maui-linux VS Qml.Net

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!

Or QML.Net

QML.Net seems to be the best of the bunch for this right now.

It looks like there are actually qml bindings for mono but not sure how active they are developed...still probably the closest you get if you want to stuck with .net

You might try QML.Net. That's a Qt library for C#, which (in theory) should play nice with LXDE in Raspbian. In theory. YMMV.

BLUF: Does anyone have some experience with qmlnet?

Instead, write your project as if you're targeting Linux. If you need a GUI, use QML.Net. It's a C# binding for QT. To access USB, try LibUsbDotNet.

Since you're specifically looking for a replacement for a desktop UI framework, I would look into QML.Net. It works across Windows and Linux (and even MacOS X) by using the Qt framework under the hood.

And there's Qml.Net if qml/qt is more what you want.