Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of Linux Foundation, as quoted by LinuxPlanet on Apr 15, 2010:
Could Google be the company they are today if they were written on [Microsoft's] .NET? Could Facebook? The answer is no, you need an open platform that you can own yourself, modify, customize and scale.
Miguel de Icaza, on his blog, 25 Mar, 2010:
Google could have used .NET, Rails could have been built on .NET, the Wikipedia and Facebook could have been built using ASP.NET.
#1 by saulgoode on April 16, 2010 - 9:24 pm
I think the time is long past due for the Mono Project to get rid of the training wheels and produce their own desktop environment. Rather than trying to shoehorn Yet Another programming language/runtime library/graphical framework into an alien desktop environment, why not show that .NET+Silverlight truly is a capable programming environment that can fully support the needs of the modern day desktop (don't let Microsoft's failure to do so dissuade).
I shouldn't think it'd take that long; GNOME released their first version just 18 months after the project was announced — and they had to contend with that archaic C language and an utter lack of a "best of breed" IDE. Surely if Mono+Moonlight is "all that" then it should be useful for things beyond note-taking apps and image viewers. If .NET is as great a leap forward in software development as claimed, they should have something ready in time for a "Monobuntu 10.10" release (certainly an "11.04").
Why not offer a real choice to users and at the same time demonstrate that .NET+Silverlight truly is, as the Mono Project leader contends, the "future of the desktop"?
#2 by Jason on April 16, 2010 - 11:33 pm
saul,
An excellent point, one studiously ignored by Team Apologista as they choose instead to ride the coattails of popular distros, often conflating distro success with Mono success!
#3 by Lex on April 17, 2010 - 7:21 am
Based on my experience virtual machine languages are not ready to take on the desktop yet. This includes both Java and dotNET. Note that microsoft renamed "virtual machine" to "managed environmnet" to make it look more original and not a complete rip off.
The biggest challange comes from garbage collection which introduces noticable pauses to the interactive applications. Recently Java has made a significant progress in this area with the interoduction of Concurrent Garbage Collector (do not confuse with Parallel Garbage Collector).
There are further obstacles related to startup time, ram consumption, and generally higher demand for resources. If you are running a handful of programs using virtual machine you wont notice the difference. However having an entire desktop among with many programs run using VM would make the performance difference very noticable.
These are the reasons why neither Java nor dotNet became very popular on the desktop. So for the time being I would not worry about a desktop build entirely on Mono. It would not be able to compete with other desktop environmnets, especially on resource contrained netbooks.
Another point worth noting is that Java is lightyears ahead of mono when it comes to runtime optimization and garbage collection. The upcoming OpenJDK 7 release is slowly tipping the scales towards general applicability of VM languages, though it would take years to gain momentum and popularity among developers.
Mono with Silverlight coming out of the blue and sweeping the desktop environmnet market is nothing but hype and/or wishful thinking: a) team mono does not have the manpower nor support of the community to do a project of such magnitude b) even if they did, the result will be too slow, because "managed environments" are not ready to take on the desktop just yet, especially not mono.
#4 by Andrius Bentkus on February 27, 2011 - 1:50 am
it was “written with .NET on Windows Servers” and not .NET.
And it is not about the technology behind .NET, its all about the non openess of microsofts .NET.
Miguels quote is perfectly correct, with his implementation .NET gains openess, which the microsoft framework doesn’t provide.