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)
There probably is others too.
It is diffifcult to find high-level toolkits that support all of the above.
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.
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.
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 not just Wayland but Wayland only. 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?
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.
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.
I 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Accessibility bridging between .NET MAUI and Avalonia is currently limited.
Nowhere near production ready, got it.
Almost nobody needs accessibility; let's be realistic, it's obviously not a priority. The priority is to put this out the door (MVP style).
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:
There probably is others too.It is diffifcult to find high-level toolkits that support all of the above.
For everyone interested in Avalonia's Linux / Wayland strategy:
https://avaloniaui.net/blog/bringing-wayland-support-to-aval...
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.
I found https://wayland.app/protocols/ very helpful so far.
That and studying smithay code.
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.
What 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 not just Wayland but Wayland only. 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?
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.
[1] https://avaloniaui.net/xpf/pricing
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.
How mature is Avalonia for an universal app? Big 3 desktop plus big 2 mobile?
I 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
> Even MS doesn't fully believe in Maui
Source: I made it up.
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.
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.
https://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.
https://skia.org/docs/user/modules/canvaskit/
Just a reminder that this MAUI has nothing to do with the pre-existing cross platform UI framework MauiKit from MAUI Project.
https://mauikit.org/
Excited for this. I do wonder how much effort it will be to get an existing app working with this.
Microsoft adding Linux support for yet another framework nobody asked for while WinForms still exists in 2026 is very on brand.
Avalonia is not made by Microsoft and is often considered as one of the best way to make desktop app with .NET.
I can understand the confusion, Microsoft also has a framework called MAUI.
The 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.
The Microsoft MAUI framework is the one being brought to Linux by Avalonia, yes.