Do. I use Mono? Yes, three packaged apps (Banshee, GNOME Do, MonoDevelop), plus an in-house app I’ve been working on since 2007 which I’m in the process of trying to release under a Free license.

You really remind me of a Mac user. Do you actually develop mono or develop with mono? Surely you don’t USE mono apps! If so you must have a very small picture and/or music/media collection, because this shit is heinously slow.

Y’know, the *actual* whole point of Mono, not the whole point you’ve decided in your own mind

“Mono 2.0 is a milestone in the project because, as Novell product manager Joseph Hill explains, “We’re really signalling that we’ve completed compatibility with .Net 2.0′s API.”"

Mmmmkay… so mono doesn’t exist as a “portable” development platform. It was never meant to. You don’t care if it does… except.. it was. It is. And what you care about is meaningless unless your name is Miguel or Marc or something rich and/or connected like that.

“However, as Hill points out, Mono has already done considerable work on compatibility with .Net 3.0 and 3.5, so Mono 2.0 is “a little more like 3.5 minus several of the big libraries that were added to 3.0 that we’re not seeing a lot of uptake on — for example, the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the Windows Presentation Foundation.”"

Sure sounds to me like mono is all about supporting .net on linux. Think me as dense as you like but I didn’t get into honors English in college for nothing. How’s your comprehension skills?

“Even more importantly, for de Icaza, the release is a moment to reflect that the project has “come to the point where people consider Mono an alternative implementation” of .Net. For example, he cites the example of the compiler for F#, whose developers “not only test on Mono before shipping, but also provide installation scripts for Linux. Now we’re finally regarded as a serious project, and not just a toy project.”"

In those paragraphs they’ve mentioned .net and Microsoft more than mono. Yes, the object is mono… but the verb is “compatible” and the secondary object is most definitely Microsoft.

And yes, I’ve had plenty of python apps that require this version not that, or require some funky library… but.. whoah, wasn’t the whole point of .net (and mono) to fix most of that? It really doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t fix any of it. And that’s the point: it has no reason for being. It’s completely redundant.. on so many levels.

How about Windows users run, I dunno, Windows? And Mono has nothing to do with “that wonderful MS experience”

I meant linux users.. new linux users. portential linux users. You know, the “vivre la diference?” The topic you introduced? For those who are skeptical about linux, mono presents a terrific way to retain some of that microsoft experience. They even get dlls and exe files out of the deal.

Demagogic bullshit. There’s really no other way to summarise this, sorry. You have the gall to complain about childishness when you’re arguing OMG LOLZORS TEH FILE STENSIONS SI SMELLY LIKE POO!?

Furthermore, if you had actually read what I wrote beyond the title, you’d have noticed that my blog post has absolutely nothing to do with what you think it does

Maybe it’s just a problem with most mono apps I have tried being made by careless idiots who cannot properly document – oh well. If the majority of mono apps one finds are like this, that is also a problem with the language.

You’ve never found a C/C++/Java/Haskell/LOLCODE/Python/Ruby/PHP app which is badly documented or doesn’t “just work”? What a curious range of apps you’ve tried out.

I don’t care about numbers. The anecdote isn’t “made up” it’s a recent experience in fact. So pray tell, why would mono developers need to constantly go back and forth through multiple versions?

If you’ve never had an app which compiles with GCC3 but not GCC4, or Python 2.5 but not Python 2.6, then you must be very new to this Linux malarkey. Ditto if you’ve never wanted to install something newer than is found in the distro for one reason or another (e.g. to try out some new feature)

.NET was “invented” to correct, in part, that problem of outdated libraries. This isn’t opinion it’s a statement of fact as told by MS reps. It would allow libs to be updated while you still keep the old libs around and (ideally) they all work together. Except they don’t. And there’s no reason for it if the code is being properly supported in the first place. Is mono not just an open .net? What is monos reason for existing if not to simply keep up with those joneses?

Having multiple versions of corlib side by side is fine. It’s always been fine. However, Mono is not Microsoft.NET, Ubuntu is not Windows, and I have no particular interest in keeping libraries unneeded by the majority of people (i.e. Ubuntu users) lying around on their systems for no good reason. If all the apps are 2.0-only, why install corlib 1.1? And if you have a 1.1 app to run (an UNPACKAGED app which does not contain and therefore automatically deal with dependencies), why not install the libraries it needs rather than pissing and moaning? Do you behave the same way when you try to run a C app you download & don’t have all the libs already installed, rather than checking with ldd & installing what’s missing?

How do you know what are and are not windows apps? You ain’ paying attention – I specifically mentioned a windows app – a sewing machine app, I believe. Written in .NET.. but it dont work in mono. So it ain’t portable.. except the dev says it is. So it’s a Windows app, no?

You were bitching about a lack of “high-quality Mono apps” – non-portable (despite misguided developers’ protestations) apps for Microsoft.NET are not Mono apps. They MIGHT run on MOno, especially if the developer fixes whatever buggy non-portable assumptions they’re making, but it has NEVER been the primary goal of Mono, and certainly isn’t my own goal with Mono. If Windows compatibility is your own goal, why not contribute fixes to Windows-related nonsense?

I meant linux users.. new linux users. portential linux users. You know, the “vivre la diference?” The topic you introduced? For those who are skeptical about linux, mono presents a terrific way to retain some of that microsoft experience. They even get dlls and exe files out of the deal.

” They SORTA work. Just don’t ever rip out mono and think you’re gonna get it reinstalled. You can apt-get remove and apt-get install and shit will be broken. What’s broken? Dunno. And even if you never do this, good luck trying to get some other app working.

Utter unmitigated bullshit. This is precisely what a packager takes care of – and if it’s not done effectively, ANY language will do the same thing. Haskell, Java, whatever.”

No bullshit to it – except the bullshit of screwing with mono apps that don’t work well or often don’t even install. Lots of bullshit when it comes to trying to solve the problems when something dont install properly. Maybe it’s just a problem with most mono apps I have tried being made by careless idiots who cannot properly document – oh well. If the majority of mono apps one finds are like this, that is also a problem with the language. Maybe there’s something to be said for the language providing a barrier to entry – maybe language snobs actually have a point.

You *CAN’T* have multiple versions of Mono installed outside the shitty realm of /opt (which always goes wrong due to user stupidity, I might add), there was never a 1.4, and your made-up anecdote pretty obviously needs some work.

http://blog.carrion.ws/2009/07/01/multiple-parallel-mono-environments/

I don’t care about numbers. The anecdote isn’t “made up” it’s a recent experience in fact. So pray tell, why would mono developers need to constantly go back and forth through multiple versions?

.NET was “invented” to correct, in part, that problem of outdated libraries. This isn’t opinion it’s a statement of fact as told by MS reps. It would allow libs to be updated while you still keep the old libs around and (ideally) they all work together. Except they don’t. And there’s no reason for it if the code is being properly supported in the first place. Is mono not just an open .net? What is monos reason for existing if not to simply keep up with those joneses?

Screw it. I’ll just install windows in a vm and run the fucking windows app there… it’s easier, and at least the MesS feels “contained.”

Except they’re not Windows apps, and this line is only trotted out by people with a bizarre Windows fetish.

How do you know what are and are not windows apps? You ain’ paying attention – I specifically mentioned a windows app – a sewing machine app, I believe. Written in .NET.. but it dont work in mono. So it ain’t portable.. except the dev says it is. So it’s a Windows app, no?

I have no fetish for windows. I hate windows. I really don’t have a problem with windows apps aside from they tend to be ugly and clunky feeling cuz they look like windows. But I am completely mercenary about it – I got no problem with wine or running things in a vm; I do it all the time.

I simply hate mono. I have seen no unique and high quality apps using it. It seems to create more problems than it solves, and it has no reason for being aside from facilitating the intermingling of two very different gene pools of programmers.

I think the people who insist mono is part of some giant conspiracy to undermine the entire linux desktop are paranoid fools (worse case is they are right about miguel so… oops! gnome is dead, long live kde) I just hate mono because of a number of technical problems. There’s many things I hate about python as well, but at least there are enough unique high quality apps to give it value. Maybe mono will get there one day, but I doubt it will be any time soon. It’s had nearly a decade – but how many great python apps were there in 2000?

How about this? You can tell windows users that they can install mono on their machines and get back that wonderful MS experience!

How about Windows users run, I dunno, Windows? And Mono has nothing to do with “that wonderful MS experience”

I don’t hate mono because it’s part of some paranoid scheme to undermine linux – that’s just nuts. I hate mono because it bring with it all the same stupid errors and bugs and conflicts I grew to hate when I used Windows.

I used to LOVE programming in javascript… er, Jscript. I was really god with it; I had whole desktop apps written in jscript; I had a media player and even a front end for a video editor (I contributed a good bit of code to avisynth and longed for a decent front end for it). I knew how to write dlls in jscript (most folks didnt even realize you could do that back in 1999) and had all the docs right there in a most prominent spot on my desktop.

Then, I got an actual job doing it and when tried making my cool desktop toys work on other machines, I stumbled into a support nightmare. They wouldn’t work on xp cuz xp had security lockdowns; they wouldn’t work on win2k (where I wrote them) unless this exact set up was installed; they would never work on win98 (which many were still using) and would probably never work on xp. Every time ms updated its jscript engine and we needed to upgrade because the database devveloper needed some new functionality, I ended up having to rewrite chunks of my code too.

What a pain in the ass. After that job I continued in ms-land a little while longer, but after gettign code red and having to spend three fucking days trying to get all my dev tools back to functionality I said screw this and installed linux FOR GOOD. No more dual boots, cuz dual boots make it too easy to not use linux, which ends up just wasting drive space. It was a tough ten weeks but after a few months I felt comfortable enough to be sure I was never going back.

So, potted version, you picked an extremely shitty language to write desktop apps for a shitty OS, and it didn’t work for you. So far, so mundane.

So now, every now and then, I get this wild hair and decide hey this app looks interesting so let’s try mono. The first time was back when beagle was in early development – man was that a nightmare. So now the ubuntu crew have beagle sorta working, and tomboy and banshee… yeah, ok.

Beagle’s problems are almost universally caused by the Unmanaged (i.e. C-based) library, not the Mono-based code.

They SORTA work. Just don’t ever rip out mono and think you’re gonna get it reinstalled. You can apt-get remove and apt-get install and shit will be broken. What’s broken? Dunno. And even if you never do this, good luck trying to get some other app working.

Utter unmitigated bullshit. This is precisely what a packager takes care of – and if it’s not done effectively, ANY language will do the same thing. Haskell, Java, whatever.

Oh, this app is looking for mono 1.1 and you have 1.4 installed. It’s using function that was deprecated or just “worked different” on 1.1, so now you have to install that. Yes, it was made that way – so what’s the problem? So what if you have five different versions of mono installed? Don’t want the stupid mserr messages? Just install every version! Then MAYBE you can get that sewing machine app working!

You *CAN’T* have multiple versions of Mono installed outside the shitty realm of /opt (which always goes wrong due to user stupidity, I might add), there was never a 1.4, and your made-up anecdote pretty obviously needs some work.

Screw it. I’ll just install windows in a vm and run the fucking windows app there… it’s easier, and at least the MesS feels “contained.”

Except they’re not Windows apps, and this line is only trotted out by people with a bizarre Windows fetish.

Sorry, my bad. I wasn’t aware when I stepped in here I was taking a seat at the kiddy table. I’ll depart now and leave you to your kiddie court…