April 14. 2009 14:58

The information here is slightly misleading. While I have nothing, in particular, against OpenSUSE, most people will probably prefer Ubuntu. Also, the Ubuntu folks are pretty good about having updates posted pretty regularly. If you have to wait for a mono release, it typically won't be long.

Sean

April 14. 2009 18:47

I used ubuntu in the past, but I dropped it because it was too conservative for my personal way of working. I like to work with the newest from the newest. Only 5% of the ubuntu users is developer. Other distributions are more targeted on developers. Personally I use Fedora now, with mono from svn. Ubuntu feels like it was a year ago (no asp.net mvc support, limited linq, etc.) Mono will work out of the box the best on Suse, because both are sponsored by novell.

I recommend all mono developers to use the svn version.

Paco

July 11. 2009 22:44

As you note, Ubuntu lags a little bit on the release of Mono.  But there are a lot of other reasons to use Ubuntu.  First, due to its large user base, it tends to have larger repositories than OpenSuSE.  While I started off with Novell's distribution, and it will always have a place in my heart, package installation can be a tremendous pain.  However, on Ubuntu, it's tremendously easy to get up and running very quickly because of the size of said repositories.

Moreover, outside of Mono, there are very utilities where I don't need the to have absolute bleeding edge.  As a result, I find that it's much easier to just compile it from source out of the Mono svn.  I then run it in a parallel environment from my system Mono.  While this situation might not be ideal for all users, I find that it works for me very well.

One last point.  While Ubuntu may lag in comparison to OpenSuSE, the lag is fairly limited.  The upcoming 9.10 release will feature Mono 2.4, bringing it to the same version in OpenSuSE.  (The benefit of regular 6 month releases.)

Rob Oakes