Wine Releases Framework Mono 6.14 in Taking over the Mono Project
16 comments
·March 9, 2025mdaniel
cobbal
Microsoft has a habit of naming similar (or not) things the same as each other. VS and VS Code; Powershell and Windows Powershell; Copilot and Github Copilot; Azure, Azure DevOps, and probably other Azure things.
I'm not sure what internal incentives in the company lead to such terrible naming practices.
mdaniel
Oh then it's even worse than I knew: I had no idea there was Windows Powershell, too, and had (evidently erroneously?) through they just renamed Copilot to GitHub Copilot
Uvix
The different categories are worth considering separately.
PowerShell is more than just "similar" to Windows PowerShell; it's a slightly-backwards-incompatible new version with cross-platform support. With cross-platform support, the old name didn't make sense any more; and presenting it as a "new" product solved the issue of people complaining when they upgraded and things broke. (Same thing they did with .NET.) I don't know what else they could have done here.
"Copilot" is Microsoft's name for their LLM functionality across all their products. Question in, slop out. That's entirely consistent. I'm not sure what difference you're even seeing between "Copilot" (which Copilot?) and "Github Copilot".
Azure DevOps was them renaming an existing product to coopt a better-known brand name. Same with Visual Studio for Mac. (Visual Studio Code and Azure Data Studio were similar - although those weren't renames but rather a new product trying to steal mindshare.) This is the only category I'd really call "terrible".
osigurdson
>> internal incentives in the company lead to such terrible naming practices
I suspect overthinking is the root cause.
pavon
It wouldn't be a faithful reimplementation of a Microsoft product without confusing naming.
neonsunset
Do you program exclusively in Java? This is a negative comment aimed at a project led by volunteers, and another project that was made OSS 9 years ago.
What is it in the programming communities that necessitates such a constant stream of hate towards .NET?
metadat
Are you attempting a subtle dig, or what is the purpose of this comment?
EDIT: The original comment read, before edits:
> Do you program exclusively in Java?
neonsunset
Because the GP comment is clearly inappropriate.
LorenDB
I'm not sure whether to interpret Microsoft's donation of the project as a good or bad thing. Yes, they have given it a home under a project that is not driven by corporate whims*, but doesn't that then recuse Microsoft from any responsibility of contributing?
*Yes, Wine is heavily developed by CodeWeavers, but CodeWeavers exists largely to help fund and support Wine.
hdjrudni
I haven't been following .NET lately, but AFAIK .NET works on Linux now and "Mono" is basically .NET for Linux... what even are the differences?
Sounds like Microsoft just doesn't want to maintain 2 different versions so they're dumping it.
Also,
> Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016
They probably never even wanted Mono, they just inherited it because they wanted Xamarin.... which they've also killed now according to https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/xamarin
filleokus
"Modern" .NET (previously ".NET Core" v1, v2, v3 - but now just ".NET" v6, v7, v8, v9) works really well on Linux and in containers etc. "Legacy" .NET, .NET Framework, version 4.X, does not.
If you build something new today in .NET land you are using a version that is compatible out of the box with linux, but there's gazillions of LOC .NET Framework out in enterprises that have yet not been migrated/rewritten.
But I don't actually know if Mono is stable enough to run Framework services on Linux?
I don't know how (if at all) Kudu is related to Mono, but on Azure you can run .NET Framework in e.g App Services (which uses Kudo under the hood). It's probably the only way to host a Framework service outside of IIS on a Windows VM. And Kudo contains references to Mono, and looks really linuxy when I've used it.
chucky_z
It 100% is! I've used Mono years ago to run older .net in VMs and containers. I found a single service that didn't really work well and we spent our time working on that instead of rewriting the world.
whoisthemachine
> I haven't been following .NET lately, but AFAIK .NET works on Linux now and "Mono" is basically .NET for Linux... what even are the differences?
Ideally few, but I think it is a good thing to have a separate implementation of the dotnet runtime as an insurance policy against the main contributor to dotnet.
simion314
>I haven't been following .NET lately, but AFAIK .NET works on Linux now and "Mono" is basically .NET for Linux... what even are the differences?
Mono implements the GUI stuff like WinForms Microsoft .Net for Linux /cross platform has no GUI or maybe they added some new GUI now , I am not a .Net dev ,I know they were experimenting always with latest and greatest GUI stuff and failing to get traction.
replete
This is relevant for running .NET 4.x apps on Linux or Mac. .NET 5+ is dotnet core, so mono is still relevant here.
I wondered if the headline author had a stroke, but reading the article body confirmed that the whole .NET ecosystem has collectively had a stroke
> "Framework Mono is the project previously hosted at https://github.com/mono/mono, which was then simply called Mono. I have made this change to distinguish it from "monovm" and "Wine Mono", which are different projects. Framework Mono is a cross-platform runtime compatible with .NET Framework."
They just needed to toss in some miscellaneous "Core" and "ECMA" to complete the version/platform/release word salad
Anyway, if someone else was similarly confused it seems to be
> Wine, who have taken over the Mono Project, released "Framework Mono" v6.14