GtkSharp VS maui-linux

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

While this is the quite endorsed by the community: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/339

I think the fundamental issue is that desktop Linux is way too fragmented. Not only just GTK2/3 and Qt but you have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon and then you have X11, Xorg, Wayland...

To be honest, all those craps are why desktop Linux never took off. I'm very safe to say MAUI for Linux will eventually renders components off its own using framebuffer and hardware acceleration APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan just because of the market fragmentations...

If desktop Linux truly wants to get the attention, it will need to unify. Fixing dependency hell using Flatpak is the right direction.

There is an existing old fork of MAUI for Linux that uses GTK: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux

There is work being done to address desktop linux, but I agree that is one of the deficiencies.

https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux/pull/37

The lack of a WASM target is another, although UNO project in the past provided such a target for MAUI's very closely-related predecessor (Xamarin.Forms).

https://platform.uno/xamarin-forms/

That's more on the fact that there's no official set of native UI in Linux since MAUI uses the platform's native UI instead of drawing everything themselves like Flutter, there have been some community works around this via this repo using GTK as the native UI to target. This is the same case for say React Native where most Linux implementation will likely use Electron as a shell since there's no standard set of platform UI components to choose.

There's even a senior engineer at Microsoft who's done some exploratory work on Linux bindings already: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux

https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux exists but appears to be inactive lately

The applications I'm trying to make all require relatively simple GUI, only needing images, text-boxes, buttons, and basic configuration menus. I have heard of maui-linux however I'm very new to all of this and not sure how to make use of it at all.

Kudos to Microsoft and the teams (.Net, etc.) that made this possible! This is really big! What's the team's plan to extend MAUI to Linux? This is key, considering it was the platform that set the cross-platform (xPlat) .Net in motion, where Mono, MonoDevelop (now Visual Studio for Mac), among others, were bred. For example, is it possible to officially support an MAUI implementation for Linux modelled around Gtk? Like what has already been started here? Linux had so much love during the Mono/Xamarin days and has continued to enjoy same as .Net Core (now .Net all across) matures into being genuinely cross-platform. Linux's support will really be a game-changer! MAUI will then be "One Codebase, Many Platforms", indeed! Thanks once again for all the work on MAUI. It's awesome!