[KacharKhan]

Everything dotnet is doing for cross-platform is great and better than alternatives --- except one HUGE issue: There is no official GUI on Linux. Linux's exclusion from MAUI (while 25% of world's developers' primary dev machine is a Linux system according to Stack overflow survery) creates a huge hurdle for those developing on Linux to build any cross platform GUI app with dotnet. If I , as a developer developing a windows/mac/mobile app with official dotnet, am using Linux for development , I cannot create a GUI app. Hey dotnet folks! -- let me put a god damn button on the screen! Sincerely A Linux dev [Don't get at me with Avalonia/Uno etc. I am talking about "official" GUI. A graphical user interface is not a specialized domain, or some niche to be left for others to fill. It is a core element of a user facing app. ]

[rstat1]

There's no "official GUI" (w/e that means) on Linux for anything though, so it makes sense.

Avalonia exists, and from the looks of it is better than all the crap MS has put out over the years (even on Windows, don't get me started on WPF shutters) so not using it because its not "official" is silly.

[KacharKhan]

I never said I don't use or don't want to use Avalonia. The issue is not the quality of Avalonia/Uno. They are wonderful. The issue is not availability of third-party toolkits -- they are there. The core issue is being psychologically assured that the first party is interested in supporting my platform with its programming languages and libraries. If MS can support Mac, ios, and Android -- what exactly prevented it from supporting Linux ?? This conspicuous lack of support in the presence of support for other non-MS platforms is the most bothersome bit. And supporting Linux can't be too expensive either. If Avalonia and Uno being open source with no backing of a huge corporation can do it in their stride -- then Microsoft sure as hell can do it. Again , this time economically --- why exactly is MS supporting Mac, ios, and Android -- not Linux ???. I hope you see my point. The absence of MS support is not bothersome technologically. It is problematic attitude wise. If they are fine with not doing GUI on linux (while doing it on all the other platforms) --- what other features/enhancements they will be willing to hold back from Linux ??

[neonsunset]

One way to look at it is MAUI isn't more official than Avalonia or Uno, it just happens to be primarily driven by dedicated team from Microsoft. However, it does not mean that Avalonia or Uno are inferior due to just this fact.

EF Core in that regard is very similar - you can easily use Dapper instead because it builds on the same primitives from System.Data. Neither MAUI nor other UI frameworks have access to internals of CoreLib or adjacent packages living in dotnet/runtime.

In fact, having multiple libraries solving a particular task is a sign of healthy ecosystem, too much centralization more often than not tends to be harmful.

[KacharKhan]

The issue is not the quality of Avalonia/Uno. They are wonderful. The issue is not availability of third-party toolkits -- they are there. The core issue is being psychologically assured that the first party is interested in supporting my platform with its programming languages and libraries. If MS can support Mac, ios, and Android -- what exactly prevented it from supporting Linux ?? This conspicuous lack of support in the presence of support for other non-MS platforms is the most bothersome bit. And supporting Linux can't be too expensive either. If Avalonia and Uno being open source with no backing of a huge corporation can do it in their stride -- then Microsoft sure as hell can do it. Again , this time economically --- why exactly is MS supporting Mac, ios, and Android -- not Linux ???. I hope you see my point. The absence of MS support is not bothersome technologically. It is problematic attitude wise. If they are fine with not doing GUI on linux (while doing it on all the other platforms) --- what other features/enhancements they will be willing to hold back from Linux ?? reply

[neonsunset]

No, I do not see your point.

The reason why Avalonia and Uno have support for Linux but not MAUI is purely technical one - Avalonia and Uno draw their controls by themselves, like with Skia(sharp). MAUI tries to be a successor to Xamarin and uses native controls drawn by the host instead. Naturally, this has always been a problem on Linux and supporting it is non trivial (what do you choose? Attempt to make it work with Qt, GTK, something else entirely? what about X.Org vs Wayland?). Realistically, supporting mobile platforms first alongside Windows and macOS is much more important and is a far better investment of effort (how many users are there with desktops/laptops on Linux vs macOS/Windows) and there are only so many people working on this. It is perfectly fine for GUI frameworks to take different approaches and pursue different goals, where Linux systems are much better served by Avalonia.

[jug]

If it’s any consolation, MAUI is often terrible in Windows and widely rejected.