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Comment by vsuperpower2020 | Hacker News Reader

vsuperpower2020

I don't bother making anything run on linux unless it's meant to run as a service. It's just not worth the time and trouble to test it on multiple operating systems, probably with different libraries, just for what is a very vocal minority.

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I have a really random winforms project I opened up the debug build of on Linux with Mono and had 0 issues. The bar can be very low.

Wait, that project actually got off the ground? Is this something you're using in production? What's a good starting point?

Not the comment you're replying to, but I also have a couple of internal winforms projects at work. They make it much easier to diagnose and debug issues with a backend service that works with GIS data, using libraries like GMap.NET. Come to think of it, the company's environment management tool is a Winforms application that gets used in every production instance. For basic UI tooling in a dotnet shop it's second to none.

Windows has a bit less than half the marketshare for developers according to the last Stackoverflow suvery. By not having a Linux and a MacOS version, you are losing close to half of developers.

Even Microsoft themselves understood this.

There are a couple of problems here.

Half of Stack Overflow "developers" might not use Windows, but the relevant population to measure is C# developers.

Assuming as many Linux C# developers will buy the thing as Windows or MacOS developers do is an obvious mistake.

> Even Microsoft themselves understood this.

Microsoft understands, among other things, that they can't charge money for Linux tools.

There isn't as many C# developers on Linux and MacOS because the experience has been terrible for a long time and still is lacking to a smaller degree, you have the cause reversed.

> Microsoft understands, among other things, that they can't charge money for Linux tools.

It's the opposite trend going on, they embrace as much as possible Linux and port as much as they can.

> It's the opposite trend going on, they embrace as much as possible Linux and port as much as they can.

How much of it is stuff that people actually pay for?

Since they just focus on Azure and just milk Windows with ads and let it rot nowadays, I'm guessing it must be very profitable, otherwise they would stop.

I'm sure Azure is profitable for Microsoft. Microsoft are not even trying to sell development tools (the category of tools that would include LINQPad) to Linux devs.

They don't care about development tools period anymore, they just make most of their business on the cloud and most of it being very dependent on Linux.

Or use a Flatpak.

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