MAUI is pretty much a non-starter without Linux support to me. I don't care if it's wrapping GTK, Qt or something else. It's needed imo for community engagement.

MS has made some good will with VS Code and even .Net since Core. That said, I think they're missing the horizon for the Forest in front of them. It's there, they just can't see it.

As to Blazor, I think ASO.Net Razor + HTMX is a safer option.

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

Xamarin forms only supported GTK, gnome is built in GTK. That would be considered good enough by pretty much everyone Chrome and Edge don't have different builds for KDE and Gnome etc. It's a cup out.

I mean windows has had a bunch of different UI surfaces and paradigms that have been started and abandoned over the years. MAUI isn't targeting them all, is it?

In Linux they only needed to pick one. Hell even a browser surface like tauri with web based rendering would have been better than nothing, which is what Linux got.

I don't think they'd have to transparenty blend into all environments on Linux. Anything akin to old Java apps would suffice, for as long as the apps can be ported over. I imagine many of these cross-platform apps would have their own UI, anyway, like games for example. And basic Wayland support would suffice, too.

Does c# have much of an open source community?

I get the impression that Microsoft makes packages for everything and those are what get used for everything.

It does, yes. MS sets the base for the core stuff more so than on other ecosystems though.

Which also makes a big cultural difference in Microsoft only shops, as whatever comes with Visual Studio is what matters, a common discussion theme.