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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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What's the twist? There must be some reason.
I guess it's simply the framing: It was a not very actively maintained open source project. So they've decided to turn it over to a new maintainer. Calling that 'donation' is a bit pushing it
Most of the time a company does something like this they would just let it die. It’s good that Microsoft have at least made the effort to hand it over to a team who’s willing to keep it going.
...Like MS-DOS getting open sourced. It's pretty much worthless unless you need to use some really old device.
It's certainly good, I'm not arguing that. My point is, if the wine team is interested, they can fork the unmaintained project, and work on that. Eventually, people will switch over to the active fork. What Microsoft is doing, is helping the process along, and making it easier. So it's good, and helpful - but not really a "donation" to winehq.
Actually, wine used to maintain a fork.
So it's like "gifting" someone a puppy.
.NET runs natively on Linux since quite some time. Honestly, I don't get what Mono is even good for these days. Maybe reverse engineering old .NET versions.
.net core is the future but Mono is still important for running legacy .net framework applications like ones that use WinForms or WPF. That's pretty much it. Anything new should go straight to .net core.
Hm, WinForms and WPF with Wine you mean? Otherwise makes not much sense. Was WPF ever run in this combination!
Ah yeah. Mono didn't support WPF, but Mono did support running WinForms apps natively on Linux without using Wine.
The problem with WinForms is that at least serious 3rd party libraries do a lot of direct API calls I guess, hence Wine.
Only
.NET CoresadlyWhen I moved my personal laptop to Linux I needed WINE to run some source-available .NET apps that were written targeting the Windows-only
.NET FrameworkAll the new stuff is now on .NET Core/5.0 and up at least.
Hasn't been called ".NET Core" since 3.1
Although it's essentially the subsequent version of core, .NET 5 is the successor to both .NET Core 3.1 and .NET Framework 4.
Since then, it's just been called .NET 5/6/7/8/...
IIRC Mono was mostly used for WASM as it was optimized for smaller builds than the full fat CoreCLR (talking about .NET non-Framework Mono)
WASM? Are you talking about WebAssembly?
yes
Cost cutting.
Probably simply that they are done with it (mono specifically, and possibly .net framework in the long run)
I would be extremely surprised if they are planning to abandon .NET
With ICAAN introduction of new gTLDs now they can drop .NET and pick up .ONLINE
Underrated comment.
Well they said .NET Framework, and I also wouldn't be surprised if they more or less wrapped that up - .NET Framework specifically means the old implementation of the CLR, and it's been pretty much superseded by an implementation just called .NET, formerly known as .NET Core (definitely not confusing at all, thanks Microsoft). .NET Framework was only written for Windows, hence the need for Mono/Xamarin on other platforms. In contrast, .NET is cross-platform by default.
They officially don't care about running .NET applications on Linux anymore. They never really did before but so few people fell for that trap Microsoft is finally ready to turn in the towel
Huh, you are very much mistaken. Since .NET they have official and vast support for running on Linux and MacOS. Before they didn't and hence Mono/Xamarin.
It's more they are focused on running ASP and CLI apps on Linux, there is no official MS GUI library/framework for Linux which is one big thing missing from modern .net, there are a couple of thrid party ones like Avalonia however.
What the hell are you talking about?!
They are saying very little in Linux world moved to .NET/C# : https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mono
It's just not popular in Linux world despite MS attempts to make it so. It's a Windows people language.
Very few package maintainers even like providing packages written in C#/.NET. For example, the linux version of git-credential-manager (included with git on windows) is only available on gentoo, nixpkgs, and the AUR. There's linux builds in the github releases, but nobody will ship it.
If nothing else, a lot of (containerized) .NET (web) services run on Linux. Also note that .NET apps can be packed as standalone (ignore the size) and as such are as any other standalone app.
You got some stats? The Debian stats say no one is using it on the desktop or traditional server stuff. I can believe Windows C# Dev are porting their closed service to Linux to improve, well, everything.
No stats, just what I see and consider logically. If you have a .NET (web) app, it makes sense to run it (for free) under Linux (directly or using docker/kubernetes/etc.) instead of paying Windows server license. Sadly I don't see download counter for dotnet linux images but they would be some sort of an indicator. I can believe Desktop apps are not many, though, for historical reasons mostly. But now one can create a standalone nice looking app as well, perhaps they will be more frequent in future, who knows.
I think it will remain a Windows dev thing. Even if they sometimes use Linux as a runtime. Linux devs will use Python or something else. PHP is legacy really now. Go is popular for apps started at a certain time, but Rust seams to be replacing it. Which is good as Go is as Google as C# is MS.
The thing is that we have to define what exactly we are talking about. Existing Linux devs are indeed unlikely to switch to .NET, though perhaps a bit unfairly (based on 'old' Microsoft) but who really knows what future brings. Anyway, I was talking about .NET apps running on Linux, not about Linux developers switch to .NET. We can agree on this, right?
As I said, I can see Windows .NET people using Linux for server runtime. Actural Linux natives aren't going to touch that stuff. There is no new Microsoft. I've been hearing new Microsoft for over 20 years. In that time they never stopped the patent trolling, corrupted the ISO process for OOXML, continued their anti competive practices, etc. They never stopped being a big tech monster. Just equally big new monsters came along so they went it to background to those not watching. They still need dealing with. They are the definition of the confusion of standards and monopolies.