I don't think "was always" is an accurate statement

However, above and beyond free, it is also a collection of ECMA standards https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/standa...

Now, don't get me wrong: I have grave suspicions there is currently only one actual implementation of them (I don't count hobby, or abandonware, ones) but IMHO "actual standard" combined with "for real reference implementation" is way better than just reference implementation

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since I'm still within the edit window, the MAUI referenced by the sibling comment is MIT licensed https://github.com/dotnet/maui

https://github.com/dotnet/blazor (Apache 2) is marked an archived, and points to https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore (MIT) but command-f blazor on its readme is nothing so :shrug:

> I don't think "was always" is an accurate statement

If we want to be really pedantic they said ".NET" and not ".NET Framework" or ".NET Core", so basically that what came with .NET 5 and newer.

The very idea of those 3 things being disjoint is a supremely Microsoftian thing to do and makes discussions horrific

And .NET is truly cross-platform for 11 years already (since .NET Core 3.0 was released). No licensing/patent/litigation issues since then.

Great GUI cross-platform GUI toolkit (MAUI), great WASM engine (Blazor).

Upcoming .NET 10 is going to be awesome.

Isn't the official MAUI still basically "everything but Linux"? I haven't been keeping up with that the last 2 or so years and I just remember there being an unofficial GTK implementation somewhere in the interwebs, but nothing being officially supported on Linux.

Linux desktop has a tiny market share. No reason to invest significant resources for that. Also, by supporting MAUI on Linux, Microsoft would feed their own competition in desktop area, and it's crucial for them to maintain dominance in that area. I think this is why they did not port the great WPF to Linux as well.

And besides, Linux desktop is a mess. I never learned details on how Wayland / X11 / KDE / Gnome etc. work, which is for what. All I know is that some distros switch from one to another, that one is declared the best, and another the worst, and all of it changes regularly. I'm glad someone in Canonical made the desktop mostly working for me in Ubuntu, although it still lacks a lot compared to Windows.

I think when you need that level of cross platform support to cover Windows, Linux, macOS, maybe mobiles, and you do a serious project, you use Qt.