Many, many people have strong opinions on Mono, but whatever your stance what is the impact on a Jaunty install of removing it?

Well, for the most part it seems not very much.  I did “sudo apt-get autoremove mono-common” and aptitude promptly (after confirmation) removed 37 packages, for the most part these are associated to the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), only two packages are actually applications – Tomboy and F-Spot.

Now, I quite like Tomboy but use Wiki’s much more often for notes and snippets – which comes with the added benefit of being available across multiple machines.  F-Spot I don’t use at all – it crashes regularly when importing images from my camera (an HP330) and in honesty I don’t really need anything more than folders an thumbnails to organise images – which Nautilus provides.

I hope this doesn’t provoke arguments from either Mono camp because that’s not the intention of this post, its just to emphasize that if you like Mono then well that’s great but if you don’t care for the technology or the politics surrounding it then you can un-install it with little impact – providing you don’t want Tomboy or F-Spot.

This might not hold true for Karmic and beyond of course.

As said in the Simpsons:

Maude: Well, you may be a bit cautious. What’s wrong with that? Some people like chunky peanut butter, some like smooth!

Ned: Mmm-hmm, and some people just steer clear of that whole hornet’s nest! I’ll stick with just plain white bread, thank you very much, maybe with a …

All but Flanders: “… glass of water on the side for dippin’!” ((Thanks SNPP – http://www.snpp.com/episodes/AABF06))