.NET/Mono Install Base

Question

Me and some friends are considering writing a new FOSS project, and the debate is divided between using .NET or something else.

So I am wondering if there is an advertis

Answer 1

According to the Debian Popularity Contest, mono-runtime is installed on 13184 out of 90447 participating Debian hosts (rank #1504).

That would translate to an installed base of 15% on all debian installations (surely including many servers).

For an appoximation of Desktop installations, I looked at the xserver-xorg installations (49872 inst, rank #390).

Assuming that mono is only installed if an X server is installed, that would translate to an installed base of 26% within the desktop population.

Others:

• bash: 99.9%
• perl: 99.4%
• python: 97%
• php(4,5,cgi,cli): 56% (probably contains some duplicates)
• tcl8.4: 45%
• tk8.4: 35%
• java: 35% (more than 50% of which are the old non-free sun JREs)
• ruby1.8: 26%
• ghc6 (haskell): 2%

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As a side-note: due to the automatic dependency resolution and installation of tools like apt and yum, a small installed base of the interpreter is much less of a problem than under Windows where the manual installation process is much more tedious.