Textbook of Linux

b. 1972, Mexico City — Software engineer; co-founder of GNOME, Mono, Xamarin

Also known as: de Icaza, Miguel

Miguel de Icaza, with Federico Mena, founded the GNOME project in 1997 after the KDE project chose the then-proprietary Qt toolkit. GNOME became one of the two dominant Linux desktop environments (the other being KDE Plasma) and is the default on Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, and most enterprise Linux distributions.

De Icaza later founded Ximian (which shipped the Evolution mail client and was acquired by Novell) and launched Mono — an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET runtime on Linux. Mono was controversial in some free-software circles for depending on technology whose patents Microsoft partially owned, but it eventually formed the basis of Xamarin, which Microsoft itself bought in 2016.

He is a prolific writer and blogger on cross-platform development, and has long advocated that Linux desktop projects should be open to collaboration with Microsoft technologies. He worked at Microsoft after the Xamarin acquisition and left in 2022 to work on a new terminal emulator and tooling projects.