[thankful69]

C# is not a better Java by any means, Java has a more diverse and greater ecosystem, you have plenty of choice for tooling, IDEs, libraries, platforms, etc... With C# you are pretty much stuck with Microsoft which everyone knows what that means (.net core runs everywhere, but still attached to msft in many ways), if you are serious about the C# ecosystem, you need to use Windows, C# IDEs outside of visual studio are mediocre at best. If you like running a operating system that doesn't give a f** about your privacy and developing for that platform then sure. There is a reason why C# (even with Msft huge lobbying efforts, not only to the goverments but to dev communities) have been relegated to boring(and sometimes dying) industries which get huge discounts for using Azure.

EDIT: typos

[dijit]

Jetbrains rider is not mediocre by any stretch and many C# developers prefer it, even on windows, even though it’s paid.

[solarkraft]

I agree with most of your points, but also really dislike Visual Studio. Rider has very good compatibility (unless you care about the constant hangs and crashes and buggy, nonsensically laid out eye sore UI and dumb defaults and ...) and VSCode (the one with all the proprietary Microsoft stuff) is quite usable. What kind of blew me away was finding out that they support Jupyter notebooks now.

The Visual Studio team seems to dislike dotnet supporting other platforms, but it's one of the most critical things for its survival. The more the VS team hates it, the more likely it's to be the right choice (probably a good rule of thumb for building IDEs too).

[cutler]

Microsoft's multi-platform play is only skin-deep. Witness the lag in features for Visual Studio for Mac which will not be getting .Net MAUI compatibility until a long time after the Windows version.