I'm having Deja Vu from about 20 years ago of writing Gnome apps in C# using Mono.
"Miguel de Icaza and his ostracization from FOSS" https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bru...
"What killed the Linux Desktop" https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html
"How I ended up with a Mac" https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html
One might wonder how things would have turned out instead if the community had been more welcoming of his efforts on GNU/Linux.
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?
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.
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.
I remember making some rudimentary accounting software for which I'm sure now the source is long gone.