FYI - the owner of this site, gamingonlinux, was a mod on the !linux_gaming community until they were caught abusing their moderator powers. Then they deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it’s stupid design that mod logs are public.
I am no Microsoft fanboy, but I get the impression people are a bit overly skeptical here.
I think this is fairly obvious. They have no further use for it, they can either let it rot or they can do the tiniest bit of effort and get some positive PR. It might also just be as simple as an initiative from some employees.
Yup, what they needed from Xamarin was absorbed into .NET and now that have MAUI for cross platform stuff, it was either sunset mono or give it to someone else
.Net sucks, compared to mono. The compiler is slower, filesize after optimization is still higher and the character set in cli is far more limited when I compile an app with .Net.
I think they do in the enterprise hosting / software dev world, which is the reason for so much effort being poured into WSL, but for standard client applications or the “average user” switching to Linux I agree
Yeah, they want to be able to get people totally off Linux as a root OS.
By creating WSL, they now can say, "Oh, you like to develop for/on Linux? Well good news, Windows has Linux built in! Just come on over to Windows and you can use WSL and Linux on Azure for all your Linux needs!
And WSL is pretty good according to one of the other guys in my department that’s been using it.
The problem for Microsoft is that my entire user experience is better when I boot straight into Linux and use all their software (except vscode) in browser tabs.
Microsoft has had dotnet-core for awhile. If you are running production dotnet loads (eg a C# app), you’ve probably been using those Linux containers for awhile. This doesn’t surprise me; they usually aren’t interested in maintaining an open version of software they have more restrictive licenses for. Enterprises will continue to use dotnet-core and Microsoft will probably do something to shoot mono in the foot in a few years.
The reason to use mono over dotnet is political. This is stirring up some really old shit; I expect a continuation of that shit now. Mono is currently MIT as is dotnet core. Who knows what direction each project will go now? MS has a history of fucking with licenses and Wine uses copyleft setups.
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.
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.
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.
.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.
When 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 Framework
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.
I know a lot of folk that work at MS or have worked there, they are all very good people. They are highly motivated professionals that are top in their field. MS is a rich company and they recruit the best they can. However those are not the people making any kind of decisions. And it’s a cut throat company, if the budget gets cut, you are out on your ass. At least in most of the world, where strong employee protection isn’t a thing.
Don’t get me wrong, MS has a lot of bad apples just like any other company. Useless managers who say dumb shit and take praise for other peoples work. A leadership that doesn’t care about anything except their bonuses and the bottom line. But at least as far as the engineers go, there’s plenty of really good folk.
People also seem to forget how huge MS actually is. And a lot of the time the different branches within the company are as far away from each other as can be. Even within the same branch one can only talk to so many people.