So Mono release it's beta 1 yesterday. Mono, for those of you unaware, is the open source effort to create a .NET compatible system. In light of my "Linux needs apps" thought, this sounded perfect so I thought I'd take a look. Letting Windows programs runs unmodified, as well as giving the developers easy access to Linux specific API's might finally create a simple, unified development platform.
Of course, like with all things Linux there was seemingly no documentation, and it was a total nightmare to install (they've seperated it into 30 seperate packages, all of which must be downloaded and installed, and it didn't even contain all the depedencies I needed so I had to hunt for them). I finally, after about an hour or two of on and off fighting, got the thing installed. Question #1, alright, what can I do with it? How do you release something like this, the major point of which is basically to entice developers, without a single line of useful documentation? I ran the "documentation browser" (finding that was an educated guess; nothing told me "to run the documentation browser, run monodoc"). Which promptly crashed because of a missing library.
Another 45 minutes of tweaking after stracing it to see what was really missing, and it ran. Hey, check it out, there's something called the mono handbook, llet's try that...clicking there gives "Unhandled URL." Searching Google for "Mono tutorial" returns a few references to it and the mono handbook, none of which tell you were to find it. I finally find a link to it on the mono web page, and get access denied when I try to hit it.
I was about 10 minutes from throwing my computer out the front door. I know it's just a beta, and everyone's been heads down on implementing, which is great, but this "release" is of such low quality in the install/documentation department as to be useless to anyone not deeply familiar with Linux. Even then, it's frustrating enough to them to probably cause hands to be thrown up in the air and say "why bother?" Anyone coming from Windows trying to set it up, which is a big point of the project, is totally doomed.
I think I'm gonna save up for a Mac.
Update: I hopped on the IRC channel (#mono at irc.gnome.org) and they pointed me to the tutorial, which can currently be found at gotmono. Would have been nice to just put that as a link somewhere...
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