Mono makes headway on the Linux desktop

Mono—the open-source runtime for .NET applications—is stealing some of the thunder from Java applications for the Linux desktop. Recent Linux distros have featured new .NET consumer applications that run under Mono. Part of the reason is that the distributions contain up-to-date Mono development tools, while their Java tools are obsolete.

"We have seen a real spike in Mono [application] development for the Linux desktop over the last two to three years," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. He cited Mono applications, including the Banshee music player, the GNOME Do desktop search tool, and the Tomboy note-taking application as examples of Mono applications that have no Java counterpart equivalent in popularity.

The Mono project is an open-source implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), a technology that was created by Microsoft and subsequently standardized by ECMA and ISO International. Microsoft supports the Mono effort with technological assistance.

When it comes to desktop Linux applications, "Mono is clearly more popular than Java. I've been using desktop Linux as my primary desktop for three to four years, and use just a handful of Java apps day to day," O’Grady said.

If Mono is succeeding, its success appears to be limited to the Linux desktop. "While it's certainly true that Mono has been used to write some nice applications, I have seen very little usage of it among independent developers outside the Linux desktop community. It's also worth noting that many of the high-profile Mono applications are written and maintained by Novell," said Ian Murdock, Debian founder and vice president of emerging platforms at Sun Microsystems.

"That's a pretty classic platform strategy: Try to get your platform broader distribution (in this case, integrated into the GNOME desktop) by creating compelling applications that require it," he added.

There’s no good data on how many consumers or developers have installed Mono. The software project team collects some data about package installations on Debian and Ubuntu, but Mono project leader and Novell vice president Miguel de Icaza believes that the data is skewed because tracking is opt-in only. "We publish the source code, and then people redistribute it in packaged form, and we have no way of tracking its use."

However, it’s clear that Mono is currently doing a better job at attracting Linux desktop application developers than Java.

Out-of-date tools
One big reason may be that Debian and Ubuntu, two popular Linux distributions, include current versions of a Mono development environment, called MonoDevelop. By contrast, they contain an old version of Eclipse, a popular open-source IDE. Both Debian and Ubuntu come bundled with Eclipse 3.1, which was introduced in 2005. The Eclipse tool chain is updated annually, and the latest version of the Java tools, Eclipse 3.5, came out in 2009.