Personally, as a programmer, I welcome MONO into the Linux fold. Here's my 2 cents' worth (and they are good old ZA cents, so really not worth all that much...). When I first tried Linux some years ago, it was Debian, the glorious giant upon whose shoulders we Ubuntu users stand. I came from a win32 background and sorely wanted to program on this shiny new Linux machine. I was a very-much junior developer and I loved (still do!) making little utilities that I could use and give away. Problem was that I hadn't learned C or C++ as yet. Python was available but barely beyond what you could do with bash. Perl (*shudder*) made me afraid for my life and the lives of others. Powerful it may be, but Perl is not a friendly language. The whole concept of learning by reading code is very difficult (imo) for someone trying to learn from Perl -- perhaps some of the reason is that Perl programmers revel in their ability to make their code ugly and unreadable. But I digress, and I also apologise if any Perl programmer out here has been offended. Perl just scares me. Now that I have about 7 languages that I regularly use (and some others, including perl, which I can read but prefer to avoid), Linux is a really nice dev platform. I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but .NET really took off on win32. There are a plethora of .NET devs who would try a good Linux distro if they can still program their own homebrew apps on it. MONO fills that gap quite nicely (I think, but C# is in the sub-list of "some functionality, but not a pro" with respect to my list of programming utilities). Sure, a lot of the real M$'isms (WPF, for example) aren't in MONO -- and I can't say that I miss 'em, to be honest. Gtk# beats WinForms hands down -- perhaps a win32 dev will see that and Gtk# will gain some more traction under win32? Dunno. The bottom line is that MONO provides a tool for a lot of people who would otherwise not have something that they want in their desktop OS: a development environment. MonoDevelop is a freaking good IDE, and supports standard c/c++ projects now as well! Bravo! I think it boils down to: If you don't want it, apt-get remove it. I personally don't use Beagle or Tracker or whatever. I personally won't use <a href="http://ASP.NET">ASP.NET</a> via mod_mono. But I can see how someone else certainly might! As a programmer, it's very frustrating to find a new OS and not be able to create! And the same people that a blathering on about "MONO this" and "MONO that" -- I hope all of you are just as fervent about anthing Java? I mean, not just the Sun implementation -- goodness no! If you want to complain about other platforms polluting our precious GNU/Linux, then please, by all means, go completely Stallman and refuse anything which isn't totally 100% free in all senses of the word. We do need radicals like RMS to tip the scales -- but we don't need everyone to be a radical. The best road (again, IMO) lies somewhere in the middle. Oh, and I also hope that the MONO-haters aren't using NVIDIA or ATI binary blobs -- otherwise the hypocrisy must be eating them alive. Personally, I like things that work. Free is better than non-free -- but working beats them all. Hate me for not being a hater. I don't care. Big up to Miguel and his team. Big up to distros which make functionality a higher priority than pure freedom. Big up to freedom fighters like RMS who help us to maintain perspective. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Truth doesn't cease to be just because you don't agree with it.