MAUI Is Coming to Linux(avaloniaui.net)
90 points by DeathArrow 5 hours ago | 41 comments
- robin_reala 2 hours agoAccessibility bridging between .NET MAUI and Avalonia is currently limited.
Nowhere near production ready, got it.
[-]- MikeCodesDotNET 14 minutes agoThis is the first preview release. It’s targeting a preview of .NET 11, which should help you understand that it’s not intended to be used in production right now.
We don’t expect this to graduate from a preview until November. There’s plenty of time to sort out Accessibility.
- siwatanejo 47 minutes agoAlmost nobody needs accessibility; let's be realistic, it's obviously not a priority. The priority is to put this out the door (MVP style).[-]
- skeeter2020 18 minutes agoUnfortunately too many developers share your perspective. I'd be surprised if anyone building commercial software would move ahead without accessibility support though because, 1. it's required by law in many situations, and 2. it makes good business sense.
- saidnooneever 23 minutes agothis was down voted but its correct. even if as a human j disagree and it sounds mean, this is how people think in general..too bad, but too true. accessibility will come after 'launch'.[-]
- skeeter2020 15 minutes agoIf they mean "only a small subset of your users need accessibility support" this might be true, but I haven't worked for a organization selling software in the past 20+ years that hasn't needed to provide support, and those orgs are the audience for a .net cross-platform UI solution, so in that case they are wrong; almost everyone "needs accessibility support".[-]
- saidnooneever 11 minutes agoprovide support on a product and accessibility are really different things.
accessibility is like implementing braille and things for deaf and colourblind etc.
support is resetting password and helping with accounts etc.
so one is to get a certain category of users to be able to access your site in the general sense. the other (support) is about helping people who already can access your site or service.
- Ciantic 3 hours agoI 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:
There probably is others too.- 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 1 hour agoFor everyone interested in Avalonia's Linux / Wayland strategy:
https://avaloniaui.net/blog/bringing-wayland-support-to-aval...
[-]- MikeCodesDotNET 43 minutes agoWe’re actively working on Wayland support for Avalonia 12. While we considered dual licensing it, we ultimately decided to keep things simple and make it MIT licensed.
- Pay08 2 hours agoNot 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 2 hours agoI found https://wayland.app/protocols/ very helpful so far.
That and studying smithay code.
[-]- Pay08 35 minutes agoThat was the documentation with the incorrect nullability I was referencing.
- shevy-java 1 hour agoWayland 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 1 hour agoWhat does “nobody writes for Wayland” mean?
If you write software using GTK, Qt, or FLTK then you are writing Wayland software.
The majority of Linux desktops are Wayland at this point. Nobody writes software for them?
The Steamdeck uses gamescope which is Wayland. GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, Niri, and Hyprland are not just Wayland but Wayland only. KDE will be Wayland only soon. Cinnamon is switching to Wayland. XFCE is writing a Wayland compositor.
What percentage of Linux desktop users are not using one of the above? 10 at most?
- Gigachad 22 minutes agoYou have to go quite out of your way to not use Wayland. Pretty much all mainstream distros switched over long ago. This just feels like the systemd drama restarted. Some will complain and hold on to the past for as long as they can but the rest of the world moves on. Wayland is the better choice today.
- eikenberry 11 minutes agoI think Wayland is basically waiting for a higher level abstraction to fully replace X11, at least for the desktop. I'm currently playing with the River Wayland compositor (https://codeberg.org/river/river) which separates the window manager from the compositor and I think it could fill this gap left in the transition. Not as sure about non-toolkit (gtk,qt) application development...
- audidude 2 hours ago[dead]
- pjmlp 2 hours agoThe 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.
- general1465 3 hours agoWhat 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 2 hours agoLet 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 2 hours agoHow mature is Avalonia for an universal app? Big 3 desktop plus big 2 mobile?[-]
- exceptione 2 hours agoI can't comment on that specifically, but it works with MVVM extensions toolkit, which is handy for decoupling of event handling and is helpful in complex scenario's.
Most import thing to look for are the components you need imho. You can build themselves, but if you can use something ready made, that helps of course. You would best take look at their gallery to see if you see something similar for your needs.
- Kwpolska 2 hours agoAvalonia 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 2 hours agoFrom 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.
[-]- siwatanejo 45 minutes ago> Even MS doesn't fully believe in Maui
Source: I made it up.
[-]- exceptione 18 minutes agoMS has multiple personalities, so some might do, I will give you that. Meanwhile, WPF is getting rehabilitated. It seems like that not only the average developer has concluded that all the other UI frameworks since wpf are half-baked. Someone more involved than me makes the same assessment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480056
I recommend everyone to ignore all experiments, and go straight for AvaloniaUI, as it is quite similar to wpf, actively devloped and cross-platform. The only downside I see is that Wayland is still in progress yet.
- nobodyandproud 40 minutes agoHow many MS products are dog fooding Maui?
When COM rolled out, every product was very much on board.
The need for Maui in-house is for…what?
[-]- skeeter2020 9 minutes agodoesn't look like much; the seem to use electron for almost everything in this space. If they had faith in Maui something (VS Code, Teams, Outlook, ... calculator?) would use it.
- nobodyandproud 47 minutes ago> But since these people aren't idiots, I gladly assume I am missing something.
Microsoft politics. Someone who’s aware please confirm but I want to say it’s something like…
Different orgs jockey for power and you can see when the wrong orgs and initiatives influence different products.
What I can’t tell is whether it’s established teams scrambling to stay relevant. Or if it’s new teams and products imposing their influence where they shouldn’t.
But the Windows team doesn’t want to see Linux get traction, so they’ll do their part to hamper any OS shims or any native-first functions in Office.
The Office org wants to expand beyond Windows but for political reasons, the only add-in tech without platform lock-in is JS so they ally with the Azure/Cloud team to allow third parties to create add-ins.
Because of this partnership, rather than making a streamlined add-in store, publishers are required to learn the full complexities of Entra and the Partner centers.
I imagine the UX and .NET orgs are caught in similar political battles; but without any direct income or product to influence.
If I had to guess, they were in the Windows team at one point; but with the platform-independent initiatives (good) it’s been a shitshow over the past 20+ years for desktop developers (bad).
[-]- exceptione 27 minutes agoI agree that MS has often internal conflicts of interest. But that still leaves su with the question: why would Avalalonia do the work that MS did not bother to do, where is the benefit? I mean, Avalonia has AvaloniaUI already.
- zteppenwolf 9 minutes agoWhy would anyone want .NET on Linux?[-]
- dardeaup 7 minutes agoMy guess would be so that they could make use of a single code base.
- politelemon 2 hours agoI 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.[-]
- CodesInChaos 1 hour agohttps://avaloniaui.net/platforms/wasm
> Avalonia renders through Skia compiled to WebAssembly
I'd guess it builds on Skia CanvasKit and renders to an HTML Canvas element.
- blendergeek 2 hours agoJust a reminder that this MAUI has nothing to do with the pre-existing cross platform UI framework MauiKit from MAUI Project.
- tonyedwardspz 3 hours agoExcited for this. I do wonder how much effort it will be to get an existing app working with this.
- soumyaskartha 3 hours agoMicrosoft adding Linux support for yet another framework nobody asked for while WinForms still exists in 2026 is very on brand.[-]
- louhike 3 hours agoAvalonia is not made by Microsoft and is often considered as one of the best way to make desktop app with .NET.[-]
- Pay08 3 hours agoI can understand the confusion, Microsoft also has a framework called MAUI.[-]
- LeFantome 2 hours agoThe MAUI they are talking about is the Microsoft framework you are referencing.
MAUI is Open Source but Microsoft does not provide a Linux back-end. This is a non-Microsoft effort to bring Linux support to MAUI.
- pie_flavor 2 hours agoThe Microsoft MAUI framework is the one being brought to Linux by Avalonia, yes.