MAUI Is Coming to Linux

Ciantic

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.

soumyaskartha

Microsoft adding Linux support for yet another framework nobody asked for while WinForms still exists in 2026 is very on brand.

tonyedwardspz

Excited for this. I do wonder how much effort it will be to get an existing app working with this.

general1465

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

politelemon

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.

pjmlp

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.

exceptione

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.

blendergeek

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/

robin_reala

Accessibility bridging between .NET MAUI and Avalonia is currently limited. Nowhere near production ready, got it.

zteppenwolf

Why would anyone want .NET on Linux?

giancarlostoro

Nice, I love MAUI but hate that it has no support for Linux. The only option I have is Avalonia and Photino. I love .NET but when I want to make a GUI I reach for other languages because Microsoft despite reinventing their .NET GUI stack every few years, they never add Linux support. Personally I prefer to use their built-in stuff as much as possible.

ChicagoDave

I’ve been using Claude to build native versions of a couple of apps and what was once unthinkable (maintaining multiple code bases) is now fairly trivial. And Electron/Tauri implementations are high quality. I’m not sure platforms like Maui are necessary anymore. I did note the comment “if you don’t want Liquid Glass” as a direct response to GenAI native development. Time will tell.

MrDrMcCoy

Maui was on Linux the whole time :-P https://mauikit.org/

troad

This is a relatively opaque article for someone who isn't up on dotnet's GUI frameworks. So am I understanding correctly that Avalonia, the OSS project, is contributing an AvaloniaUI backend upstream to Microsoft's MAUI library, which is itself OSS? Ergo, someone using MAUI can now use its integrated AvaloniaUI backend to target platforms that were previously not available using MAUI, mainly Linux? Happy to be corrected if I'm misunderstanding something.

sombragris

I read the title and thought it was odd that the MAUI project "is coming to Linux", because I had it in mind the KDE project with that name, https://mauikit.org/ . Looks like what is announced in the article is something different.

sakesun

Wonder how would it looks like if we run MAUI over Avalania over Flutter Impeller over browser's WebGPU.