[Mono-list] could linux be MORE .Net then windows ?

[Andreas Färber]

Getting back to the above topic, one must keep in mind that a Linux
distribution is not entirely comparable to Microsoft Windows. Windows
consists of the OS and mostly some small (GUI) apps while Linux consists
of the Kernel and surrounding core tools and, depending on the distro,
lots of contributed packages. How would one go about comparing the two
with respect to .NET? Wouldn't a full Linux installation be more
comparable to Windows 2003 Server + Office + SQL Server + Exchange etc.?

I would welcome seeing the CLI become a core part of Linux and other
operating systems, which would then in turn facilitate the adoption of
.NET on the respective platform and the deployment of .NET/Mono based
apps. SuSE 10.1b8 is a good step into that direction.

On Windows however, as a complement to the previous opinions and
observations in this thread, Microsoft is in fact slowly dropping
support for .NET. Windows 95 was never officially supported by .NET, and
this June Microsoft will drop all Windows 98, 98 SE and Windows ME
support, so I am already expecting those operating systems not to be
supported by any successor to .NET 2.0.
That paradigm was already apparent dropping support for Pocket PC 2002
and Smartphone 2003 with .NET Compact Framework 2.0; similarly WSE only
support Windows 2000 and later.
While you might argue that many desktop users will have upgraded their
OS by now, some customers of my software are actually still running
Windows 95 legacy systems, just as I personally do not intend to replace
my Pocket PC 2002 anytime soon. So from this perspective "write once,
run anywhere" is not only an illusion because of system dependencies a
developer might bring in at his/her choice (and I did go through a lot
of hassles developing my own platform-independent SOAP stack with TCP
binding etc.) but also because the CLI runtimes are only available for a
limited number of OS versions. Unfortunately Mono a) does not offer a
.NET CF replacement although supporting both ARM processors and
Microsoft Windows OS and b) does only support Windows 2000 and later
out-of-the-box, with complicated Cygwin compilation instructions for
earlier systems. This is already an argument one could make for Linux
being a better .NET target platform:
=> On Linux the user can relatively easy get [the latest version of]
Mono using the tools native to his/her distribution while on Windows the
user can only run [the latest version of] .NET Framework where Microsoft
choose to support it.

Andreas