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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

mono-project.com

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Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#111

Post by kelnos »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #96
dtquad wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's own FOSS multiplatform implementation of the .NET runtime is now much more performant and feature complete than Mono. However Mono is easier to embed into other applications and easier to port to new platforms. That is for example why it's used for the .NET/Blazor WebAssembly stuff. Microsoft still maintains their own fork of Mono for this specific use case. Mono also implements some of the legacy Windows…

Winforms and WPF are both very maintained and supported for .NET 8 on Windows, to clarify. Good cross platform desktop frameworks include Avalonia.

Are those frameworks available in .NET 8 on non-Windows platforms, though? If not, I think that's what the GP was getting at.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#112

Post by [deleted] »

lyu07282 wrote: post #88
bri3d wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mono has no reason to live anymore This isn't really true. Mono functions as a complete replacement for the ".NET Framework" - something that can be used to run any .NET app, including "legacy" apps targeting old ".NET Framework" versions, on any supported platform, even when the app was built to target Windows. dotnet/runtime is intended to run more modern applications that target ".NET Core" - basically, stuff th…

Won't most apps use way more .net stuff than core? Mono was a way to run dotnet apps on Linux, killing it meant killing cross platform support for modern dotnet desktop apps?

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#113

Post by kelnos »

ragebol wrote: post #43
jcims wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has ’free as in puppies’ not reached its rightful place on the podium?

I'm not a dog person: a puppy would be a burden (financially and time-wise) and provide me barely any fun.

To be fair, "free as in beer" doesn't work for a lot of people who don't drink (or do drink, but don't like beer). I don't think we're going to come up with a one-size-fits-all slogan...

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#115

Post by kelnos »

pentagrama wrote: post #106

A bit off-topic, but this makes me wonder about the relationship between Microsoft and Wine. Do they consider it a threat? An ally? Both? This is my first time seeing Microsoft acknowledge Wine's existence, and in this case, it was at least in a friendly manner? Or could there be bad faith behind this 'donation'?

Another poster quoted Wikipedia somewhere here; MS implicitly acknowledged Wine's existence back in 2005 when they added a check for some of Wine's registry keys which would disable Windows Update if it found them. And in 2020 MS filed an Amicus brief in that Google/Oracle lawsuit in support of free re-implementations of APIs, citing Wine as a positive example.

While I am still wary of Microsoft after their previous anti-competitive behaviors, I think they've taken a more pragmatic view of late, and realize that projects like Wine are actually good for their platform as a whole. I expect if Wine/Proton did not exist, we'd see more (for example) Windows-only games ported to macOS or Linux. With Wine/Proton, those ports are mostly not necessary, and Microsoft gets to say that Win32/DirectX is something of a cross-platform gaming "standard".

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#116

Post by Kye »

Blot2882 wrote: post #57
lolinder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there somewhere where someone new to the ecosystem can get a simple introduction to all of these different terms and which ones are still relevant today? I looked into .NET somewhat recently and came away with the apparently mistaken impression that Mono was how .NET did cross-platform. I guess I must have been reading old docs, but I'm pretty sure they were at least semi-official. Is there good documentation some…

Mono was, but newer versions of .NET run on Linux and Mac. You can install at the link below, and then making a project is just `dotnet new console` and run with `dotnet run` https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux

For historical context: this was before the conclusion of the antitrust case that led Microsoft to start softening its stance toward open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

This was the same year Antitrust came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)

Any support for open source or cross-platform stuff was a bulwark against claims of monopoly abuse, but none of it worked well enough to be a true replacement. Mono worked for some purposes, but it was far from the first party support cross-platform .NET gets today. Nowadays it sounds like .NET Core + third-party GUI libraries is the way to go.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#117

Post by grokys »

kelnos wrote: post #111
lloydatkinson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winforms and WPF are both very maintained and supported for .NET 8 on Windows, to clarify. Good cross platform desktop frameworks include Avalonia.

Are those frameworks available in .NET 8 on non-Windows platforms, though? If not, I think that's what the GP was getting at.

Not by Microsoft, but Avalonia has a commercial fork of WPF which runs on Linux and macOS:

https://avaloniaui.net/xpf

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#118

Post by moron4hire »

simion314 wrote: post #101
pionar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use third party libs like Avalonia[1] or Uno[2] [1] https://avaloniaui.net/ [2] https://platform.uno/

Sure, nobody wants to write Winforms new applications today My point is about running existing applications on Linux, there are still issues with running .Net GUI stuff under wine and Mono was not a perfect implementation. I read in other comments that the newer .Net cross platform stuff is not a replacement for Mono for running this old applications. (nobody will rewrite them to use the current GUI stuff from MS sin…

No, Microsoft's .NET only supports WinForms on Windows. They do have an official cross platform GUI toolkit in MAUI, but it strangely does not support Linux.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#119

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

lolinder wrote: post #49
zbowling wrote: post #31

I worked on Mono a lot back in the early 2000s (back in the SVN days before it moved to Git, even). This move makes a lot of sense. Things evolved a lot over the years. Mono's legacy goals, which are to be a portable CLR (.NET) runtime for platforms that Microsoft didn't care about, don't make much sense today. Mono made a lot of sense for running places where full .NET didn't, like in full AOT environments like on t…

Is there somewhere where someone new to the ecosystem can get a simple introduction to all of these different terms and which ones are still relevant today? I looked into .NET somewhat recently and came away with the apparently mistaken impression that Mono was how .NET did cross-platform. I guess I must have been reading old docs, but I'm pretty sure they were at least semi-official. Is there good documentation some…

> I looked into .NET somewhat recently and came away with the apparently mistaken impression that Mono was how .NET did cross-platform. I guess I must have been reading old docs,

History here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET

.NET Core 1.0 (2016) was the first cross platform prototype. It got good in a release in 2018 or 2019, I even forgot which now. And took over steadily after that.

We don't even think about it any more. "which OS is the prod env on" isn't a factor that causes any support worries at all.

Getting set up would start at https://dot.net/

And the download page, which should show you content for your current OS https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

But also other targets are here https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0

You'll want the latest SDK 8.0.x

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#120

Post by codersfocus »

jcims wrote: post #22
rickcarlino wrote: post #12

I feel like I’m missing some context here. Is this a “free as in take this puppy” situation? How do the wine developers benefit from this?

How has ’free as in puppies’ not reached its rightful place on the podium?

White elephant has usually been the go to animal for this kind of idiom
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