Fedora Core 5 includes Mono

cyberjessy writes "Surprise! The Fedora Core 5 Release will include Mono in the distribution, in spite of Red Hat's opposition. In addition to the Mono runtime, it will also include Mono applications like Beagle and F-Spot. Is the Linux community finally ready to accept Mono? Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista, which has WinFX (the next .Net Framework) as its core API. This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"

Comments

Easily run

[DrXym]

Someone has obviously never tried running a .NET application under Mono. More often than not, it calls Win32 via PInvoke, uses an ActiveX control / COM interop, or does something else which renders it unusable on other platforms. Some apps might work, particularly command line tools, but it is by no means guaranteed or even probable.

And this is probably what MS had in mind all along. And I don't see it changing either. Microsoft make it easy to slap together apps with their stack and tools. Mono makes it hard to do the same with theirs. That means Mono will constantly be playing catch-up with Microsoft, reaching for but never getting close to 100% compatibility.

talking about exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono.

How about

This may mean that in the future, some native Windows applications will run on Linux, with Mono.

Re:Summary

[timeOday]

Yes, off topic, but it's nice to see a well written and concise topic summary around here once in a while.

But how accurate is it?

This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono.

I think that's far premature. Without even knowing yet what the catch is, I know there will be some. I just don't think Microsoft will let Windows apps seamlessly run under Linux, one way or another.

Re:Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?

[MobyDisk]

Actually it is quite easy because of one crucial difference. It's not the implementation that matters, it is the interface. And .NET provides a good interface.

Even if Microsoft implemented the .NET APIs as wrappers around Windows APIs, the fact is that the APIs are clean and they are well documented. They follow the rules of encapsulation well. That makes it possible to re-implement them in a straightforward fashion. The problem with WINE is that the Windows API does not follow good design and rules of encapsulation, so the implementation is often exposed. WINE is not an implementation of an API as much as it is a reverse-engineering of one. But that problem goes away with .NET.

Mono today works stunningly well today. The only issue is Windows Forms, because it isn't as well encapsulated as the rest of the API.

Re:Mono and python

[m50d]

How is it a boil? It's a great language, very useful, makes the base system smaller overall (because so many things can be made much smaller in python) and is nice to be able to depend on it being available. Slating distributions for depending on python is like criticising them for depending on libc.