Gui.cs VS Avalonia

Thanks but I'm sticking with Terminal.Gui

Used this neat library to handle the GUI gui-cs/Terminal.Gui: Cross Platform Terminal UI toolkit for .NET (github.com)

Terminal.GUI - cross platform terminal UI for .NET: https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui

Two I've used are Terminal.Gui for .net https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui and BubbleTea for Go https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

In that case you can use console (https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui) to make games.

As you can see the tool is always integrated into the terminal because it has built on a cross platform UI toolkit based on a fantastic open source project called Terminal.Gui. Now you can select the objects by using space bar and than confirm the selection with enter. The result will be:

C# - https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui

Since you mentioned minimal GUI, have you thought of a TUI? I haven't spiked it out but I would guess Terminal.Gui would work with Native AOT

I've had to resort to make TUIs with https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui because there's no sane way to make a GUI app in Linux without a 300-files boilerplate or obscure languages.

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.