Playnite: Any future plans for macOS/Linux support with Mono?

[TheDarocker]

Nice project here, got a bit farther than mine ever did. Would like to know if there's any future plans for cross-platform support.

[JosefNemec]

I'm afraid no, at least not in foreseeable future. The biggest blocker is the absence of WPF on those platforms, which is used for the GUI in Playnite. I'm currently not planning to use anything else because there isn't any mature toolkit with C# and modern binding support (with only Eto and Avalonia getting there slowly). So I guess it's up to Microsoft to release WPF as cross-platform toolkit (which might happen some day given their open sourcing efforts lately).

[Ruedii]

Exactly what subset of WPF do you use. Many of them are duplicated across the .Net namespaces and are implemented in Mono.

The most substantial portion, XAML, is mappable to the system.xaml namespace.

[JosefNemec]

XAML and WPF are two completely different things (WPF uses XAML for markup definitions) and WPF as UI toolking is not implemented in Mono at all.

[colonelpopcorn]

Is Xamarin a candidate for WPF replacement? I know it would be a pretty big ordeal to port from WPF to Xamarin, but I know I'd certainly like to see this available for other platforms. It could also allow ports to phones as well.

[JosefNemec]

Last time I checked Xamarin.Forms for desktops was not a good option for porting complex application like Playnite. At this time Avalon would be more fitting alternative.

[mirh]

WPF should be available on .NET Core 3.0

[JosefNemec]

WPF is in .NET Core 3, but still Windows only (and that's not going to change any time soon). See #59 for more information. This issue is closed, please continue discussion there if you have something to add.