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My biggest issue with C# is that it doesn't have a good cross platform GUI. Maui dev is too slow and lacks a lot of the features a lot of people want, and Avalonia still uses the hybrid axml approach that just feels bad. I wish C# had a Flutter like library that utilized C#'s Hot Reload features

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You have Avalonia, Uno Platform and, yes, MAUI. Most cross-platform GUI frameworks are flawed regardless of the language. The ones .NET has are decent, with various ways to approach the UI wiring - you have both XAML and declarative SwiftUI-style (and with MVU pattern too) options. Avalonia even has F# support through FuncUI. There are also plenty of bindings for SDL2, there's GTK# successor Gir.Core.

I wish the comments focused more on the subject of the article which is interesting and under-discussed.

MAUI is the official one but Linux support AFAICT? Such a shame!

I agree. Avalonia tries too much to be like WPF, but in my opinion, WPF was two steps forward and one step back (mainly due to XAML).

Besides the other GUI libraries people have mentioned, there is also Eto: https://github.com/picoe/Eto

Using something like Photino (https://www.tryphotino.io) with Blazor can start to feel like an actual good C# cross plat GUI solution but even as a C# truther I agree with you.

I think you'll start seeing a lot more "cross platform C# frameworks" when PanGUI drops: https://pangui.io

It's a native layout/gui util by the devs of the mega-popular Odin extension in Unity, and the idea is to directly solve "good native c# gui lib" with the implementation just being a single shader and an API that is more like DearIMGUI.

I'm also planning on using it my own small 2D C# engine when it's available: https://github.com/zinc-framework

I already do iterative hot reload GUI with DearImGUI in that engine so PanGUI will work in the same way.

re: PanGui, it seems nice but the fact that they don't even have "accessibility" in their docs means it really shouldn't become widely used until they address that. It would be a big step backwards and one that is unacceptable in these modern times.

Unfortunately, the way they've designed it without accessibility in mind from the start means it's unlikely ever to be anything other than an after thought.

Pangui seems really cool. Especially since it's from people developing Unity plugins so we could get good GUI for games too.

Photino sounds almost identical to Maui Blazor Hybrid. Do you know the difference?

Photino is way less "all in one" like Maui Blazor Hybrid. Photino is basically just a cross platform way to open a native webview on desktop platforms and give you hooks to call in and out of that, one of which is dotnet.

From there, you can do your front end in absolutely whatever (Svelte, Next, etc.) and your back end is the .NET host doing whatever. So it's basically making a "native webapp", not actually doing what Maui Blazor Hybrid does where it's opening a native context and injecting a webview (if I understand it correctly)

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