GtkSharp VS Avalonia

Thanks, but I still have a question. Is that "rubber band selection" on GtkTreeView a new feature that was added to GTK4? Because, I use GTK# (the C# library for GTK) which uses GTK 3.22. I created a simple GtkTreeView, but I cannot do rubber band selection, on the same Linux PC where I recorded that rubber band selection in the OP. I wonder if this is because it is GTK3, or because I had not added the code to enable rubber band selection.

I noticed GtkSharp is on version 3.24, quite mature. I hope MS takes this seriously brings much needed Linux support, as all the dependency components are in place.

There's also the more direct route by using say Gtk directly[1].

[1]: https://github.com/GtkSharp/GtkSharp

Looks like a "blocker" is getting GtkSharp working with .Net6. Unclear from this GitHub issue when such support will be merged into the project's main branch.

For .NET GUI development on Linux, my go-to choice would be GTK#. This is a managed wrapper on GTK+2 or 3. If you have experience on developing GUI application using C and GTK+, you can reuse most of the concepts (and even some of the Glade files) in GTK#.

Your only real choice for GUI development with F#/.NET on Linux is GTK#. (I've gotten feedback on Twitter that this statement may be a bit harsh, will update when I dive a bit deeper into other options).

https://github.com/GtkSharp/GtkSharp is used rather than the mono gtk-sharp-3

mono/gtk-sharp is still stuck on 2.0 I think, but GtkSharp/GtkSharp uses 3.22 and up.

GTK https://github.com/GtkSharp/GtkSharp

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.