Related question. How to start to develop desktop applications? In contrast to web applications there are not many resources out there and most seem outdated.
I'm answering in terms of what I know best. I, personally, don't see the point of supporting non-Windows desktops. User base isn't large enough for me to bother.
my cross-platform DAW, Ardour, has as many Linux downloads as Windows downloads (on the order of 5k per month). Is it the DAW niche? Or are you possibly wrong about this?
It's always going to be application-specific. In my case, the kind of software I'm likely to write is going to have a majority-Windows user base, at least in the US.
Use Electron and leverage your web skills. Learn as much as you can about the architecture before you start. For example, an Electron app has two main processes: main and renderer. The main process is like your backend API and the renderer(s) are the browser windows. Once you get the hang of it, the world opens up and you can really start cranking out code/features by bending the entire architecture to the will of the developer... until it breaks, but then you get to fix it!
I've not worked on a desktop app in a while but when I did, maybe 4 years ago, I found a lot of resources googling "MVVM C#" and following tutorials there. Microsoft tends to have a lot of decent tutorials on WPF Gui development. More recently I've been playing with C++ and Qt which has decent documentation too, but to me is far more complicated than Visual Studio and WPF. Most C# textbooks tend to have sections on GUI development too.
