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If Microsoft said "Windows-only, good luck with cross platform," I'd accept it and move on. It's their prerogative to spend their resources enhancing their own platform. Instead, I've been told a half-dozen times that there's a new cross-platfotm GUI option, and had I bought into any such endeavor, I would have been rugpulled by sudden deprecation or loss of focus. I think people who did buy into any cross-platfotm GUI frameworks from Microsoft in the last ten years are justifiably feeling like they've been hung out to dry, sometimes multiple times. I don't complain about Elixir, Ruby, Go, or Rust GUI development because I don't try to use these languages for GUI development, because their core leadership and marketing doesn't promote this as one of the primary use cases. C#, and the .NET ecosystem at large, are THE premier Windows GUI development tools. When their marketing pivots to cross-platform GUI development, and they rugpull you a half-dozen times in a decade with half-finished and baffling experiments, it kinda smarts. Most people developing desktop apps are probably okay with switching to web-based options, including potentially running their own standalone rendering executable on top of a web view or chromium instance. But there's a significant minority that are building desktop apps because they want better performance and native visual integration/theming, who don't benefit from browser process isolation and the hairy JS event loop situation, who don't want to serialize every user action in the GUI, who saw what XAML set out to accomplish (GUI style templates that convert to framework code that could equally be hand-written, modified, or extended) and ran marathons with it. Maybe this will get better with WASM improvements in the next few years, but it doesn't change that the approach to GUI design is fundamentally different, and in a lot of ways needlessly harder, when you have to pretend your GUI isn't all running on the same machine. |