.NET is a pretty good framework. Better than any framework linux has to offer.

That statement doesn't even make any sense. Linux is a kernel. .NET programs are run in userspace. The two cannot, as far as I can tell, be even tangentially related, unless you're trying to call .NET some sort of kernel API?

Or is this that definition of "Linux" that people love these days, which is "whatever free software operating system distribution I happen to be most annoyed with this week"?

"Linux" is used here as "a linux distro" (which was pretty clear). Is there a runtime for a linux distro that is better than .NET?

java virtual machine?

How is it better? (Genuine question, I mostly do web programming.)

The .NET is better then the JVM because it was designed to run on windows only, so no run anywhere stuff needed to be designed.

I was doing Win32 development for 5 years and concluded the .NET development is the best way to go (Only if you can convince the marketing guy to include the 20MB runtime installer in the package)

Silverlight 2.0 runs C# code (any MSIL compiled code, really) on OS X quite well... It also includes a significant portion of the base class libraries.

Do you mean runtime or framework? And better by what measure?

In any event, you'll find Gemstone's kit more than accounts for .NET (and Java, for that matter) in the trade/financial space.