Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) VS maui-linux

You know, I'm not the only one surprised by this issue. If you take a look at the long threads around this issue, you can see many developers are complaining about the missing support for a very common feature such as authentication in Microsoft's own operating system!

Just a few hours ago, the .NET MAUI team announced a significant change coming in .NET 10: the ListView control and all its related cell types (TextCell, ImageCell, ViewCell, etc.) will be marked as obsolete. This decision is part of Microsoft's strategy to streamline the developer experience by focusing on a single, optimized control for displaying collections of data. Which I'm personally happy with, the less duplicated controls to maintain the better.

Unified Codebases: Frameworks like Uno Platform and .NET MAUI enable developers to write once and deploy across web and native platforms.

I am migrating XF app into MAUI and writing a simple Navigation framework because Prism doesn't work well and I didn't use anything advanced anyway. So, I am surfing the code of MAUI to intercept all the back buttons, etc. I haven't found a single mention of apis related to predictive back "RegisterOnBackInvokedCallback", "OnBackInvokedDispatcher", "OnBackPressedDispatcher", "AddCallback", "android:enableOnBackInvokedCallback" Also I don't see any issue on github that would say "Support Android Predictive back". Only one kinda related https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8680

Below issue is still reproducing in Maui .net7.0 version also. #10163

Maui is Open Source, MIT License

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

.NET is Open Source

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source

I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.

Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.

My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.

I hope I am not wrong.

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)

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!