MAUI Is Coming to Linux (avaloniaui.net)
65 points by DeathArrow 4 hours ago
robin_reala an hour ago
Accessibility bridging between .NET MAUI and Avalonia is currently limited.
Nowhere near production ready, got it.
Ciantic 2 hours ago
I wish they support Linux wholeheartedly, a lot of toolkits and GUI frameworks do it by half-assing things, mostly because Wayland is difficult to understand.
In Wayland you have multiple ways to render windows, not just the XDG top level window. It works via surfaces, and here is a list I've discovered so far:
- XDG Top Level Window
- Child Window
- Popup Surface
- Layer surface (like task-bars, shell overlays)
- Subsurface (region in another surface)
- IME Panel Surface (surface that follows text cursor)
It is diffifcult to find high-level toolkits that support all of the above.
sandreas 2 minutes ago
[delayed]
Pay08 an hour ago
Not to mention that there's no clear documentation for this anywhere. A while ago I was attempting to debug some Wayland-specific issues with a graphics library, it turns out the issue was that the little documentation there was, was wrong about what is and isn't nullable.
OtomotO 38 minutes ago
I found https://wayland.app/protocols/ very helpful so far.
That and studying smithay code.
shevy-java 12 minutes ago
Wayland is a mess.
Perhaps https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver can revive the older ecosystem. Almost nobody writes for wayland. About two years ago I tried to switch, then gave up when I realised how many things are missing on wayland. And then I noticed that barely anyone wrote software for wayland. It feels like a corporate advertisement project really. GNOME and KDE push for wayland now.
LeFantome a minute ago
What does “nobody writes for Wayland” mean?
If you write software using GTK, Qt, or FLTK then you are creating Wayland software.
The majority of Linux desktops are Wayland at this point. Nobody writes software for them?
general1465 2 hours ago
What is unclear to me, is how does it work with Avalonia pricing wise? If I am having commercial application for Windows, Android, MacOS, iOS (Microsoft MAUI range) then according to [1] I would need to dish out 125000 EUR per application. But it was never clear to me what are the conditions which actually triggers the difference between free and paid plan.
exceptione an hour ago
Let me rephrase what sibling said: the paid offering is for you when you have gotten an existing traditional windows-only wpf application and you want to have that appplication cross-platform as-is, foregoing any effort to port it to AvaloniaUI.
You won't need the paid offering if you build your stuff in AvaloniaUI directly.
oblio 37 minutes ago
How mature is Avalonia for an universal app? Big 3 desktop plus big 2 mobile?
exceptione 30 minutes ago
Kwpolska an hour ago
Avalonia is free and open-source. Avalonia MAUI currently appears to be MIT as well [0]. The pricing you’ve linked to is pricing for their paid offering, which wraps Avalonia and a WPF-style API for easy migration of legacy apps.
[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.Controls.Maui/blob/ma...
exceptione an hour ago
From a quick look, I can't find a reason. why? Even MS doesn't fully believe in Maui, as it seems they reblessed WPF. For Avalonia to do the work of MS seems weird, their own free regular WPF-like Avalonia UI toolkit is already the standard for cross desktop development.
I was looking for the line: Microsoft sponsored us. Even then I would not understand why they would spend effort on a doomed project. I know Avalonia being a small company has a big task ahead of porting Avalonia UI to Wayland, which makes porting MS semi-abandonware all the more confusing.
But since these people aren't idiots, I gladly assume I am missing something.
pjmlp an hour ago
The rewrite from Xamarin.Forms into MAUI, has given a bad taste to many in the community, and kudos to Avalonia to make it happen on GNU/Linux.
By the way on macOS MAUI uses Catalyst as backend, not native macOS APIs.
Also it is kind of interesting that Miguel de Icaza, nowadays completely switched into Swift ecosystem, and is the responsible for making game development on iPad with Godot a reality. Or porting old .NET ideas of his into Swift.
politelemon an hour ago
I like the possibilities this opens up but I'm struggling to understand how wasm is involved. I had the impression it doesn't have a user interface, but it's called by javascript instead.
blendergeek an hour ago
Just a reminder that this MAUI has nothing to do with the pre-existing cross platform UI framework MauiKit from MAUI Project.
tonyedwardspz 2 hours ago
Excited for this. I do wonder how much effort it will be to get an existing app working with this.
soumyaskartha 2 hours ago
Microsoft adding Linux support for yet another framework nobody asked for while WinForms still exists in 2026 is very on brand.
louhike 2 hours ago
Avalonia is not made by Microsoft and is often considered as one of the best way to make desktop app with .NET.
Pay08 2 hours ago
I can understand the confusion, Microsoft also has a framework called MAUI.