MAUI Is Coming to Linux

Accessibility bridging between .NET MAUI and Avalonia is currently limited.

Nowhere near production ready, got it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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/

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