF/Electron thing. And yes, that's crappy, but it also means you get to use much more of the knowledge/mindshare/community that is out there which is bigger than all desktops combined.