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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

mono-project.com

261–270 of 509 posts

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#261
post #11

Is the correct interpretation, reading between the lines that the original Mono project is being retired, and basically put on life support?

Look at the release history and you'll see it was already on life support. MS stopped adding new features to .NET Framework with 4.8 but Mono has yet to reach parity with that.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#262

.NET now runs on Linux and other platforms, so what is the purpose of maintaining Mono separately at this point?

wine-mono for one. It's also used for some desktop apps, crucially for those built with the WinForms framework, since the newer, .NET Core versions of that are Windows-only.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#263
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of .NET-Core was to remove all the (largely desktop-oriented) platform-specific dependencies that tied it to Windows, so you could run server-oriented .net programs on Linux. So no, afaik you can't simply run GUI apps built with .Net on Linux desktops - that's the reason Mono wasn't simply killed, because it covers that niche (which wouldn't even exist, were it not for Mono/Xamarin's efforts back then…

.net Core still has Windows Forms thoguh? At least I (for kicks) migrated one of my old .net 4.something projects to .net core and it still works and shows the classic Windows Forms GUI. It's (of course) not portable

.Net Core on Windows has support for loading assemblies that reference COM interfaces and the win32 API, along with other things that aren’t supported elsewhere like C++/CLI.

That’s why loading System.Windows.Forms still works, it’s not part of .Net 5+, but it can still load the assemblies on Windows (they still use GDI, etc under the hood).

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#264
post #185

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…

As the OP notes, MS use their own fork of Mono for the .NET Core runtime these days. So you're not wrong but they are different codebases these days.

The .NET Core runtime was never a fork of Mono, it’s always been a separate code base.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#265
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i want to love dotnet-core, especially since godot switched from mono in godot 3 to dotnet-core in godot 4, but so far i haven't been able to currently debian has a mono package but no dotnet-core package. i'm not sure why this is; usually when debian lacks a popular nominally open-source package like this, it's either because it fails to build from source, or because it has some kind of tricky licensing pitfall that…

.NET Core is available for Debian, you just have to add Microsoft's APT source [1]. Fedora [2], Ubuntu [3], and FreeBSD [4] build .NET from source themselves. A lot of work has been done to make it possible to build .NET from source [5] without closed source components, so it might just be a matter of someone being motivated to create the package for Debian. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/…

When using Microsoft repositories you need to explicitly opt out on telemetry collection.

I think telemetry collection alone should be a good reason for Debian to consider repackaging it. I don’t want telemetry to be collected on my GNU/Linux machine, thanks Microsoft, but you already have so much telemetry from my Windows machine, please leave my other machines alone.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mono implemented the GUI stuff like Windows Forms, do the latest windows cross platform stuff support that? Can you run .Net GUI windows program on linux without Mono but using the latest .Net thing ? I know it was not possible in the past.

I think this is what you need now... https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui "Build native, cross-platform desktop and mobile apps all in one framework." I know my buddy uses it to write Android apps on his Mac that interface to an ASP.NET Core web site.

I don't think that supports Linux tho

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#267
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

> Nowadays it sounds like .NET Core + third-party GUI libraries is the way to go. For reference for those unfamiliar with the terms: .NET Core was the name given to the cross-platform fork of the .NET runtime. It was forked out of .NET 4.x and dropped support for a lot of things in the first versions. It ran on various distributions of Linux and MacOS. At the same time there were forks of other libraries/frameworks i…

Minor nit: from what I understand dot net (core) is not a fork but rather a reimplementation / rewrite as far as I understand

> It was forked out of .NET 4.x and dropped support for a lot of things in the first versions.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be pedantic, English does have distinct words for the two connotations of free--"liberal" and "gratuitous". Although it should also be immediately obvious why those words aren't preferred either: "liberal" also has several other connotations (to the point that a "Liberal Party" could be almost anywhere on the political spectrum), while "gratuitous" tends to lean more towards "unnecessary" than "free of…

> English does have distinct words for the two connotations of free--"liberal" and "gratuitous". Sorry but no it doesn’t. These words have the other meanings you mentioned, but they don’t include either of the meanings of “free”. If you said you were giving away “gratuitous software”, native English speakers wouldn’t know what you were talking about. The only way to understand it would be to realize that those words…

The word "liberal" definitely has the same definition of "libre"--ever hear of the term "liberal democracy"? That's exactly the same kind free they're talking about.

"Gratuitous" also has that definition, though it's far less common in use. See the dictionary definition, e.g., here: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gratuitous

> 2. given, done, bestowed, or obtained without charge or payment; free; complimentary.

It's more of a stretch there, because the primary definition of gratuitous has a connotation of unnecessary, even undesirable. If you didn't have at least some hint of disapproval of a service, you'd reach for the word "free" long before "gratuitous".

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#269
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…

With commercial applications that want to just take their existing code and have it run on Linux with only a couple lines changed, Avalonia XPF will do that

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows: it's cross platform! Looks inside "Except for Linux" Huh

Contribute to the Maui backend for GTK and/or Qt, nothing is stopping you

Alternatively, just because you're on .NET doesn't mean you need to use Microsoft sanctioned UI toolkits, just as C++ has no "official" UI toolkit. You're free to pick up some GTK or Qt bindings if you want a native feeling and your application is already architectures correctly. Alternatively, throw Imgui at it if you just need dev tooling, or maybe try other cross platform toolkits in the ecosystem like Avalonia or Uno

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