Can you develop Linux applications with Xamarin?
Is it possible to develop and build Linux applications with Xamarin with the same code base?
After a few years with Ubuntu, my main OS right now is Windows again. But it's not impossible that I could switch to Mac.
Right now I have a bit of experience with Qt and no experience with Xamarin. With Qt you can develop on Windows, Linux, and Mac and for Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, ... They are pretty clear about that.
Since Xamarin is free and open source now and I still don't have much experience in Qt, I'm considering trying out Xamarin for cross platform development instead of Qt.
Not being able to release my software for Linux would be a deal breaker for me. Being able to develop on Linux would be nice, but is optional. But after all my Google research, I could only find information and people asking for support to develop on Linux and not for Linux.
As far as I know, this shouldn't be a problem with Mono alone. But as far as I know Xamarin > Mono and I don't get everything in Mono I could get in Xamarin.
I'm also not sure how well-supported Mono will be in the future. For me it looks like Xamarin is much more important for Microsoft than Mono itself.
I'm not sure if it's even possible, since Xamarin is based on Mono, but is it possible that Microsoft will at some point decide not to support Mono with .NET compatibility in the same way as Xamarin, or even cancel Mono as standalone completely?
So I'm looking for one single framework for all desktop and mobile platforms I can rely on, and I want to know if Xamarin and/or Mono and and/or Xamarin + Mono could be an alternative to Qt before I go deeper into any of those solutions.
Answer
Just in case someone else comes accross this q/a: the situation has changed. With Xamarin.Forms 3.0, Gtk# is supported (as preview, at this moment). Therefore, full Linux GUI support is enabled.
So, Xamarin now covers:
The only thing left to wish for: JS/HTML5 Web App target platform, as part of Xamarin :)