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.
That and studying smithay code.
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/book/ https://wayland-book.com/
But when you try to do so, you see there's very little documentation and help out in the open, and by the commit history, you can see there's been like three dozen people who have ever contributed to the project.
The rate of code change and the obscurity means the knowledge simply does not build up over time.
So it's unclear how to fix an issue you've encountered, or add a feature, and if you've done so, how to get your changes merged.
* 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
Most apps are just using GTK and qt and doesn't even care about their x or Wayland backends.
Which of those? GTK apps look alien on KDE desktops, and Qt apps look alien on GNOME desktops. Also, if you only need to create a window with a GL or Vulkan canvas, pulling in an entire UI framework dependency is overkill. There's SDL, GLFW, winit etc etc - but those also don't fix the 'native window chrome' problem in all situations and they all have to work around missing Wayland features. The bare window system functionality (managing windows - including window chrome and positioning(!), clipboard, drag'n'drop, ...) should really be part of the OS APIs (like it is on *every other* desktop operating system). Why does desktop Linux have to do its own thing, and worse (in the sense of: more developer hostile) than other desktop operating systems?
So again, how is it different elsewhere? What about windows, where even their own frameworks look alien because they have 3-4 of them? How is that the fault of Wayland somehow?!
No? Where did I write that? I want my window to look and feel consistent with all other Linux desktop applications, and this is mainly achieved by having common window decorations (a problem that had already been solved by any other desktop operating system in the last 50 years).
I just gave you an example of Windows that by default fails this requirement (see settings vs control panel or what that is called), let alone when you install applications using sorts of different frameworks.
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.
Why not use a much simpler command buffer model like on 3D APIs, and only for actually asynchronous commands (but not simple synchronous getters)?
PS: is io_uring using sockets for its "shared memory ringbuffers"? If not why? Too much overhead? And if there's notable socket overhead, why is Wayland using sockets (since it has to solve a simar problem as io_uring or 3D APIs).
What happened is basically this:
- X11 was fairly complex, had a lot of dead-weight code, and a whole bunch of fundamental issues that were building up to warrant an "X12" and breaking the core protocols to get fixed.
- Alongside this, at some point in the relatively distant past, the XFree86 implementation (the most used one at the time, which later begat Xorg) was massively fat and did a huge amount of stuff, including driver-level work - think "PCI in userspace".
- Over the years, more and more of the work moved out of the X server and into e.g. the Linux kernel. Drivers, mode setting, input event handling, higher-level input event handling (libinput). Xorg also got a bit cleaner and modularized, making some of the remaining hard bits available in library form (e.g. xkb).
- With almost everything you need for a windowing system now cleanly factored out and no longer in X, trying out a wholly new windowing system suddenly became a tractable problem. This enabled the original Wayland author to attempt it and submit it for others to appraise.
- A lot of the active X and GUI developer liked what they saw and it managed to catch on.
- A lot of the people involved were in fact not naive, and did not ignore the classic "should you iterate or start over" conundrum. Wayland had a fairly strong backward compat story very early on in the form of Xwayland, which was created almost immediately, and convinced a lot of people.
In the end this is a very classic software engineering story. Would it have been possible to iterate X11 toward what Wayland is now in-place? Maybe. Not sure. Would the end result look a lot like Wayland today? Probably, the Wayland design is still quite good and modern.
It's a lot like Python 2.x vs. 3.x in the end.
We have eons better ways to transport graphical buffers around (also, what about sound? That seems reasonable - but now should the display server also be a sound server?), so building it into such a core protocol just doesn't make sense.
- Modern DX and old Direct Draw games often was a clusterfuck in order to keep them running fast in Windows 8 and up.
- XVideo and overlay video for Windows were 100% the same; green glitches on drawing, blue screens on screnshots et all.
- Same issue in Windows with pixmaps.
- RDP was fine there, even Gnome adopted it. But I prefer 9front's transparency, you don't need to get everything from the host to use it, with 9front you can just get the device you want, you can decouple auth from the GUI and a lot more, even the network and audio devices. Much fetter than X11's remote setups, VNC, RDP and whatnot.
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.
Why would I want to add more complexity to a display server?
https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-wayland
Basic window system functionality really needs to be provided by the OS, not by 3rd-party libraries. And there's no reason why simple things like creating a window should be drastically more code in an OS API than in a wrapper library like SDL.
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).
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. 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.
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 I am an Xfce user, I'm happy to wait.
I'm not all that informed regarding Waylands benefits and shortcomings (just being puzzled when "performance" or "overhead" is quoted as reason to move away from X11, remembering that the latter didn't seem unbearable slow 30 years ago and that performance of computers in general and computer graphics in particular increased manifold since then). There are however some who should know, who don't seem all that excited: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...
Whether you use Wayland or not depends on what DE/Window Manager/Session Manager you are using and not what distro.
Cinnamon, XFCE don't really work with Wayland. Cinnamon just hangs on my system, and I don't believe XFCE even support. I am on Debian 13, so things may have changed on the latest versions.
Making Gnome using X was as simple as disabling Wayland. A one line change in GDM config somewhere and restart the session manager.
> 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.
That because a similar things happen fairly regularly in Linux land. It seems every 5 years (or so it seems) There are things that are working perfectly fine, and then someone/some group decided that half of a particular stack needs rewriting/replacing at <large corp> and we go through a rigmarole of bugs, breakage, stability issues.
It isn't people being irrational. It is people not wanting to go through another 5 years of churn on their desktops. If people are happy with something that works fine in their opinion and it is replaced by something else that causes a lot of churn and it isn't substantially better a lot of people are going to be left pissed off about it and thus the drama and resentment.
This also causes issues for other operating systems e.g. BSDs/Solaris forks etc. Their users have to deal with all the Linuxisms.
> Wayland is the better choice today.
The problem is that a lot of stuff still doesn't work properly. I am using a modern AMD card. I get weird hang ups in Chrome/Brave that don't happen in X. Sometimes the windows "stick", other times the whole desktop just locks up. Doesn't happen in X at all. I am a web developer, so this is very annoying.
There is another problem and that is that I don't think Wayland even works on non-Linux *nix like FreeBSD.
The things that Gnome did well with Wayland is things like Different Refresh rates, display scaling etc. That all worked nicely. However the way Gnome works with Games can be a PITA.
When I was using Wayland BTW, I was using it with Gnome 48, GDM on Debian 13. I think they just released Gnome 50. I went to Cinnamon and can't really go back because I updated too many dependencies from back-ports to reinstall Gnome.
You are free to use whatever you feel like, no one stops you.
At the same time, you are not free to request for/expect other people's free work in maintaining stuff forever for you. If you want it to continue to work, feel free to step up and maintain Xorg/your DE of choice, whatever.
Also, both systemd and Wayland are just factually better stuff than their predecessors. Not everything is NIH, there are legitimate technological advances we are better off adapting at one point - see git, not managing the complex process of system boot via hacky bash scripts, or package management (we are not yet ready, but nix is the future, all other package management systems are objectively worse).
It is just sometimes in an easier context to be replaced. Display stack is tightly depended on by all kinds of software and no matter how good an interop it has (xwayland), people will always find problems and blame the new tool. The network effect should not be underestimated.
I was merely explaining to the person why people become resentful as they didn't seem to grasp it.
It was neither condoning or condemning the position. Simply why it happens.
> At the same time, you are not free to request for/expect other people's free work in maintaining stuff forever for you. If you want it to continue to work, feel free to step up and maintain Xorg/your DE of choice, whatever.
1) I wasn't doing anything of the sort. I am also allowed to criticise anything I like and for any reason I like. I don't expect anyone to take any notice of it either. Statements such as this is done by people simply to shut people up.
2) You and I both know that isn't possible for the vast majority of people. Further more even if it were, it is basically a second full time job, which most people don't have the time to do.
Therefore I treat statements such as this as disingenuous.
> Also, both systemd and Wayland are just factually better stuff than their predecessors.
So says you. The fact that there is a huge amount of disagreement and discussion over it would suggest otherwise.
All I will say is that. I was using Linux distros way before Wayland and SystemD were even conceived and things worked about as well as they do now, outside of hardware support.
I use Debian 13 that comes with Wayland and SystemD as default. So I don't care what I use, as long as it works.
> Package management (we are not yet ready, but nix is the future, all other package management systems are objectively worse).
Thomas Sowell is often quoted as saying "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs". When people make statements like this, I honestly don't think they fundamentally understand what Engineering is really about. Every solution has a bunch of trade offs.
I don't know much about NixOS, but spending 5 minutes searching there are a bunch of trade offs you have to make when using it. Which means it is at best not objectively better. Not mentioning those makes me think you are a fanboy, and you can never get an honest assessment from fanboy.
> It is just sometimes in an easier context to be replaced. Display stack is tightly depended on by all kinds of software and no matter how good an interop it has (xwayland), people will always find problems and blame the new tool.
People will blame the replacement if it doesn't substantially offer anything new, while introducing news defects and limitations.
That is the issue. Not that they are just curmudgeon. It is a completely rational and correct to be critical of change when the perceived benefit at best marginal.
Sure, but we are talking about desktop OSs which do specify a set of requirements to fulfill, and in that scenario I do believe both systemd and especially nix brings a whole lot of benefits at the price of insignificant/small tradeoffs.
I also agree with you that one should be critical of change, especially change of change's sake. But at the same time it does get old, similarly to when you are surrounded by people still using an FTP server with .V2.4.final.beforeRelease suffices instead of learning git. It took time to make git the default and people naturally resist change. But not always for a good reason.
not to mention GTK and Qt, both supporting wayland.
Most software vendors never talked to X directly either. You seem extremely misinformed
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.
The whole idea of granular and independent extensions is pretty stupid across GL, Vulkan and Wayland. It makes more sense to have a handful "tiers" or "profiles" which guarantee a specific set of features (eg how all other 3D APIs do it) - e.g. Wayland should have a "desktop profile" instead of dozens of optional extensions needed for desktop scenarios, other profiles could be "mobile" and "kiosk".
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.
Most other Linux projects "just work" without any drama (usually those not originating at Red Hat?). Makes you wonder why Wayland is so special (or maybe it is something special about the Red Hat company culture?).
Sometimes a badly designed system is simply a badly designed system, and the main forces behind Wayland seem to be exceptionally tone deaf and defensive when it comes to feedback both from users and application developers (e.g. there seems to be a general "we know better what's good for you" attitude).
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.
[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.Controls.Maui/blob/ma...
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.
> Avalonia renders through Skia compiled to WebAssembly
I'd guess it builds on Skia CanvasKit and renders to an HTML Canvas element.
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.
And no just because the compass is #ifdef’d out when CoreLocation is compiled for MacOs does not count as “divergent”
The various incantations of AI frameworks that have been introduced throughout the years?
SwiftUI vs UIKit vs AppKit vs Cocoa Touch vs Catalyst?
SceneKit vs RealityKit?
I understand as target platform also the various versions of macOS.
Cocoa Touch is just the umbrella term for iOS frameworks including UIKit, and Catalyst also uses UIKit.
Go look at any of Apple’s sample code. Outside of UIKit/Appkit, most of their samples target both platforms simultaneously
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.
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).
Step 2: "now that your devs have seen how good Avalonia is, why not use it in your future projects directly? It's our core business, so we won't do a regular rug-pull like MS"
Notice how many languages DevDiv supports nowadays, see languages dropdown on https://devblogs.microsoft.com.
Thus even .NET has to fight for internal relevance, most Azure contributions to CNCF are in Go and Rust, they even have a "Rust for C#/.NET Developers" (https://microsoft.github.io/rust-for-dotnet-devs/latest) tutorial.
Azure is also mostly doing Azure Linux nowadays, even if Azure Host OS is still Windows based.
Except that outside Windows, .NET is only another option among many.
Add to it the way cloud infrastructure key offerings are based on, and Azure wanting to play against Google and AWS for first place, naturally the Azure team isn't that focused on being known as the Windows only cloud, as it used to be on the early days.
This naturally plays a role in what programming languages they end up adopting.
Parallel to it, note how Microsoft also plays a role in Python based tooling nowadays.
> a survival decision
> Parallel to it, note how Microsoft also plays a role in Python based tooling nowadays.
It all started with the folks that joined ASP.NET team with a FOSS culture, with Damian Edwards and David Fowley being the driving force of those early .NET Core day, JSON solution format (which ended up being dropped), replacing IIS with Kestrel, and so on. Eventually they got the backing from Scott Hanselmann and Scott Guthrie, both Scotts nowadays enjoy a very high management position.
If you listen to random interviews of them, at known .NET podcasts like .NET Rocks, Coding After Work, Nick Chapsas, and so forth, they often refer the identity crisis of .NET outside Windows and bringing in new generations, as an ongoing issue.
Example, Maddy Montaquilla, the product lead for .NET Aspire, on her Coding After Work interview, from minute 27 until 32:20.
https://codingafterwork.com/episodes/26f166e4-0f0f-43d7-8a00...
Source: I made it up.
When COM rolled out, every product was very much on board.
The need for Maui in-house is for…what?
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.
In other words; Avalonia is coming for MAUIs turf.
Nowhere near production ready, got it.
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....
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 doesn't only mean easing access to your application to people with disabilities. Accessibility makes it also easier for people with temporary or situational impairment to use your software. A simple example that comes to mind is single finger zooming on map applications, where you tap once and then hold-swipe up/down to zoom in/out, which makes it easy to be used with one hand. I know it's difficult to relate to people with permanent disabilities, but we can definitely relate to situational ones where we wish something was easier to use with one hand because the other was busy. Now imagine if it's the only way you can ever use it :-)
Ultimately, it leaves out no one and benefits everyone.
We don’t expect this to graduate from a preview until November. There’s plenty of time to sort out Accessibility.
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.
UI toolkits are probably the only space where a third-party vendor can challenge the MS. They can just ask the CTO how many unsupported or badly supported frameworks from Microsoft he or she can name.
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.
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.
Just like IBM, Google, Facebook, Oracle and other so beloved FOSS companies.
.NET has been on Linux for ages.