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I think this is good news. I use FC4 and include Novell's mono repos. It's the only outside repo I use, all other stuff I build/hack/package myself. This means I won't have to use any repos besides Core and Extras, which rocks. Maybe this will mean they'll also include Muine? My fave musicplayer, which happens to be a Mono app. Who cares about them windows compat features anyway? There's enough coolness in Mono on itself to warrant its inclusion into FC5. More languages, more choices. Sounds great!

Well. If it was about running this or that app despite it being written in .NET, that would be all fine and dandy, but new and useful Unix/Linux apps are being written in C# as well. Take the desktop search Beagle for example, or the music player Muine. Some people just seem to like the language and the libraries.

Oh, brother. Mac UI consistency? You mean, classic or Aqua or metallic thingies and whatever custom interface Jobbs envisioned for specific application based on abovementioned toolkits?

I don't even want to start on Windows UI consistency, it's just ridiculous. For example, Windows doesn't have any human interface guidelines whatsoever. I recall some semi-coherent instructions written in an obscure place at MSDN - but even Microsoft never followed those, they just stamp new widgets around like there is no tomorrow and week after every stupid shareware developer starts copying them. Remember those stupid flat menus which suddenly surfaced in Office? Right. Oh, and the dazzling world of "lovely" themeable applications of which no one looks like the other is another big issue.

Actually, at the moment, I think Gnome has more UI consistency than both those systems combined. Which is actually an achievement, whether you like the end result or not. Gnome is not my thing (I use FVWM with some GTK/Gnome apps), but the road they traveled since Gnome 1.x is far and the progress to the "Just works" world they made may well be respected. Oh, and I'll take Muine over Amarok any day of the week.

I'd like to point out that while there is Xmms, which consciously imitates Winamp, and Rhythmbox, which consciously imitates iTunes, there is also the excellent Muine, which is radically different. It's not well known, since it requires the mono libraries, but it provides a beautifully simple, clean, sensible, and most of all usable interface for playing music. I'd take it any day over the baroque mess that is the iTunes/Rhythmbox style interface. Its song/album model is intuitive, and works fabulously well, even for the large collection on my LAN's samba server.

http://muine.gooeylinux.org/

How much applications in Gnome are actually coded using Mono? None, AFAICS

MUINE http://muine.gooeylinux.org/ is a Gnome app coded in Mono.

Here are a few more:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9780

And when they don't come with cover art, there's always Muine.

It does a better job of handling multi-thousand file archives than anything else I've found.

Not to harsh on iTunes if you use it for all its various features, but if all you want is music playing, Muine is absolutely amazing, and with a super-simple easy-to-use interface.

I like it a lot better than iTunes for my ~1000 CD library (plus even more that I've downloaded).

But it doesn't have any ripping/burning/tagging support, so you have to use other programs to do those things, which might annoy you. I dunno.

Personally, I don't like iTunes' interface at all, and I never did. I like Muine much better.

I use the hotkeys on my Microsoft Internet Keyboard (I like the key action). They control Muine (music player); Back is mapped to Previous Track, Forward to Next Track, and Stop to Play/Pause (wierd scheme, I know). Much easier than changing to the player and clicking the relevant button.

I prefer to use dedicated hotkeys rather than reassigning arbitrary keys on my keyboard.

You know, if you look outside of KDE apps they can be quite good. RhythmBox is a competent iTunes clone though gstreamer is still a bit immature - for now you may wish to use the Xine backend. If you're looking for something truly fresh then Muine has an innovative, unique (afaik) interface especially suitable for lots of albums. It doesn't do net radio though: it's purely for playing back music. Other downside is that it requires Mono. It works nicely however, in my limited experience.

There are already a lot of replies to this post saying "no definitely not, OSS developers are all elitest ignoramuses" because it's easy to sound insightful when criticising, but really what they're saying doesn't stack up. It might have been right 3 years ago but the improvements made since then have been staggering.

A lot of software has been rewritten or redesigned with usability being core. Example: grip was deemed a lost cause as far as UI went, so Sound Juicer was written instead. XMMS was deemed fundamentally flawed so Muine and RhythmBox were written. Gnome has adopted a pervasive HIG and while it may have a few rough edges still it's arguably more consistent than both Windows (hands up if you read the Windows HIG - thought not) and even Apples (brushed metal or aqua - what mood is Steven in today?).

Today, if you want, you can get software that's had well thought through usability. That doesn't mean everybody uses it, but it's certainly available to those who want it.

Now, there are some big remaining usability issues in free software but these tend to be structural/architectural. For instance Linux software installation is frequently very difficult and it's not easy to solve without a great deal of engineering.

On Windows the GIMP user interface isn't anywhere near as good as on Linux, despite the GIMP 2 itself making great strides over the 1.2 release in absolute terms, the different (arguably worse) Windows WM model and UI paradigms aren't accounted for and there aren't enough Win32 Gimp developers to give Gimp/Win32 an excellently integrated UI. Or at least, not rapidly.

This is more a side-effect of the Gimp being most popular on Linux and the core developers all using Linux though, rather than any fundamental insight into the nature of open source. I've seen some pretty crap ports to Windows UI from commercial companies as well - for instance, the laughable QuickTime 4 which not only made zero effort to integrate with the host operating systems UI but also committed quite a few usability sins like the thumbwheel.

Muine, a media player

Woodpusher, an ICS chess client (seems to have stagnated recently though).

Dashboard, an exciting new user interfact paradigm.

I'm sure there are others, these are the ones I remember off the top of my head.

Go check out muine, it is written by the guy who started the rhythmbox project and its interface is my fave of any of the music players out there.

Nate

Apparently, iTunes does actually work if you install it on Windows then copy it (and the registry entries it creates) across, though it's not really perfect.

Anyway, it's pretty high up on the CodeWeavers wishlist, so expect to see us work on it at some point. Just don't expect it soon - iTunes isn't really a killer app and there are some nice native equivalents like Muine or RhythmBox available.

Off topic, but ... Are there any examples of actual projects using mono that I could try out right now? (On Linux.)

Muine (Music player for Gnome) uses Mono and is a fully functional application.

There's the Muine music player.

I'm not sure exactly what the point of these is...we've already got very nice apps that do the same thing as these (and have nicer interfaces): for music, either Rhythmbox or Muine, and for photos, GPhoto. The only purpose I can see for LinSpire to have its own photo and music apps is branding, which is pretty silly since they're already positioning themselves as the OS for "generic" PCs. I'm afraid I just don't see the point.

Depending on your take on "non-trivial", there are several projects built with mono and C#: Muine, the music player and F-Spot the personal photo manager, off the top of my mind.

The point is just that Mono is not a toy. Of course, it's not silver bullet either, but compared to C, it sure allows the developer to focus on the important logic of his applications instead of juggling with memory pointers.

No. C has its place for sure, but for writing desktop apps it's the wrong tool for the job.

Still, I have to admit, this is something that could go so many ways. Right now Mono has the mindshare in terms of Gnome/GTK# apps, people are playing with it, liking it, there are actually unique interesting apps (like Muine) written in it etc. Where are the interesting GTK/Java apps?

On the other hand, the GNU java toolchain is nicer than Monos. GCJ is a really nice, easy to use compiler that's pretty fast and it creates ELF binaries. It fits in with the existing infrastructure, reuses our investment in ELF and the resultant apps don't have strange EXE and DLL extensions.

Java-GTK is apparently also quite a mature set of bindings, though I haven't used them so I can't say for sure.

I'm not convinced the patents thing is really valid. If Microsoft have patents on their class libs I think it massively unlikely Sun don't have patents on theirs. Worse, I suspect that even if there was a completely open source, newly designed framework that was similar to Java/.NET it would fall under those same patents.

We probably just have to ride them out.

I think Havoc is off base with the XAML comments. XAML will only be usable with the arrival of Longhorn which is in, what, 2008 now? It looks a lot like XUL, and yet where are all the XUL apps? Firebird is still the flagship XUL app, even after all this time. I certainly cannot see XAML taking over HTML anytime this century, there's simply too much investment in HTML and XAML isn't compelling enough from what I've seen to offset that.