I hope Solang will become something like that in the future, because quite frankly, it kills my bones having to download so much KDE-stuff just to be able to use a usable image organizer. Had only DigiKam been more cross-desktop…

Ohwell, it runs fast on old hardware as well, guess it’s really just me jugding it too harshly on non-technical points.

Unlike the Monopologists in this Article who are incredibly shortsighted and apparently don’t have a mind for history, I readily see why Mono is a bomb and Microsoft is giddily waiting for 2012 to detonate it.

There is nothing. NOTHING. Nothing is stopping Microsoft from shooting Mono and anything that uses it out of the sky. Not the ECMA, not the ISO. Not the community “promise” PR Microsoft pulled to lull gullible fools LIKE the Monopologists into thinking they won’t sue, ignoring the fact that: 1. Standardization is not indemnification. The ECMA can’t stop Microsoft should they choose to detonate the Monobomb. 2. Even if 1 is untrue, the sad, cold fact is that the ECMA standard covers scant little about the .NET CLI. 3. Because the ECMA standard covers very little, and that a great deal of the .NET CLI is indeed patented, there’s little safe in Mono. 4. Re-emphasize, there is nothing. Not one thing, that has the authority to stop Microsoft from abusing their own patents and their own “open” standard. 5. The community “promise” is a public relations stunt and anyoen with a brain stem could easily see that Microsoft has no intention of honoring it on the long term. There *will* be a lawsuit over something they “promised” they wouldn’t sue over. Whether it’s .NET related or not is irrelevant. 6. Mono is only legitimately used from a Novell platform in accordance with their agreement with Microsoft. 7 Mono *does* have patented code in it, which is one of the reasons why it is specifically covered by the agreement with Microsoft. That is why only Novell platforms can legitimately use Mono. 8. Even if the community “promise” is indeed a real binding contract (It isn’t. Totally unenforcible, even through class action.), Microsoft’s history is littered with parties they breached contract on AND GOT AWAY WITH IT. IBM, Apple, SpyGlass. Sound familiar? The “promise” isn’t stopping Microsoft from patent trolling at all.

The Monopologists have no memory for history, either. Perhaps they’ve forgotten that Microsoft *has* pulled this crap in the past.

And all the proponents of Mono and C# can say in its defense is that “they’re ECMA/ISO standards!” To which I say: Since when was standardization synonymous with indemnification? In fact, Mono is only legally applied to SuSE thanks to that deal with Novell. And anyone who pays attention to Microsoft’s history (Apparently everyone BUT the Mono proponents.) believes that Mono is far from safe, intellectually, for Linux. It should be obvious to anyone how easily Microsoft could pull the rug out from the happy place of all those who think Mono is safe. The worst that could happen if Microsoft patent trolls Mono is (*Gasp!*) losing the standard status on .NET. I imagine by the time MS would be ready to pull the trolling they would be prepared to lose the standard. No skin off their back, they never respected standards, anyway. Microsoft has virtually nothing, nil, to lose by pulling an SCO on Mono.

Do not feed me the so-called “community promise,” that’s pure public relations on the part of Microsoft. Big money says that Microsoft has no intention of honoring that “promise” on the true long-term.

In my head, a true open standard is one that is designed and maintained equally by more than two groups. .NET and C# do not meet this criteria. Nor does OOXML (And the only reason OOXML became an ISO standard was through bribes and committee stacking. Google it.)

I see no technical problems with Mono, though I never liked .NET in any implementation, but one would have to be quite naive or forgiving to blindly trust Mono like its proponents do. Mono looks to me as a big patent bomb that Microsoft nurtured indirectly. Hell, look at the asshole who CREATED Mono: Miguel de Icaza, the single biggest Microsoft ass-kisser in the FOSS movement (Calling OOXML a “superb” standard, almost having a veritable hard-on about the .NET CLI, and, yes, tryign real hard to even get a job at Microsoft instead of Novell at one point.). There’s conspiracy theories akimbo about whose employ de Icaza is really in.

In fact, Miguel tried and failed to convince the rest of his GNOME team to convert GNOME to a Mono-based DE. From what I heard, he got completely shut out with that idea.

Fortunately, I switched to KDE. Qt is more than powerful enough to actually cover anything Mono could try to do on a technical level with GNOME.

Human, as a GTK theme, never impressed me. Of course, since switching to KDE I’ve found things like QtCurve that makes most themes in GTK look like crap.

Either way, I don’t count remasters as separate distributions. I’m of the opinion that to create a new distribution, there needs to be an emphasis on CREATE and NEW. If you’re forking, you still gotta do some actual building and real development. Otherwise it’s just a remaster, a custom install of something that already exists.

Too many remasters of Ubuntu exist. Way too many. And too many of their so-called “creators” try to pass them off as new distros.