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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

mono-project.com

331–340 of 509 posts

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#331
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Microsoft has finally realized that its animus toward projects like Wine and pre-acquisition Mono was ultimately unproductive, and a net negative for Microsoft itself. I still don't trust MS's motives in general, but I think they at least recognize that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a g…

>that Wine/Proton helps make the Win32 and DirectX APIs a sort of de-facto cross-platform standard when it comes to things like desktop gaming, and that this is a good thing for them. I'm not sure if it benefits microsoft in the long term, because the "backwards compatibility" features of Wine need to be implemented in Windows already as a part of the system. So in the long run wine/proton/mono will implement windows…

> I'm not sure if it benefits microsoft in the long term, because the "backwards compatibility" features of Wine need to be implemented in Windows already as a part of the system.

Sometimes running old software atop Wine on Windows is the easiest - or even only - option to have said old software work on new Windows.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#332
post #308
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you want your package to be in debian, you are going to have to find a debian developer who is willing to take responsibility for maintaining it. microsoft is already providing .deb packages on their website, at least binaries

But it is not Microsoft like I mentioned but .Net Foundation. They could get one of their people to become Debian maintainer.

getting one of your people to become a debian developer is similar in difficulty to getting one of your people to become a senator or a citizen of switzerland

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fully-cross platform To a point. Making cross platform native desktop apps is still in the hands of 3rd party vendors such as Avalonia and Uno. MAUI was supposed to fix that oversight to a less than stellar results.

That is like saying C is not cross platform because there is not a library for making desktop apps that use native components on all those platforms.

.NET/C#'s competitor JVM/Kotlin does provide a UI framework (Jetbrains Compose) that runs on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and the web.

That's what you have to compare against, and .NET/C# falls flat.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#334

I always assumed Microsoft did not condone Wine or other re-implementations of their APIs (like ReactOS), but that they were protected by DMCA reverse engineering provisions and anyway too insignificant to send the legal team after. Wikipedia says, > Until 2020, Microsoft had not made any public statements about Wine. ... On 16 February 2005, Ivan Leo Puoti discovered that Microsoft had started checking the Windows R…

Even if Wine had become drop in replacement for modern Windows distribution, I doubt it would hurt much. Business would likely still buy Windows, because of support and security patches. Consumers would get their Windows preinstalled. Some manufacturers would probably do Wine installations - but then it would depend on support. Don't want to sell machines to people who are not tech savvy, that are not getting updates. That is a potential for returns and massive cost and headache.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#335

This will sound pretty dumb, but with all the amazing cross platform games written in Unity - which I thought was Mono or some form of cross platform library with .NET as one of the primary languages, I always wondered why there was not a more 'business app version' of this. After using Xamarin, Appcelerator, and dozens of other 'cross platform tools', with to be let down from ALL of them in the end and/or support dr…

If you want a consistent UI (non-native look), your best bet may be Blazor Hybrid currently. Yes, it's web technology (with the overhead that comes with that), but at least it uses the native browser components, so it's not nearly as "heavyweight" as something like Electron. My main concern has always been the lack of Linux support, but maybe that's not an issue for you.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#336
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not alone. I would say I’m not ‘new’ and even developed .net 4.5 for a number of years. I’m just as stumped by the naming mess that Microsoft made across the board in that space. Edit: I say 4.5 because I mean the original thick .net which is not dotnet core, which I think is the way to differentiate between versions, but also all the sub libraries like the orm were iirc named the same but did different things…

It's even worse, since they dropped the core now and just call it .NET. So searching has become even more of a pain. It's also pretty much a mess, because many things were different between the versions. So let's say you google how to do something and the result could be: - .NET Framework - .NET core 1 - .NET core 2 - .NET core 2.1 - .NET core 3 - .NET 5+ Many times there will be no clear indication what version the…

Given current naming scheme, what do you propose?

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is there a way to build a GUI app with .NET on Linux? Will it be cross-platform?

Yes. There are multiple UI projects that build on the WinUI 3 components in the Win App SDK.

There's the first party MAUI which is an updated version of Xamarin Forms. The two best-known third-party implementations are AvaloniaUI and Uno. I prefer Uno, it has more cross-platform targets.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#338
post #124

For everyone who is confused by what is going on, here's the explanation: Today, there are 2.5 Mono's: Mono that lives in https://github.com/mono/mono . This is the original Mono codebase that was written back then and was the .NET Framework for Linux, with corresponding compat. and such, pioneered by Miguel De Icaza, who now seems to be happier in Swift land. At the present day, it was receiving very little maintena…

> due to a massive rift in performance between the two Not that massive; factor 1.8 as we found out recently.

If we compare the last major release of Mono back in 2019, where there was a real improvement to the CLR (not just bug and security fixes), with the CoreCLR versions at that time, the factor is rather 1.1 (see e.g. https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Mono-CLR-really-slower-than-Cor...).

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#339
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For modern .NET, you don't need to know anything about the legacy terms of Mono, .NET Core, .NET Framework, .NET Standard, etc. All you need is .NET 8 SDK. It's fully-cross platform and installs support for both C# and F#. For example, just download .NET 8 SDK on whatever platform, which is usually very easy on most platforms, and then run `dotnet fsi` to get into an F# REPL.

This is wild, apparently this stuff is in the Debian repos now? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-... So you can just apt install dotnet-sdk-8.0. This must be the most unfriendly Linux install documentation I've ever seen though, it was not easy to find the names of those packages.

> This is wild, apparently this stuff is in the Debian repos now?

It's not. Microsoft provides its own apt repository you need to add first.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#340

This makes me curious. Could MS secretly be using wine for some of their Azure services?

Why would they use Wine when they have free and unlimited access to the real deal?

Well, let's say they wanted to use Linux, but run their windows software on it.
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