That is a good question, and made me think a lot.
From one side, having Gnome to use Mono as their development platform is a great thing, yet, that is a possibility but, Java can win the race. If Java is the choice, then where will Mono fall?
By other side, I think Mono is picking Gnome as a quick path and maybe that’s also good, for now.
I expect Mono to become the Linux platform of the future also, I expect something very similar to Gnome but fully Mono based to appear in 2-3 years. That’s the path Microsoft is following with Windows and I think Linux had much to win with it.
Compatibility would be the first thing to win because, even if I do not like Microsoft policy, I must agree it is a kind of “standard” operating system – Microsoft did open Linux a door to archive a maximum compatibility scenario that we couldn’t archive before, of course to .Net based applications.
Mono doesn’t need to follow Microsoft’s own implementation, at some point, I will not be surprised if a Mono fork appears with the objective of improving its integration with Linux itself – yet I do not see that to happen, maybe only if Microsoft change its policy or something like that.
Mono really has a big advantage against Java or any other platform/language that is the option of picking almost any language to code, and that is surely one of the big flags that can make Mono to win on Linux, even because Linux is about choices but there isn’t a unified platform that focus on problems Mono does – specially application inter-operation.
