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Ciantic 14 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)
There probably is others too.
It is diffifcult to find high-level toolkits that support all of the above.
sandreas 12 hours ago [-]
For everyone interested in Avalonia's Linux / Wayland strategy:
We’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.
zamalek 9 hours ago [-]
> [Article] What works in GNOME might not work in KDE. What works in both might not work in Sway.
If you subtract GNOME from the set then things become a lot more sane. "Compositor-specific extensions" are really "everyone besides GNOME extensions." The system tray extension isn't KDE-specific. Sure, window positions might not be available at all (because they don't make sense for a TWM), or a user might not have a system tray bar (or you might be on GNOME). However, if they did have a system tray it would be the StatusNotifierItem protocol. Ideally, these should be handled like other platform features like accelerometers etc.. That may not be possible, either way a lot of them can safely noop.
> [Article] For Avalonia, this means "Wayland support" isn't one implementation, it's potentially dozens. We're not just writing a Wayland backend; we're writing a GNOME-Wayland backend, a KDE-Wayland backend, a Sway-Wayland backend,
If you're making per-WM backends then you've fundamentally misunderstood how extensions are supposed to work. Other Wayland client libraries do not have a independent backends for KDE, Sway, and GNOME. Maybe quirks would be needed because you're attempting to support an existing UI library - but those should be few and far between.
IIRC Avalonia supports Vulkan as a rendering backend? Wayland protocols are the same line of thinking as Vulkan extensions.
wlroot and smithay are good examples of what extensions are used in the real world.
a_vanderbilt 3 hours ago [-]
My experience was the same while helping to adapt a Steam Deck game for wider Linux support. The issue wasn't Waylandisms, most of those have already by figured out. It was GNOME. Their preferred resolution to issues seems to be dropping support rather than bug fixes, and they go out of their way to adopt implementations that are against the momentum of the wider community. I can get why they make some of their decisions, but things like killing the tray indicator or server side decorations are insane. To be an outlier in name of a greater or grander goal is one thing, then there is whatever GNOME is doing.
kelnos 6 hours ago [-]
> For Avalonia, this means "Wayland support" isn't one implementation, it's potentially dozens. We're not just writing a Wayland backend; we're writing a GNOME-Wayland backend, a KDE-Wayland backend, a Sway-Wayland backend, and so on.
What? No, that's not the case. Yes, different Wayland compositors often support different extensions, but everyone has the basics (Wayland core, xdg_shell, and probably a few others). You need one backend, and then you can support extensions to implement more advanced features, but you of course have to be able to continue to work without any extensions present.
Yes, there are some features that might require a different extension on GNOME than it does on KDE (for example), but you don't need a full "backend" to handle those differences.
As someone who has always been skeptical of Wayland, frustrated with its shortcomings, and who has written both a compositor and XEMBED-workalike library for Wayland, it just feels like author is trying to play up the difficulties for PR purposes here.
thayne 1 hours ago [-]
> there are some features that might require a different extension on GNOME than it does on KDE
More likely you have to use a GNOME Extension (as in the plugin, not a wayland extension), or maybe a gnome-specific, possibly undocumented D-bus protocol.
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
Why is Wayland so complicated? I thought half the reason for breaking with X11 was to produce a simpler window server. I was flabbergasted when I realized that there were competing compositors for seemingly no benefit to anyone.
sho_hn 24 minutes ago [-]
> Why is Wayland so complicated?
It's not particularly complicated, and certainly a lot simpler and cleaner than X11 in almost every way.
The reality of the situation is that there's sort of a hateful half-knowledge mob dynamic around the topic, where people run into a bug, do some online search, run into the existing mob, copy over some of its "arguments" and the whole thing keeps rolling and snowballing.
Sometimes this innocent, like OP discovering that UIs are actually non-trivial and there's different types of windows for different things (like in really any production-grade windowing system). So they share their new-found knowledge in the form of a list. Then the mob comes along and goes "look at this! they have a list of things, and it's probably too long!" and then in the next discussion it's "Did you know that Wayland has a LONG LIST OF THINGS?!" and so on and so forth.
It's like politics, and it's cyclic. One day the narrative will shift again.
The mob will not believe me either, for that matter, but FWIW, I've worked on the Linux desktop for over 20 years, and as the lead developer of KDE Plasma's taskbar and a semi-regular contributor to its window manager, I'm exposed to the complexity of these systems in a way that only relatively few people in the world are. And I'd rather keep the Wayland code than the X11 one, which I wrote a lot of.
endgame 7 hours ago [-]
Making each one implement input handling was also a dazzlingly bizarre design choice.
Pay08 13 hours 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.
wayland.app just HTML-renders the contents of the specification XML files. If a compositor or client is not interpreting nullability the same way wayland.app says it should be interpreted, then that's a bug in the compositor or client.
Pay08 2 hours ago [-]
What if no compositor is interpreting it correctly? We tested on Weston, GNOME (this was shortly after it went Wayland-only) and Plasma and the same problems persisted on all 3. In all fairness, the exact functions with wrong nullability might have been different, I don't remember, but the nullability issue itself was persistent on all 3.
audidude 12 hours ago [-]
In X11 we kept things simple by offering:
* Core protocol drawing (lines, rectangles, arcs, the classics)
* XRender for compositing and alpha
* XShm for shared-memory blits
* GLX if you felt like bringing a GPU to a 2D fight
* XVideo for overlay video paths
* Pixmaps vs Windows, because why have one drawable when you can have two subtly different ones
* And of course, indirect rendering over the network if you enjoy latency as a design constraint
smackeyacky 4 hours ago [-]
And it worked very well for a remarkably long time. Even over dialup if you were patient. It still seems bizarre that the security flaws couldn’t be addressed, I never understood the Wayland push and I still don’t.
UltraSane 3 hours ago [-]
Once applications moved local and GPUs became the rendering path X11's network transparency became pure overhead for 99% of users. Wayland fixes this by making shared-memory buffers the core primitive and remote access a separate concern.
whizzter 56 minutes ago [-]
Not to mention that the complexity of X11 shots through the roof once shared buffers comes into play.
X11 was ok for it's time, but fundamentally it's an really outdated design to solve 80s/90s issues over the network in the way you solved it back then.
Underphil 2 hours ago [-]
...and then you have long time Linux users (like me) who cannot feel any of the benefit of removing that overhead. The only difference I can tell between X and Wayland on my machines is that Wayland doesn't work with some stuff.
cindyllm 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shevy-java 12 hours 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 12 hours ago [-]
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 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?
noselasd 10 hours ago [-]
It just means "noone" uses the wayland APIs directly, but instead they leave the wayland complexity to GTK,Qt or FLTK, and they call their app a Qt app, not a Wayland app.
simonh 10 hours ago [-]
Was X11 any different in practice? Apart from ancient legacy stuff like XTerm. It would be like writing a Mac application in Quartz directly.
9 hours ago [-]
sprash 8 hours ago [-]
It was/is mostly the same practice except for the cases where it really counts. Window managers in general, xdotool, all kinds of input mapping and automation or the fact that you can write a screenshot tool in less than 500 LOC are only possible if you talk to X directly. And there the possibilities are almost limitless. And thanks to the xcb library it's actually somewhat convenient to use.
Also certain types of power tools for mac probably need use Quartz directly as well.
kelnos 6 hours ago [-]
> Window managers in general, xdotool, all kinds of input mapping and automation or the fact that you can write a screenshot tool in less than 500 LOC are only possible if you talk to X directly.
Honestly I think this is a pretty fair approximation of "no one". How many people are writing tools like this vs. the number of people writing regular applications? A very small number, I'd say.
And after working extensively with both libX11/libxcb and libwayland-client directly, I can say that none of them are particularly pleasant to work with. Actually, no, that's not true: libwayland-client wins, easily. Every single Wayland protocol has code generated for it that works exactly the same way. I suppose the same is (more or less) true of libxcb, but libX11 (and all the other libraries you might have to use, like libXrender, libXrandr, libXext...) are a complete mess.
And even then, libwayland-client has a much lower number of concepts you have to understand than libxcb does, simply because the Wayland protocol has a small number of concepts you need to understand. libxcb is definitely an improvement over libX11, but it can't magically make all the underlying X11 protocol concepts become unified.
hparadiz 8 hours ago [-]
Having written a new gtk program recently I had to implement Wayland and X -isms in the code. Off the top of my head X prefers using W_Class and Wayland prefers app-id with each window having a role set. Both are fine. I honestly think Wayland is nicer but realistically you code for both. To get a global hot key you register it with the compositor and it works. But you can run a background daemon to catch all keys if you really want.
rezonant 3 hours ago [-]
No one who loved themselves wrote Xlib apps directly either.
whizzter 44 minutes ago [-]
I actually wrote some stuff directly because I was young, poor and stupid.
First year in uni my windows laptop broke, had to lug around a heavy second hand underpowered ppc powerbook and wrote some application I needed that I didn't want "bloated".
Font handling, shared memory backbuffers, network api, etc.. as I wrote in another comment. It is an API to solve over the wire graphics in the late 80s/early 90s era using idioms of that time, and already by year 2000 the problems (rasterization power) didn't exist nor is it even a suitable API surface (even less so 25 years later).
kelnos 6 hours ago [-]
Then in that case, the point is moot, as a similar version of "no one" uses the X11 APIs directly anymore, either.
11 hours ago [-]
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
> If you write software using GTK, Qt, or FLTK then you are writing Wayland software.
Why is it so complicated if it's just a common backend? Surely you don't need 1/10th the complexity just to render gnome or kde (never heard of fltk before).
sprash 8 hours ago [-]
It means that Wayland is the worst and most idiotic graphics API ever conceived. Talking to Wayland's "asynchronous object oriented protocol" directly is a fucking disaster [1]. Secondary and partly duplicated infrastructure in form of a dbus infested maze of "Desktop-Portals" is necessary to do things as simple as taking screenshots.
As such it essentially cements the GTK/Qt duopoly. Both are extremely subpar low-quality bloated toolkits that are also responsible for the fact that the Linux desktop is still not a thing in 2026.
Wayland isn't really a graphics API, it's just a protocol for clients to communicate with the compositor. Sure, there's a lot of boilerplate to get a window on the screen, but you also aren't supposed to use it directly if you want something super simple. It's really meant to be a low level interface for toolkits to be built on top of. Here are two disagreements I have with the linked article:
1. Comparison with raylib
This is imo comparing apples with oranges. Raylib sits at a much higher level than wayland, and it in fact supports using wayland as a backend.
2. Wayland is littered with callbacks because it's an object oriented protocol
It's more due to wayland being an asynchronous protocol. When you send a request to the compositor, chances are that you wont hear back from it immediately. But it's also likely that the app can do other things while waiting for the response. X11 is also in fact an asynchronous protocol, it's just that XLib creates a synchronous API on top of it (and as a result suffers from unnecessary roundtrip delays). In comparison, the newer XCB library is a lot more faithful in terms of preserving the asynchronous nature of the protocol and is used by, for example, Qt's X11 backend and even XLib itself. Of course that also makes it more difficult to use, not unlike libwayland, but the main takeaway here is that you can build a sync API on top of an async one if you wish and not vice versa.
I think some parts of the author's frustration is misplaced because they see libwayland as a toolkit, and in that case yeah it's pretty painful. But I really don't agree with the conclusion that this somehow makes it a bad foundation to build upon. As an analogy, making raw syscalls to the kernel is also painful, but that's why libraries exist.
(edit for better formatting)
hparadiz 8 hours ago [-]
Once you set permissions the screenshot taking program always has them and you don't have to do grants more than once.
kelnos 6 hours ago [-]
I agree the portals thing is a horrid mess, but you don't need them to take a screenshot unless you're a sandboxed application. Which is probably a good thing.
You can write a simple Wayland screenshot app with a few hundred lines of code[0], and a compositor that supports the ext-image-capture source and ext-image-copy-capture extensions implemented. (Or the older wlr-screencopy.)
I have plenty of criticism for Wayland and its ecosystem, but if you're going to criticize, don't spread FUD.
(I don't like being the guy who has to assert his credentials, but: I've implemented all three of those screenshot/screencast protocols in a Wayland compositor, just a month or so ago, and know how they work, and what it takes to talk to them from a client.)
Also I read through the link you posted. There's a lot of truth to many of those frustrations, but a lot of it is based on misunderstandings of what Wayland actually is. Yes, most people should be using a toolkit. No, it's not great that the main choices are GTK and Qt. I think there's absolutely room for a mid-level toolkit that lets you do the basics without requiring all the Wayland boilerplate. smithay-client-toolkit is one such effort, and I think it's a good start, though something even higher-level on top of it would be nice.
I also don't get the callback hate. I much prefer registering callbacks over a ginormous switch statement that has to dispatch every event under the sun. Toolkits use callbacks too; does the author hate all toolkits as well? You actually could talk to a Wayland compositor with a big switch statement if you wanted, though you'd need to modify libwayland-client to return events as you iterate its event queue rather than dispatch things to callbacks. That could be a fun project for someone who wanted to make Wayland event handling just like libX11 event handling. (See: just a fundamental misunderstanding of what Wayland is.)
And comparing raylib to libwayland-client is silly; they're fundamentally different things. And you can use raylib to talk to a Wayland compositor. It's just a bad-faith argument.
If you want to compare libwayland-client to something, you have to compare it to libX11 or libxcb. And while yes, getting a simple window on-screen is indeed simpler with libX11/libxcb, doing anything more complicated than that is on par with what you'd end up doing with libwayland-client.
[0] Not counting the protocol code that wayland-scanner will generate for you, because that's like saying you have to count the lines of code in libX11 to write an X11 screenshot app.
Gigachad 11 hours ago [-]
You 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 hours ago [-]
I 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...
moondev 8 hours ago [-]
Things like this remind me how much I love open source software. Choice is amazing shout out to all the contributors!
cagz 40 minutes ago [-]
I am a big fan of MAUI, but I'd really wish they fixed existing issues instead of extending it further. 3.9k open issues and counting. I've got 5 open, verified bugs, some from 2023 :(
exceptione 13 hours 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.
corstian 11 hours ago [-]
Between MAUI and Avalonia, Avalonia is the superior framework when it comes to technical quality as well as community response. What Avalonia doesn't have is the enterprise component libraries MAUI has. As part of this move Avalonia is about to reel in these libraries, as well as a whole bunch of MAUI teams.
In other words; Avalonia is coming for MAUIs turf.
3 hours ago [-]
nobodyandproud 12 hours 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 11 hours ago [-]
I 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.
siwatanejo 11 hours ago [-]
> Even MS doesn't fully believe in Maui
Source: I made it up.
array_key_first 9 hours ago [-]
MS doesn't believe in any of their toolkits, and the source is their actions. First off, they're addicting to introducing new toolkits instead of improving existing ones. But that doesn't even matter, because they just use Electron anyway.
exceptione 11 hours ago [-]
MS 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 11 hours ago [-]
How 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 11 hours ago [-]
doesn'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.
smackeyacky 5 hours ago [-]
Their actions show how much of a shit they don’t give about Maui. Or frankly any of the air biscuits they’ve launched as UI toolkits since winforms
cjbgkagh 10 hours ago [-]
Some of us have insider connections
pjmlp 13 hours 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.
fingerlocks 8 hours ago [-]
> By the way on macOS MAUI uses Catalyst as backend, not native macOS APIs.
What does this mean? Mac Catalyst is native. It’s just a thin bridge between iPhone’s UIKit and AppKit on MacOS, which are really the only two divergent frameworks in the entirety of the massive Apple SDK.
pjmlp 19 minutes ago [-]
It isn't really the same, exactly because of that divergence, and platform differences not covered by Catalyst.
Also they aren't the only frameworks that are divergent, although that is another discussion.
Accessibility bridging between .NET MAUI and Avalonia is currently limited.
Nowhere near production ready, got it.
MikeCodesDotNET 11 hours ago [-]
This 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 12 hours ago [-]
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).
skeeter2020 11 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately 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.
naasking 3 hours ago [-]
> 2. it makes good business sense.
What expected ROI are you basing this on? If it made good business sense on its own, it wouldn't be required by law.
saidnooneever 11 hours ago [-]
this 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 11 hours ago [-]
If 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 hours ago [-]
provide 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.
tacticus 9 hours ago [-]
> accessibility is like implementing braille and things for deaf and colourblind etc.
or
- larger fonts
- Better contrast controls,
- Non abstract art iconography,
- larger buttons and keyboard navigation,
- understanding that there are many types of colourblindness with different requriements,
- the ability to set lightmode on your app and website due to the issues reading text for anyone with astigmatisms,
- reducing the amount of animation or motion blur
The range of what accessibility is isn't small and some of it is going to be required for the vast majority of products. Also accessibility requirements change over time. eyes and hearing degrade. the desire to waste energy trying to find some stylish button that has no border and almost no contrast to indicate where it is goes away
9 hours ago [-]
saidnooneever 8 hours ago [-]
sure, its much more likely even than your examples too...
was there a point you wanted to make or did you just want to elaborate on what accessibility means? im sure google can churn up tons more examples if u need em....
fluffybucktsnek 7 hours ago [-]
Accessibility isn't a binary, though. Without any level of accessibility, your software is innaccesible/unusable and your MVP is DBA.
sombragris 5 hours ago [-]
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.
troad 6 hours ago [-]
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.
DeathArrow 53 minutes ago [-]
Yes, you got it right. Beside Linux target, Avalonia also opens WASM target.
general1465 13 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.
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 12 hours ago [-]
How mature is Avalonia for an universal app? Big 3 desktop plus big 2 mobile?
exceptione 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Kwpolska 13 hours 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.
Wonder how would it looks like if we run MAUI over Avalania over Flutter Impeller over browser's WebGPU.
giancarlostoro 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Rohansi 10 hours ago [-]
> Personally I prefer to use their built-in stuff as much as possible.
Why? Avalonia is a spiritual successor to WPF but FOSS and cross-platform.
giancarlostoro 8 hours ago [-]
Drastically less likely to get a rug pull, licensing wouldn't really be an issue for any commercial project, and easy to sell to an employer.
Rohansi 4 hours ago [-]
> Drastically less likely to get a rug pull
Microsoft's list of abandoned UI libraries says otherwise.
> licensing wouldn't really be an issue for any commercial project
It's MIT licensed. Simpler for commercial use than Qt.
> easy to sell to an employer
That's a tough one. For some reason employers are weird about non-Microsoft dependencies in the .NET space. It makes no sense to me personally. They likely aren't nearly as strict for web or mobile apps. But that'll definitely be a dealbreaker if your employer is like that.
giancarlostoro 3 hours ago [-]
> That's a tough one. For some reason employers are weird about non-Microsoft dependencies in the .NET space. It makes no sense to me personally. They likely aren't nearly as strict for web or mobile apps. But that'll definitely be a dealbreaker if your employer is like that.
We had a vendor go from "this license is fully royalty free" or whatever, to, we need to charge for all devs in your org, to then, for every single user of your app, we want to be paid. Ridiculous. The problem is companies who start getting license cost hungry and wanna squeeze every dollar out of you, when the project you're using it on might not even bring revenue.
politelemon 13 hours 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.
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.
tonyedwardspz 14 hours ago [-]
Excited for this. I do wonder how much effort it will be to get an existing app working with this.
blendergeek 13 hours ago [-]
Just a reminder that this MAUI has nothing to do with the pre-existing cross platform UI framework MauiKit from MAUI Project.
Microsoft adding Linux support for yet another framework nobody asked for while WinForms still exists in 2026 is very on brand.
louhike 14 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 13 hours ago [-]
I can understand the confusion, Microsoft also has a framework called MAUI.
LeFantome 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pie_flavor 13 hours ago [-]
The Microsoft MAUI framework is the one being brought to Linux by Avalonia, yes.
6 hours ago [-]
zteppenwolf 11 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone want .NET on Linux?
drzaiusx11 9 hours ago [-]
C# is cross platform, I'd bet money that most .Net services run on Linux these days (Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs after all) This just fills the client side gap so you can unify the full stack under one language a la node etc
jeremycarter 9 hours ago [-]
Hundreds of thousands of .NET applications run inside Linux Docker containers.
orthoxerox 11 hours ago [-]
Orgs that have their LOB software written in .NET and want to migrate to Linux without rewriting it. Avalonia's commercial offering is designed to do exactly that.
DeathArrow 48 minutes ago [-]
At work we have over ten major products written in .NET and running as Linux containers in the Cloud.
dardeaup 11 hours ago [-]
My guess would be so that they could make use of a single code base.
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.
https://avaloniaui.net/blog/bringing-wayland-support-to-aval...
If you subtract GNOME from the set then things become a lot more sane. "Compositor-specific extensions" are really "everyone besides GNOME extensions." The system tray extension isn't KDE-specific. Sure, window positions might not be available at all (because they don't make sense for a TWM), or a user might not have a system tray bar (or you might be on GNOME). However, if they did have a system tray it would be the StatusNotifierItem protocol. Ideally, these should be handled like other platform features like accelerometers etc.. That may not be possible, either way a lot of them can safely noop.
> [Article] For Avalonia, this means "Wayland support" isn't one implementation, it's potentially dozens. We're not just writing a Wayland backend; we're writing a GNOME-Wayland backend, a KDE-Wayland backend, a Sway-Wayland backend,
If you're making per-WM backends then you've fundamentally misunderstood how extensions are supposed to work. Other Wayland client libraries do not have a independent backends for KDE, Sway, and GNOME. Maybe quirks would be needed because you're attempting to support an existing UI library - but those should be few and far between.
IIRC Avalonia supports Vulkan as a rendering backend? Wayland protocols are the same line of thinking as Vulkan extensions.
wlroot and smithay are good examples of what extensions are used in the real world.
What? No, that's not the case. Yes, different Wayland compositors often support different extensions, but everyone has the basics (Wayland core, xdg_shell, and probably a few others). You need one backend, and then you can support extensions to implement more advanced features, but you of course have to be able to continue to work without any extensions present.
Yes, there are some features that might require a different extension on GNOME than it does on KDE (for example), but you don't need a full "backend" to handle those differences.
As someone who has always been skeptical of Wayland, frustrated with its shortcomings, and who has written both a compositor and XEMBED-workalike library for Wayland, it just feels like author is trying to play up the difficulties for PR purposes here.
More likely you have to use a GNOME Extension (as in the plugin, not a wayland extension), or maybe a gnome-specific, possibly undocumented D-bus protocol.
It's not particularly complicated, and certainly a lot simpler and cleaner than X11 in almost every way.
The reality of the situation is that there's sort of a hateful half-knowledge mob dynamic around the topic, where people run into a bug, do some online search, run into the existing mob, copy over some of its "arguments" and the whole thing keeps rolling and snowballing.
Sometimes this innocent, like OP discovering that UIs are actually non-trivial and there's different types of windows for different things (like in really any production-grade windowing system). So they share their new-found knowledge in the form of a list. Then the mob comes along and goes "look at this! they have a list of things, and it's probably too long!" and then in the next discussion it's "Did you know that Wayland has a LONG LIST OF THINGS?!" and so on and so forth.
It's like politics, and it's cyclic. One day the narrative will shift again.
The mob will not believe me either, for that matter, but FWIW, I've worked on the Linux desktop for over 20 years, and as the lead developer of KDE Plasma's taskbar and a semi-regular contributor to its window manager, I'm exposed to the complexity of these systems in a way that only relatively few people in the world are. And I'd rather keep the Wayland code than the X11 one, which I wrote a lot of.
That and studying smithay code.
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/book/ https://wayland-book.com/
* Core protocol drawing (lines, rectangles, arcs, the classics)
* XRender for compositing and alpha
* XShm for shared-memory blits
* GLX if you felt like bringing a GPU to a 2D fight
* XVideo for overlay video paths
* Pixmaps vs Windows, because why have one drawable when you can have two subtly different ones
* And of course, indirect rendering over the network if you enjoy latency as a design constraint
X11 was ok for it's time, but fundamentally it's an really outdated design to solve 80s/90s issues over the network in the way you solved it back then.
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 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?
Also certain types of power tools for mac probably need use Quartz directly as well.
Honestly I think this is a pretty fair approximation of "no one". How many people are writing tools like this vs. the number of people writing regular applications? A very small number, I'd say.
And after working extensively with both libX11/libxcb and libwayland-client directly, I can say that none of them are particularly pleasant to work with. Actually, no, that's not true: libwayland-client wins, easily. Every single Wayland protocol has code generated for it that works exactly the same way. I suppose the same is (more or less) true of libxcb, but libX11 (and all the other libraries you might have to use, like libXrender, libXrandr, libXext...) are a complete mess.
And even then, libwayland-client has a much lower number of concepts you have to understand than libxcb does, simply because the Wayland protocol has a small number of concepts you need to understand. libxcb is definitely an improvement over libX11, but it can't magically make all the underlying X11 protocol concepts become unified.
First year in uni my windows laptop broke, had to lug around a heavy second hand underpowered ppc powerbook and wrote some application I needed that I didn't want "bloated".
Font handling, shared memory backbuffers, network api, etc.. as I wrote in another comment. It is an API to solve over the wire graphics in the late 80s/early 90s era using idioms of that time, and already by year 2000 the problems (rasterization power) didn't exist nor is it even a suitable API surface (even less so 25 years later).
Why is it so complicated if it's just a common backend? Surely you don't need 1/10th the complexity just to render gnome or kde (never heard of fltk before).
As such it essentially cements the GTK/Qt duopoly. Both are extremely subpar low-quality bloated toolkits that are also responsible for the fact that the Linux desktop is still not a thing in 2026.
1.: https://www.p4m.dev/posts/29/index.html
1. Comparison with raylib
This is imo comparing apples with oranges. Raylib sits at a much higher level than wayland, and it in fact supports using wayland as a backend.
2. Wayland is littered with callbacks because it's an object oriented protocol
It's more due to wayland being an asynchronous protocol. When you send a request to the compositor, chances are that you wont hear back from it immediately. But it's also likely that the app can do other things while waiting for the response. X11 is also in fact an asynchronous protocol, it's just that XLib creates a synchronous API on top of it (and as a result suffers from unnecessary roundtrip delays). In comparison, the newer XCB library is a lot more faithful in terms of preserving the asynchronous nature of the protocol and is used by, for example, Qt's X11 backend and even XLib itself. Of course that also makes it more difficult to use, not unlike libwayland, but the main takeaway here is that you can build a sync API on top of an async one if you wish and not vice versa.
I think some parts of the author's frustration is misplaced because they see libwayland as a toolkit, and in that case yeah it's pretty painful. But I really don't agree with the conclusion that this somehow makes it a bad foundation to build upon. As an analogy, making raw syscalls to the kernel is also painful, but that's why libraries exist.
(edit for better formatting)
You can write a simple Wayland screenshot app with a few hundred lines of code[0], and a compositor that supports the ext-image-capture source and ext-image-copy-capture extensions implemented. (Or the older wlr-screencopy.)
I have plenty of criticism for Wayland and its ecosystem, but if you're going to criticize, don't spread FUD.
(I don't like being the guy who has to assert his credentials, but: I've implemented all three of those screenshot/screencast protocols in a Wayland compositor, just a month or so ago, and know how they work, and what it takes to talk to them from a client.)
Also I read through the link you posted. There's a lot of truth to many of those frustrations, but a lot of it is based on misunderstandings of what Wayland actually is. Yes, most people should be using a toolkit. No, it's not great that the main choices are GTK and Qt. I think there's absolutely room for a mid-level toolkit that lets you do the basics without requiring all the Wayland boilerplate. smithay-client-toolkit is one such effort, and I think it's a good start, though something even higher-level on top of it would be nice.
I also don't get the callback hate. I much prefer registering callbacks over a ginormous switch statement that has to dispatch every event under the sun. Toolkits use callbacks too; does the author hate all toolkits as well? You actually could talk to a Wayland compositor with a big switch statement if you wanted, though you'd need to modify libwayland-client to return events as you iterate its event queue rather than dispatch things to callbacks. That could be a fun project for someone who wanted to make Wayland event handling just like libX11 event handling. (See: just a fundamental misunderstanding of what Wayland is.)
And comparing raylib to libwayland-client is silly; they're fundamentally different things. And you can use raylib to talk to a Wayland compositor. It's just a bad-faith argument.
If you want to compare libwayland-client to something, you have to compare it to libX11 or libxcb. And while yes, getting a simple window on-screen is indeed simpler with libX11/libxcb, doing anything more complicated than that is on par with what you'd end up doing with libwayland-client.
[0] Not counting the protocol code that wayland-scanner will generate for you, because that's like saying you have to count the lines of code in libX11 to write an X11 screenshot app.
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.
In other words; Avalonia is coming for MAUIs turf.
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).
Source: I made it up.
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.
When COM rolled out, every product was very much on board.
The need for Maui in-house is for…what?
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.
What does this mean? Mac Catalyst is native. It’s just a thin bridge between iPhone’s UIKit and AppKit on MacOS, which are really the only two divergent frameworks in the entirety of the massive Apple SDK.
Also they aren't the only frameworks that are divergent, although that is another discussion.
Nowhere near production ready, got it.
We don’t expect this to graduate from a preview until November. There’s plenty of time to sort out Accessibility.
What expected ROI are you basing this on? If it made good business sense on its own, it wouldn't be required by law.
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.
or
- larger fonts
- Better contrast controls,
- Non abstract art iconography,
- larger buttons and keyboard navigation,
- understanding that there are many types of colourblindness with different requriements,
- the ability to set lightmode on your app and website due to the issues reading text for anyone with astigmatisms,
- reducing the amount of animation or motion blur
The range of what accessibility is isn't small and some of it is going to be required for the vast majority of products. Also accessibility requirements change over time. eyes and hearing degrade. the desire to waste energy trying to find some stylish button that has no border and almost no contrast to indicate where it is goes away
was there a point you wanted to make or did you just want to elaborate on what accessibility means? im sure google can churn up tons more examples if u need em....
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.
[1] https://avaloniaui.net/xpf/pricing
You won't need the paid offering if you build your stuff in AvaloniaUI directly.
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.
[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.Controls.Maui/blob/ma...
https://mauikit.org/
Why? Avalonia is a spiritual successor to WPF but FOSS and cross-platform.
Microsoft's list of abandoned UI libraries says otherwise.
> licensing wouldn't really be an issue for any commercial project
It's MIT licensed. Simpler for commercial use than Qt.
> easy to sell to an employer
That's a tough one. For some reason employers are weird about non-Microsoft dependencies in the .NET space. It makes no sense to me personally. They likely aren't nearly as strict for web or mobile apps. But that'll definitely be a dealbreaker if your employer is like that.
We had a vendor go from "this license is fully royalty free" or whatever, to, we need to charge for all devs in your org, to then, for every single user of your app, we want to be paid. Ridiculous. The problem is companies who start getting license cost hungry and wanna squeeze every dollar out of you, when the project you're using it on might not even bring revenue.
> 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/
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.
https://mauikit.org/
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.