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Comment by achn | Hacker News Reader

C# and .net 6 are not windows-centric.

Here is the very first sentence of the Wikipedia entry [0] for .NET Framework:

"The .NET Framework (pronounced as 'dot net') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows".

The official documentation for both C# [1] and .NET Framework [2] live on Microsoft.com.

I would say the above constitutes a pretty Windows-centric existence relative to some other vendor-agnostic languages, but maybe we're saying different things. What did you mean?

Refs

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0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/

2: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet-framework

Jellyfin is written in .NET 6, not .NET Framework. .NET Framework is the legacy Windows only version, but .NET 6 is FOSS and cross-platform.

And the documentation is on Microsoft's site because it was originally developed at Microsoft.

The .NET Framework is not quite the same thing as .NET, and they have separate Wikipedia pages which reflect that distinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET

Here is the very first sentence from https://dotnet.microsoft.com:

"Free. Cross-platform. Open source. A developer platform for building all your apps."

The download page for .NET which includes downloads for Windows, MacOS and Linux is https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

What the GP meant is exactly what they said, "C# and .net 6 are not windows-centric.", sadly it shares a name with .Net Framework which was windows centric.

That sentence has perhaps not been edited in a while. .NET has been multi-platform for years. (edit: my bad, I didn't see that you'd linked to the .NET Framework, which is the Windows-only legacy runtime.)

There are several GUI libraries that are still Windows-only (e.g. Winform, WPF, etc.), but the latest one MAUI targets MacOS as well as Windows desktops, in addition to iOS and Android.

Just glancing at the code on GitHub, Jellyfin is primarily an ASP.NET web server targeting .NET 6. The download <https://jellyfin.org/downloads/> page shows a wealth of platforms, of which Windows is only one.

The original statement suggested the Jellyfin was somehow weaker on other platforms than Windows when there's nothing to suggest that there isn't parity on all supported platforms.

The .NET team has put a lot of effort into shedding its Windows-only past. I'm honestly not sure how FOSS the platform is, but at least some of it is open-source.

I made the mistake of saying "Windows" instead of "Microsoft". I didn't mean to indicate that it somehow works better on Windows. I'm running it on Linux and don't have Windows, so I couldn't even be the judge of that. Thank you for this clarifying statement, it helped me to understand.

I was also not aware that .NET 6 is not the same as .NET Framework, so that was my mistake. I'm partly going to blame my ignorance on Microsoft for that one; for us folks that don't develop in M$ land, these distinctions can be subtle.

What I _meant_ to say was that I wish it weren't such a Microsoft-centric language framework.

Then MSSQL or PowerShell are technically not Windows-centric since they have native Linux ports? While cross-platform, the .Net ecosystem is decidedly Windows first. Zero of the .Net developers I know develop on a non-Windows machine.

I think those are very different. .Net 6 (formerly core) is specifically branched to get away from being tied to windows only. In fact the initial versions lacked many of the windows API supports! It is open source and cross platform by design.

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