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Comment by dtquad | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's own FOSS multiplatform implementation of the .NET runtime is now much more performant and feature complete than Mono.

However Mono is easier to embed into other applications and easier to port to new platforms. That is for example why it's used for the .NET/Blazor WebAssembly stuff. Microsoft still maintains their own fork of Mono for this specific use case.

Mono also implements some of the legacy Windows Desktop GUI frameworks like WinForms and WPF that Microsoft never bothered to port to their new .NET runtime. This is probably why the Wine developers might be interested in Mono.

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Mono also supports winforms. I don't think they're supported in dotnet (but there's libraries for Gtk, although you could also use Vala with a bit extra effort).

Yeah I think it also supports WPF. Can't remember where I read that.

winforms are supported in .NET, obv only for Windows

A shoutout goes to a project that aims to simplify CoreCLR embedding UX to prevent the issues stemming from embedding legacy Mono: https://github.com/StudioCherno/Coral

Winforms and WPF are both very maintained and supported for .NET 8 on Windows, to clarify. Good cross platform desktop frameworks include Avalonia.

Are those frameworks available in .NET 8 on non-Windows platforms, though? If not, I think that's what the GP was getting at.

Not by Microsoft, but Avalonia has a commercial fork of WPF which runs on Linux and macOS:

https://avaloniaui.net/xpf

I think MS wants you to use this?

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui

I was pleased to see WinForms got some updates in .NET9. I really thought they'd left it. I still use it every day when I need to spin up a new tool to do some little task that needs a GUI.

The only people wanting anyone to use MAUI are the MAUI team and even then only half heartedly.