Is a question I’m asked a lot (and that I’ve addressed before), because I spend a lot of time looking at the technology (not to mention using it in F-Spot, Tomboy, etc). My answer is always the same: because developers are I track using it, and using it a lot.
This manifests itself most clearly in the desktop arena: a high percentage of the newer, more cutting edge desktop applications for Linux use Mono. Miguel’s noted this trend before.
Separately, you’ve heard me go on at length about Portage, Gentoo’s (my distro of choice) package management application.
But I just ran across this today, which melds the two. Markus is apparently building a Mono/C# based front end to the CLI only Portage application. While the front ending of Portage is certainly of interest, I found his reasoning around Mono particularly relevant:
Why do you use Mono/C#?
If I didn’t I wouldn’t have neither time nor patience to write this piece of software. Mono and C# allows to build good applications fast. It is also portable, so it will work on many systems. If you want it written in C, you’re free to use my concept and code it yourself. Let me know if you do, it would be fun.
Anybody still wondering why I cover Mono?
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