Why ETS Is Still Windows-Only, And What The Association's Own Forum Says About It

Someone commented on my last post asking a fair question: why is ETS, the software every KNX project gets programmed in, still Windows-only in 2026? Is cross-platform development actually being talked about, and if not, why not? Worth answering properly rather than in a comment reply.

The current state, officially

Per KNX Association's own current software requirements page, ETS6 exclusively supports Windows 11 x64. Windows 10 support ended on 15 October 2025. Linux and macOS are explicitly listed as not supported. And it goes further than most people expect: KNX Association's own documentation states that running ETS6 in a virtual environment, Parallels, VMware, Virtual PC, or over Remote Desktop, is "not foreseen," and warranty and support cannot be given if you do. Plenty of people run it that way anyway, successfully, but officially you're on your own if something breaks.

Is cross-platform development being talked about?

Yes, genuinely, just not by KNX Association itself. There's a feature request thread on the association's own support forum, "ETS on a Mac," that's been open since November 2020. It's still active years later, with over seventy comments across professionals, hobbyists, and installers, most of them asking for the same thing. A KNX Association staff member has shown up in these threads, but only to merge duplicate requests and point people toward upvoting the original one, not to confirm or commit to anything. As of writing, there's no public roadmap item, no stated timeline, no official position beyond "we've seen the request."

So why hasn't it happened?

KNX Association hasn't published its reasoning, so I won't pretend to know it precisely. But the same forum thread makes the practical trade-off pretty visible if you read through it.

Porting ETS off Windows isn't a recompile. The application is built on the Windows .NET Framework, and by most accounts in that thread would need a genuine platform-independent rewrite, not a patch, to run natively elsewhere. There's real-world evidence this isn't a small technical gap either: CodeWeavers, the company behind CrossOver, a dedicated tool that exists specifically to run Windows software on Mac and Linux, currently rates ETS6 as "installs, will not run" on Mac and "will not install" at all on Linux (their own listing flags that rating as a few versions old, so it may have shifted since, but it's the most concrete outside data point available). If a tool built for exactly this purpose still can't get it working cleanly, that suggests the dependency runs deeper than a missing installer.

Then there's where the installed base actually sits. One installer in that same thread estimated well over 80% of the electrical trade works on Windows day to day. Several posters who'd genuinely like a Mac version, including one who called ETS6's current performance frustrating (slow filtering on large bus monitor logs was the specific complaint), said they'd still rather see KNX Association's small development team spend its time fixing problems every user hits today than split attention across a second platform. That's a real trade-off, not KNX Association brushing the request aside.

What this actually means if you're on a Mac

If you're an architect, designer, or KNX enthusiast working from a MacBook and want to run ETS yourself, the realistic path today is Parallels or Bootcamp running Windows 11, which multiple users in that community thread report working reliably, including on Apple Silicon via Windows 11 ARM through Parallels. Just budget for it as an unsupported setup rather than an official one, and don't rely on it for anything commissioning-critical without a proper Windows machine as backup.

For what it's worth, this is a limitation of the engineering software, not the KNX standard itself. The bus, the devices, the open multi-manufacturer ecosystem, none of that cares what operating system programmed it. It's worth knowing about before you buy a laptop for a project, not a reason to second-guess the platform underneath it.

Just a conversation about what the project needs.

wayne@knxlogic.co.za | 082 564 3982 | www.knxlogic.co.za