FluentAvalonia VS Avalonia

This is what you need : https://github.com/amwx/FluentAvalonia

FluentAvalonia

If you want to have the FluentUI theme you can use https://github.com/amwx/FluentAvalonia. I used this for another project and didnt have any issues.

It's literally not the most basic control for Windows development. That would be something like Window, Button, or TextBlock. If you're only using the basic features of a NavigationView, then you can implement it using a simple ListBox with some minor styling instead. The fully featured NavigationView from UWP has a lot of complexity that most devs won't need. You could also use the implementation from FluentAvalonia

There are many cool custom themes for Avalonia, also default Fluent theme is already very good looking. Try for example this https://github.com/amwx/FluentAvalonia

But, going by the Avalonia route, you have the promising FluentAvalonia project for the Windows 11 look & feel. I was a bit overwhelmed by Avalonia when I tried it but especially for cross-platform projects it's of course a solid contender and probably a strong alternative to MAUI.

You might also want to look at AvaloniaUI[0] for a cross platform .NET GUI library. It is similar to WPF but much nicer to work with.

[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

Production user here. There's no money gotchas. They're above reproach. In fact, I've received considerable free support from their devs on GitHub Issues [1].

The Avalonia business model is based on selling XPF, which runs WPF (Windows-only) apps on other platforms. That's very interesting to big corps with existing codebases.

See my comment [2]

[1] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/issues

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246988#39249128

Yes, but the portable GUI frameworks by Microsoft themselves are generally not very good, and they tend to be abandoned after a couple of years.

Avalonia is developed outside of the Microsoft corporate madness and seems to be slowly becoming the defacto cross-platform framework because it is expected to last a bit longer than a manager's attention span: https://avaloniaui.net/

Not my comment, but relevant here "The problem with compiling Skia to WASM is you'll lose any benefits of hardware graphics acceleration on the device."

(From https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/discussions/6831#disc... )

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

For desktop, Avalonia, hands down.

https://avaloniaui.net/

Open source, powered by Skia, backed by JetBrains, and quite battle-tested at this point for small to medium-sized apps. In theory perfectly capable for enterprise as well, since it's basically a spiritual successor to WPF, which has been an industry standard for about 15 years.

They're diving into mobile and WASM well, but that's more of a recent effort and I haven't tested that yet.