[vunderba]

Elixir, Ruby, Go?? Maybe because the C/C++ and JavaScript/Typescript user bases are about 10000 times larger and we have relatively robust cross platform UI solutions for both in the forms of QT and Electron. C# is a weird outlier for having a very large user base but very few decent cross-platform GUI support.

[miki123211]

Python's user base is pretty large, it's the most popular programming language by some metrics, and yet the situation there still sucks.

You can use tkinter, which doesn't work well with native platform features and forces you to rewrite your app from scratch in something else when you finally need to do accessibility. QT is free for noncommercial use only. WX kinda sorta works, but WX apps on Mac feel like they were on Windows, and the naming conventions are extremely unpythonic. Toga looks like a nice option, but it's still pretty young, I'm not sure how far I'd trust it.

[michaelsbradley]

> QT is free for noncommercial use only.

How so? It’s LGPL.

[actionfromafar]

LGPL is very problematic when distributing for things like iOS, what with the user re-linking requirements. On Windows, Mac and Linux it can be quite easy to solve.

[aryonoco]

There are, and have never been any issues distributing LGPL applications on iOS. You might be confusing it with AGPL?

[actionfromafar]

No

[Kwpolska]

C#'s user base was historically tied to Windows, and there are many C# GUI frameworks for Windows.

[orphea]

I, being a .NET developer since v1.1, won't touch most of them.

WPF, a framework from 2006, and Avalonia, a 3rd party framework, are the only two worth considering.

[memsom]

Six months ago I would have argued with you, but currently doing a MAUI transition from a Xamarin Forms app, and you are very right.

I wish Avalonia UI's mobile solution had had Navigation sorted a year ago when I proposed that we needed to do something with the XF EOL announcement. I had a POC with it working well enough, but sadly it was "too much work" to migrate the rest of the app. Now with MAUI we have realised that we are probably doing just as much work anyway, and it is seriously half baked as an ecosystem.

[irq-1]

Thank you for this comment. Trying to sort through the mess of GUI frameworks for .NET and other languages is difficult.

[TheCleric]

Exactly this. Anecdata, but the vast majority of the C# developers I know not only don't use anything but Windows, they are actively HOSTILE to non-Windows systems. Many of them view non-Windows systems as either toys ("MacOS is for graphic designers") or too spartan to be worth their time ("Linux is for sys admins").

As well with the rise of new tech/stacks that has displaced C# in a few places, the people who stay in C# tend to bristle at other OSes as that's what the people who are using the other techs use (and us vs. them type attitude).

So in the grand scheme of things, it's unsurprising that this happens.

[aryonoco]

I think this is an outdated view. I run a dev shop which develops applications in . Net + Angular. We have always given devs freedom to buy whatever laptop they want and put whatever OS they want on it, as long as they can work with everyone else. 5 or 6 years ago, we had 1 person using Ubuntu, another person using Mac, and everyone else used windows. Right now, roughly 40% are on windows, 30% develop on Mac and 30% develop on Linux (Linux has recent grown at the expense of Mac actually).

Our production environment where all applications are run is based on Debian (though we test on Windows Server as well) in a kubernetes cluster, running in Azure.

C# is decent language for writing line of business application logic, and these days .Net is a completely cross platform, open source framework.

I remember using a bunch of C#/Mono applications (F Spot, Banshee, etc, they were all the rage once) on my Linux desktop over 20 years ago.

[neonsunset]

I've worked with a team that used Rider + macOS combo in the past and have friends who had a similar experience. There are those who choose to use Neovim + csharp-ls instead, or any other combination besides the historical Windows + Visual Studio.

Keep in mind that .NET has "inherited" a huge ecosystem and developer community that existed and still exists within the confines of .NET Framework. It roughly splits into two groups - the one that is moving or has moved on to .NET and left the legacy in the past and the one that harms the ecosystem by refusing to do so. Luckily, the former is in the minority compared to the latter especially as the time goes by.

It is also helped by new generations of developers who came into working with the tech after .NET Core and .NET became the mainstay or developers who moved on to .NET from other languages and ecosystems.

[alternatex]

You're correct about that sentiment from .NET developers historically but things have changed. At Skype, a company that's been under MS for a decade, more than half the devs use Macs.

[brungarc]

C# is still my favorite language and I haven't used Windows since 2017. JetBrains Rider is my IDE of choice on a Mac. It was pretty rough during the early releases of it, but for years now it's working well enough. Also .NET Core 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 was a ride. project.json anyone?

Fastforward to .NET 5, 6, 7, 8.. it's just doing great x-plat life and innovation

[TheCleric]

I'm sure that is true. I just know the C# developers I work with now and recently fall into the camp I mention.

[kcartlidge]

Maybe we have different circles.

I'm one amongst many using Net on other systems (Mac & Linux) as well as Windows. Larger enterprises which use VS on Windows often deploy the results onto Linux servers too (especially with microservices), which is hardly being hostile.

Though to address the issue of GUIs in Net-land, I've given up as nothing since WinForms (and possibly WPF) has lasted. They are 'supported' in many cases, but it always feels half-hearted or half-dead.

[DeathArrow]

> C# is a weird outlier for having a very large user base but very few decent cross-platform GUI support.

MAUI is pretty decent.

[zerkten]

That's not what people say when the daily poster in r/dotnet asks what framework they should use for a GUI app.

[datavirtue]

MAUI is not ready. I started a Greenfield project this year. Having tried a serious project in Xamarin Forms, I reached for WPF. The app is almost ready and the speed at which I was able to get stuff working (and beautifully so) has resulted in our company being able to win new business. WPF has no limits. It just works. Tons of community support.

My hope is that MAUI gets to WPF level soon. Refactoring away from WPF to MAUI should be almost trivial, if desired.

[memsom]

Okay - this is not going to happen. WPF lets you do really complicated binding tricks that XF was just not capable of. Maui is just an evolution of XF, but so far I think iit is a step back from what we had before. We have some stuff working, but it was painful to make it work and some of the WPF tricks we used in XF with binding are broken in Maui so far. I'm sure we will fix most of them, but it feels like we will just refactor a lot of it away to simple properties rather than complicated multitrigger bindings. I echo "Maui is not ready".