FluentAvalonia VS Avalonia.FuncUI

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.

For those interested in .NET languages with alternative compilation targets, Elmish (https://elmish.github.io/elmish/) is pretty unique.

We use F# on the front end (instead of TS), and thanks to the Fable compiler (which transpiles F# to JS, Python, Dart, PHP and Rust), most of the benefits of an Elm-style model in the UI can be ported to all sorts of different outputs languages. The rust target is in beta, but its promising because the WASM bundle size stands to be dramatically lower.

While the default is reactivity library for Elmish is React, you can swap in Avalonia/FuncUI (https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI) pretty easily as well.

The code to declare/build the widgets is quite nice. Modifying widgets by hand on certain signals or manually re-wiring all the signals seems a bit outdated to me.

Wonder if something like FuncUI [1] could be built on top of it.

[1] https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

OTOH, if desktop really is the primary focus, and if you can drop the idea of reusable UI code, then Avalonia is a great choice for F# as you can use a Avalonia.FuncUI and/or Elmish.Avalonia.

And one more MVU for you https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

You might want to check out Avalonia.FuncUI, which lets you use F# and the cross-platform Avalonia framework to build desktop applications with an Elm-like architecture: https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI#example-using-...