Fresh Wine-flavored version of Mono released
- Reference: 1741693649
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/03/11/new_wineflavored_version_of_mono/
- Source link:
It has been a while – as [1]Mono 6.14.0 's release notes say:
This is the first release of Framework Mono from its new home at Winehq. It includes work from the past five years that was never included in a stable release because no stable branch had been created in that time. Highlights are native support for ARM64 on macOS and many improvements to windows forms for X11.
This is all good stuff. The Mono Project has been largely dormant since about 2019, for good and pragmatic reasons. In August 2024, Microsoft announced that it was [2]handing over Mono to the WineHQ organization – the team of developers who develop the WINE Windows-compatibility layer for Unix-like OSes. In the last few years, we've reported on the releases of [3]WINE 7 , [4]WINE 8 , [5]WINE 9 and most recently [6]WINE 10 .
As we have described in those stories, WINE is quite mature now, and as our 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 pieces show, the developers crank out upgrades quite regularly and frequently. One component is what this version's release notes describe thus:
"Wine Mono" is a downstream distribution based on Framework Mono that is used in Wine to replace .NET Framework.
So: Mono is under new management, there's a new release, and there are grounds for some optimism that there will be more new releases in the near future as well. That's good. The release notes have a number of first-person statements in them: "I'm hoping", "I understand" and so on, but the document is unsigned. We think it's the committer, Esme Povirk, whose [7]day job is at Codeweavers. As we said in our WINE 7 story, this company does a lot of the development work on WINE these days, in aid of its commercial version of WINE, [8]dubbed Crossover , which runs Windows apps on Unix boxes without needing a VM or a license – even [9]including Apple Silicon Macs .
Why the [10]Mono Project exists and how we got here is a complicated story, and there is a lot of history involved. The modern computing industry suffers from collective amnesia to the point of serious functional impairment, so we may have to dig quite deeply here to explain what this is and why it has happened.
Mono is one of two separate and independent implementations of the Microsoft .NET common language infrastructure. The other one is Microsoft's own. Back when the Mono Project was started by [11]GNOME Project co-founder Miguel de Icaza , Microsoft's version was closed, proprietary code, although the functions it implemented were documented standards – notably, [12]ISO/IEC 23271:2012 and [13]ECMA-335 .
[14]
The Mono Project began in 2001 as a FOSS implementation of the Microsoft Common Language Runtime and supporting frameworks, to enable .NET code to run on Linux. Ximian, the company behind Mono – and significant parts of the GNOME desktop – was [15]acquired by Novell in 2003 .
[16]
[17]
Mono got there – The Register reported on the [18]release of Mono version 2.0 way back in 2008. But there was resistance in the Linux world against including tools implemented in .NET in common Linux distributions, as The Register [19]reported in 2009 , and tools such as Tomboy ended up being dropped by most distros.
Attachmate [20]acquired Novell in 2010 and a year later [21]laid off most of the Ximian staff . The team quickly reassembled and [22]started a new company called Xamarin . That company [23]partered with Microsoft in 2013, and a few years later, got [24]swallowed up by Redmond .
[25]
However, some of the reasons for the existence of an open source version of .NET were obviated by later developments. Microsoft started the process of [26]making .NET open source in 2014. By 2019 it announced that .NET 5 would be open source and cross-platform, [27]merging Mono and .NET into one . The company [28]released .NET version 5.0 in November 2020.
The work of running it as a FOSS project did hit some issues, as [29]The Reg reported in 2021 , although later that year, [30]the company released .NET 6.0 . In 2022, .NET 6 even [31]formed part of Ubuntu 22.04 . By then, though, [32]de Icaza had left Redmond .
[33]WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference
[34]Euro cloud body heads off to Microsoft's HQ to check it's keeping promises
[35]Oreon Lime is AlmaLinux with a desktop twist
[36]With Asmi 24.04, Ubuntu's never looked so snappy (without the Snaps)
When Ubuntu Jammy included .NET 6, we described a bit of the history of .NET and what was included – and saliently, what was not included – but the short version is that it's server-only stuff. The Linux editions of .NET provide the tools to compile and run text-mode versions of apps in Windows-native languages such as C#, but not those to build and run native graphical apps. There are third-party tools, but the point is that you can't take graphical Windows apps written in .NET and recompile them for Linux.
That is in part where Mono comes in. With a new team in charge, it would be good to see a new surge of development and life in the project – but we suspect that for many FOSS developers, it remains tainted by association, and developer interest these days lies more in the direction of web apps and the Javascript framework of the day. ®
Get our [37]Tech Resources
[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/mono/mono/-/releases/mono-6.14.0
[2] https://github.com/mono/mono/issues/21796
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/19/wine_7/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/03/wine_80_dxvk_21/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/18/wine_90_is_out/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/24/wine_turns_10/
[7] https://www.codeweavers.com/about/people/esme/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2011/01/29/codeweavers_impersonator/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/crossover_apple_m1/
[10] https://www.mono-project.com/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2016/04/29/from_open_source_to_microsoft_its_a_different_company_says_miguel_de_icaza
[12] https://www.iso.org/standard/58046.html
[13] https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-335/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z9BsMTfmiQq7f-id6ODZlQAAAQE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2003/08/04/novell_buys_ximian/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z9BsMTfmiQq7f-id6ODZlQAAAQE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z9BsMTfmiQq7f-id6ODZlQAAAQE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2008/10/06/mono_two/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/03/debian_reply_stallman/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/22/attachmate_eats_novell/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2011/05/03/novell_mono_layoffs/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2011/05/16/mono_founders_launch_new_company/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/13/microsoft_xamarin_ios_android_c_sharp_visual_studio/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2016/02/24/xamarin_buy/
[25] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z9BsMTfmiQq7f-id6ODZlQAAAQE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[26] https://www.theregister.com/2014/04/04/microsoft_launches_open_source_net_lovein_with_new_foundation/
[27] https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/16/will_net_5_really_unify_microsoft_development_stack/
[28] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/11/dotnet_5/
[29] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/18/net_foundation_gnome/
[30] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/08/dotnet_6_vs_2022/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/17/dotnet_6_ubuntu/
[32] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/04/de_icaza_leaves_microsoft/
[33] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/24/wine_turns_10/
[34] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/07/cispe_microsoft/
[35] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/oreon_lime_desktop_almalinux/
[36] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/15/asmi_2404_ubuntu_without_snap/
[37] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Web apps
There writes a man who's never had to write an application with a complex UI.
HTML+CSS has an extremely robust layout model; it enforces a separation of the view (in the browser) and the controller (run in the process serving the pages); it's cross-platform, easy to automate testing, accessible to remote workers, and it's easy to find developers that can build it. Frankly HTML+CSS+JS is a great choice for developing (eg) a forms-based UI, although like any software project it can be done badly.
Re: Web apps
@Androgynous Cupboard
"Frankly HTML+CSS+JS is a great choice for developing (eg) a forms-based UI"
When you need to quickly throw together a clean and working interface that combination works great, especially now Internet Explorer is retired. It was also one of those things I liked about VB6 that you could just throw the interface together quickly for a little tool or application without any real messing about.
Re: Web apps
"especially now Internet Explorer is retired"
And now you just get all the fun of dealing with all the Safari users instead!
Okay: Safari is not as bad as IE but it has caused me very significant pain on a few occasions due to its nonstandard behaviour - stuff that works fine in Firefox and Chromium based browsers but not in Safari.
I wouldn't mind so much but Safari is only available on macOS/IOS devices and therefore requires developers to purchase expensive Apple kit to be able to test it!
Re: Web apps
> Frankly HTML+CSS+JS is a great choice for developing (eg) a forms-based UI, although like any software project it can be done badly.
A few years ago now, building an application which already had a C++ GUI, I found the [1]HTMLayout library very useful for putting together additional sections, especially for built-in documentation and interactive help: a single source for those pages could be auto-massaged into web pages, printable PDFs and appear in the program, linked to what the user was actually doing at the moment. Before the days of (robust) embeddable JavaScript interpreters, btw. As that link shows, HTMLayout itself is not an active project and the author has a replacement, but it is curiously refreshing to still be able to see what *was* around, it is possible for people in the software industry not to suffer from amnesia for anything older than a few months!
At the time, this was the only HTML+CSS renderer that I could find (aside from a few rather twee projects) which would bind together with the main C++ code and run as a single process. Since then, I have done a few projects with a local-access-only web server built in, so the UI can be rendered using a standard browser, but I'm still interested in the single process option.
Although using the server+browser model does have big advantages, especially with respect to portability: it is a lot easier to write a UI-less server and build it on multiple platforms, then using whichever browser happens to be around.
[1] https://terrainformatica.com/a-homepage-section/htmlayout/
This is another WTF happened story ?
My understanding (yes, I was there) was that .NET would provide the ability for non-Windows platforms that implemented it, to run Windows applications (they may even have been called "programs" then).
It seemed a genius move. It would allow MS to continue to own the desktop without relying on Windows.
Then early on it seemed like too much hard work, and that was that.
How the fuck did Amercans ever get to the moon ? I can see how some people struggle to believe they did if the MS approach is anything to go by.
Re: This is another WTF happened story ?
The Jimmy Page?
Re: This is another WTF happened story ?
.NET has been reasonably successful (in the form of .NET Core) in providing portable server-side applications - indeed it's been sufficiently successful that Windows is perhaps no longer the platform of choice for this technology.
It also proved popular for knocking up corporate desktop applications, but because of Microsoft's constant indecision about desktop frameworks, most of these are probably still using Windows Forms and therefore stand no chance of being ported to other platforms.
In the former case we have portability that's no longer needed and in the latter case so many "portable" options that have come and gone (WPF, XBAP, Silverlight, UWP) - and now there's MAUI - that developers have largely avoided them. MAUI, of course, is based on Xamarin Forms, the same Xamarin that Microsoft acquired, giving it the ownership of Mono that's now under the control of WineHQ. Meanwhile, the portable UI community seem to be more interested in Avalonia.
The problem doesn't seem to be a lack of solutions, but rather the opposite.
Re: This is another WTF happened story ?
> The problem doesn't seem to be a lack of solutions, but rather the opposite
You aren't kidding:
> Meanwhile, the portable UI community seem to be more interested in Avalonia.
ANOTHER one? I'd not even heard of "Avalonia" before today!
Mutter, mutter, why can't people all get behind one of the existing projects and complete the damn thing, as a portability platform, without spec creep and bloat, and without "oh, this is too old fashioned, so much easier to start again"?
>> the Javascript framework of the day.
Yeah, just like that.
.
Re: This is another WTF happened story ?
Easy, all the people at Microsoft didn't get jobs at NASA.
The system is working as Designed SEGFAULT ERROR (Something has broken, please contact yyyyour adminninnnnnnistraaattor!!21wonton soup for two!
(Icon because obvs a joke...)
Re: This is another WTF happened story ?
> My understanding (yes, I was there) was that .NET would provide the ability for non-Windows platforms that implemented it, to run Windows applications
.NET is Microsoft's replacement for Java after Sun sued them for MS J++, their enhanced-and-incompatible Java. Embraced and extended, you know.
Java now is a server thing. It's largely dead on the desktop.
.NET is now largely a server thing too.
Here's my cynical summary of the history from when MS handed it to WINE:
Between 1998 and 2001, it looked quite likely that the US DOJ might split Microsoft up into (at least) 2 different companies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
The likely split was an applications division, and an operating systems division.
However MS knew very well that some tools spanned that divide: for example its lucrative development tools product line. (It also posed difficult questions, e.g. Outlook is clearly an app and would go to the apps company, but Exchange Server is effectively an OS component and would go to the OS company. But Outlook is primarily the native Exchange client.)
So MS frantically did several things.
• It embedded IE into Windows 98 as part of the UI. Explorer was rejigged to render content as HTML and display it using IE, called “active desktop”, and it was put out as part of Win98 and as an update for Win95 and NT4. It also invented a new Help file format rendered thru’ IE.
Reason: It wasn’t illegally bundling IE if IE was a necessary part of the OS, right?
• It also put together a sort of MS JVM: a runtime and tooling that would let MS tools be used to build apps that could run on any OS. And thus the dev tools could be rebuilt as MS VM apps, and they could run on anything with the MS VM, and produce apps that would target that MS VM.
That was named .NET.
It only existed because MS was afraid that it’d be split up and this was a solution it whipped up to built an MS runtime platform that the apps division could target, and which would enable MS AppCo to produce apps for Windows, MacOS, and UNIX.
Bear in mind this is before Mac OS X. At the time it offered Internet Explorer 4 on Solaris and other Unixes, for instance. Linux was barely a thing yet but was on the radar.
But the fierce DoJ judge Thomas Penfield Jackson was taken off the case, and replaced with the much meeker Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, and the split up never happened.
So now what was it going to do with .NET its big bold future platform for Windows?
Er…
Er, er, er, it’s a safer replacement for C code, er, and it’s in a sandbox, so, er, we call it “managed code” and it’s a better safer way to develop Windows apps than that boring old Win32 API.
And, er, well, no, they’re not actually portable, no, not if they have a GUI, and er, no, it’s not very quick… but, er, but, er, hey, look, here is a new touchscreen version of Windows, with a new UI called Metro, er no, sorry, Modern, and it has an App Store, and we’ll only let you sell apps in the App Store if they’re .NET apps with a Metro er, no, er Modern UI, and we’ll only take a little cut.
Everyone hated Win8 of course. Nobody bought anything much from the Store.
It backed down. Win10 gets rid of much of the Modern UI and you can put Win32 apps in the Store.
My personal impression is that it’s a bit of a lingering remnant now and MS would quite like to slipstream it into the OS and eliminate it as a separate thing.
Web apps
Web apps or Javascript are necessary evils for server based applications over the internet. Both stupid for local applications.