FluentAvalonia VS whisper.net

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.

Using bindings to C++ libraries is likely to yield better experience. C# has really good interop API (P/Invoke).

I don't have experience with machine vision but here's an example of a library that integrates whisper.cpp in an idiomatic way: https://github.com/sandrohanea/whisper.net

There are many good community projects with code quality way higher than your average enterprise SDK with layers upon layers of abstractions and allocations. Finding them is the same as with most other languages like Rust or TS.

I only made the UI wrapper, this is the star of the show really - > https://github.com/sandrohanea/whisper.net/