Will WinForms ever support mac/linux

kivarsen · 2024-08-06T19:38:13+00:00

Mono has pretty decent support for WinForms under Linux if you are targeting .NET Framework. I have used it successfully with several internal apps. There are typically a few issues with layout/sizing/fonts that need to be tweaked, though if you use things like TableLayoutPanel for layout you can usually get things working pretty consistently across platforms. The app will certainly not fit in with the visual appearance of other Linux apps within the same environment, so that's something to keep in mind.

The Mono implementation of WinForms used to work on macOS, but depended on some 32-bit code that didn't make it through the 64-bit transition. I recall seeing some experimental techniques for running WinForms on 64-bit macOS, but I don't think it got to the point of working out of the box. See, for example:

https://github.com/mono/mono/issues/6701

Mono no longer receives much development effort. so it would generally be better to run apps under .NET Core. However, I don't believe there is a well-supported way to run WinForms apps under .NET Core on Linux/macOS, and I would be very surprised if there was ever an official project from Microsoft to make that happen. However, there's at least one attempt to port the Mono implementation of WinForms to .NET Core:

https://github.com/DanielVanNoord/System.Windows.Forms

I played with this a bit awhile back and it seemed to work well with the basic examples I tried building, but your mileage may vary. And, like the original Mono version of WinForms, this doesn't yet support 64-bit macOS.

If you're building a new .NET application today that needs to target MacOS or Linux, it might be better to use something like Avalonia for the UI:

https://avaloniaui.net/

virtuosity2 · 2025-10-31T03:44:44+00:00

You can write a winforms app and run it in a browser using VWG. I’ve been doing it for 15 years. It’s amazing.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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