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.

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

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.

I think this is an outdated view.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.

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.

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.