I've stayed fairly quiet on the controversy over Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET protocol and C# programming language that's been grabbing a greater share of the desktop in various Linux distributions in recent years and months. ... Although I'm not a developer, this is a very real issue for me, and it should be for all who use Linux/Unix — and especially GNOME — on the desktop. Two of the biggest Linux distributions — Debian and the Debian-derived Ubuntu — are based on the GNOME desktop environment and seemingly have Mono apps taking a bigger chunk of the system with every release.