.NET 6 seems like a pretty good release with a few cool new features.

But it's funny how the infographic in the post mentions MAUI for desktop development, but the "desktop" keyword in the text is referring to the WinForms github repository. I can't think of a more concise statement about the state of GUI development on .NET. I would really wish for less fragmentation and churn in that space.

My strategy for dealing with Microsoft's regrettable desktop GUI roadmap is to use the web as much as possible. .NET has an incredible suite of features for pushing functionality to the browser. Kestrel is one of the fastest web servers available today. Developing directly against the AspNetCore pipeline has a bit of a learning curve, but it becomes very intuitive once you get over the DI/startup hard bits, and the performance you can get with low level middleware is staggering (to me).

There are very few applications that simply cannot work in a web browser in 2021. Even accounting for all the inconsistent bullshit between browser vendors, you can still arrive at something that works as far back as IE6 if you are conservative with your footprint.

Do you really need flexbox, webgl2 and GPS navigation for that warehouse inventory management application? Does everything have to live the various app stores? Will your users revolt if there isn't some ceremonial download & install phase of using your product?

I would go so far as to argue for deployment of a self-contained webservice to the end users that could be accessed via any arbitrary localhost browser before succumbing to the Microsoft Desktop GUI framework du jour.

"I would go so far as to argue for deployment of a self-contained webservice to the end users that could be accessed via any arbitrary localhost browser"

Might as well use Unity game engine and write your app inside one.

There seems to be some people writing UI applications with the Godot game engine. Given the dismal state of desktop UI frameworks/tools, this seem to make more and more sense (very light binaries, solid cross-platform support, a WYSIWYG toolkit with good scripting functionality, a high-performance 2D renderer, access to C/C++ if you wan to go low-level, you name it.)

Examples:

https://www.wonderdraft.net/

https://github.com/Orama-Interactive/Pixelorama