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I've done some fun stuff with Mono and C# but it's significantly more clunky than just apt-get install

What does a virtual machine + language have to do with a package manager?

Installing mono was significantly more complicated than most vm/language packages on Ubuntu, and required commensurately more upkeep.

That maybe a while ago, like when Ubuntu was 9.0 and you had to compile from source code in order to get sgen? Things are much better now. Since early this year, I've been running a web service written in C# serving one of my iOS apps. That piece of service has been running happily in a tiny VPS for half a year now. Installation of the Mono runtime was an easy apt-get.

Mono is completely installed by default on older versions of Ubuntu (8-11). The runtime with some development tools is installed in 12 and 13. You can get it on any version since 8 with apt-get.

$ sudo apt-get mono-complete $ echo "using System; static class Entry { static void Main() { Console.WriteLine(\"Hello World\"); }}" > hello.cs $ mono-csc hello.cs $ ./hello.exe Hello World

It's much like ruby in that to get everything I wanted I had to go to source, which means jumping through some hoops. That's all.

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