While I found the MonoProject interesting, I was skeptical using it. Sure, it is an Open Source .NET framework but .NET is Microsoft at the end of the day. I do not (and still do not) want their fingerprints inside my GNU/Linux machine.

What I mean by this is the legalities behind it.

Remember, my comment above is based on views 20 years ago. My perspective is that Microsoft cannot "beat" Linux purely as competition. It isn't going anywhere. While it may not be a concern in the Desktop market, it certainly dominates on servers! Microsfot are not stupid and see CONTROL through other means.

Imagine if most programs that come default in Linux distributions being C#? If more and more programs are written in C# (whether Mono or not) gives them power over the Linux user.

Today, Microsoft has .NET core (recent release .NET 8) and also replaces Mono. We still have Xamarin of course but that is getting replaced with MAUI. A lot of Microsofts software is now cross platform, like Powershell, SQL Server, etc. This "concern" I was having 20 years ago is still just as big of an issue today.

Imagine Microsoft getting the marketing right and SQL Server starts gaining momentum on Linux boxes. This means less using MySQL or Postgres.

Imagine is Powershell starts gaining more traction in Linux land rather than Bash.

Now -- I think this is EXTREMELY UNLIKELY to happen but you can garantuee this is a strategy. They have the money and manipulation skills to help make it happen. Big companies can easily eat this up and it starts with "but we can support you!"

Think about it -- WSL is easy to setup on Windows machines! More and more C# applications can easily be tested for Linux. Microsoft just gave you the tools, and letting developers/companies do the rest for them. Soon it is sheep follow sheep.

Bit of a long winded comment/reply - and while I do not share targeting hate towards anyone (I do not know Miguel personally but he seems like a cool guy) -- I just think efforts should have been elsewhere. Dlang could have been a really, really good replacement. My guess as to why Dlang didn't take off back them was the compiler was not open source. Who knows?

I think that most of what Microsoft does today on the developer front is focused on getting enterprise developers ever more integrated into azure. I live in a very Microsoft heavy part of Denmark, and the result is that virtually everyone uses azure and so do we. Take SQLServer as an example, a lot of FOSS database frameworks and orms don’t support it, even though there are some pretty decent Microsoft drivers for most languages. The result of this, when you use azure, is that you’re going to be using a different SQL server, or a different set of tools. It’ll often be the latter because on many enterprise subscriptions running SQLServer is quite a bit cheaper than running any other SQL DB in Azure.

That’s the developer side of things, then on the more operations side of things it’s hard to justify not using Powershell if you’re running a lot of Microsoft products. It integrates very well with everything your IT operations department does anyway from EntraID to Azure Automation, where you may be able to use Python as well, but Python is often not what Microsoft IT operations people “grew up with”. So unless other cloud providers have a strong Powershell presence on their IT operations side of things, using them, instead of using Azure, because a huge change management issue… Often one you can’t really solve, because a lot of IT operations people will rather find a different job than switch away from their Microsoft focused talents, and why wouldn’t they? Good cloud operations people are harder to find than basically anyone else in IT.

Given Azure's support for Postgres is pretty good, I would push hard for this in any new projects. Makes you more portable in future, and you can spin up local environments more easily.

Well, many folks on the FOSS space are to blame, Microsoft has learned by the hordes buying Apple hardware, that what a large majority cares about is POSIX experience and very little about GNU/Linux itself.

As usual, while Microsoft has its own actions to answer for, it isn't alone in making everything happen.

The Year of Desktop Linux comes packaged in desktop VMs, regardless if it is on Apple, Microsoft or Google's hardware.