>>If developing something in C# or web I'd target Mono if ok with money source: owned by MS and not fenced in by Windoze.
>
>But then, again, one would have to start reading books/articles (in order to learn Mono). And there lies the problem of not having motivation to learn new technologies.

Not really. You could install Mono dev on any win machine, and from there on it is just using the Mono API, which ***sometimes*** is different from .Net on Windows. MAny issues you run in probably fine to resolve via specific googling, stackoverflowing or reading Mono fora.

Either porting or wrapping some of the interfaces you already use.

Later on you might try to test finished app on Linux VM, but for first step you could stay inside Win for dev and hope for 0 problems