Avalonia UI has released Preview 1 of a MAUI backend that brings .NET MAUI applications to Linux — filling a gap Microsoft has shown no interest in closing.
The backstory matters here. .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) is Microsoft's cross-platform UI framework, the successor to Xamarin.Forms. It targets Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. Notice what's missing. Despite .NET itself running beautifully on Linux, MAUI has never officially supported the platform. Microsoft's position has been consistent: Linux desktop isn't a priority. Community efforts to add Linux support have stalled or fragmented.
Avalonia UI is an open-source .NET UI framework that already runs on Linux (and Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, WebAssembly, and even embedded devices). It uses its own rendering pipeline — Skia-based, pixel-identical across platforms — rather than wrapping native controls. Think of it as the Flutter of the .NET world.
What Avalonia has done with this preview is create a MAUI backend that renders MAUI controls using Avalonia's rendering engine. If you have an existing MAUI app, you can now target Linux without rewriting your UI layer. Your MAUI XAML, your data bindings, your controls — they render through Avalonia instead of through a native platform handler.
This is a meaningful architectural choice. Rather than trying to map MAUI controls to GTK or Qt widgets (the approach previous community efforts took, with predictable fidelity issues), Avalonia draws everything itself. You get consistency at the cost of native look-and-feel — the same tradeoff Flutter makes, and one that most developers building internal tools or cross-platform apps are happy to accept.
For .NET shops, this is the most practical path to Linux desktop support that's emerged. Enterprise teams deploying to Linux workstations, developers building tooling, anyone who picked MAUI and then discovered their Linux users were left out — this is directly for you.
Caveats: it's Preview 1. Not every MAUI control will work perfectly. Performance characteristics on Linux haven't been benchmarked publicly yet. And you're adding a dependency on Avalonia's rendering stack, which means bugs in Avalonia's Linux support become your bugs too.
But the signal is clear: Microsoft won't bring MAUI to Linux. The community just did it anyway, and the approach — using Avalonia's mature rendering engine rather than starting from scratch — is the pragmatic one. If you're in the .NET ecosystem and Linux matters to your users, this is worth evaluating now rather than waiting for a stable release.
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.
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 t
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 switch
Accessibility bridging between .NET MAUI and Avalonia is currently limited.Nowhere near production ready, got it.
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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 di