Linux

You can try JetBrains Rider for .NET, but it's only natural that you won't be able to write Windows applications outside of Windows.

I'm personally impartial to JetBrains for my IDEs on Linux, they work really well and are well supported.

I think there is no Visual Studio for Linux

https://flathub.org/apps/com.visualstudio.code

https://flathub.org/apps/com.vscodium.codium

I use Jetbrains Rider on Linux which runs just fine. It takes some setting up to install .NET but it didn't take me too long. Except for pre-release versions, that might take more trial and error.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with the switch to Linux and I haven't had any major issues. Not with video games, either. Protondb.com is a good website to see what games do and don't work on Linux and you may need to add launch options to get specific games to work or switch to a specific version of Proton.

It's up to you to decide if it's worth it for you or not. You could try a dual boot setup first.

I'm also a C# dev and I have been using Linux for years now.

VS Code was pretty much unusable in the beginning when compared to VS. However, nowadays VS Code is very capable at syntax highlighting and debugging.

There is no support for WPF and Forms applications on Linux, since I mostly write web and console applications I don't mind running a Windows VM for those few exceptions. There is also no support for Maui applications but as things are going right now it seems to not be going anywhere anyway.

Since we mostly deploy to Linux servers nowadays anyway it has actually made my job easier since I can run Docker without having to fiddle with it every day like I had to on Windows.

Even if you can run your .net code on linux, it's better for you to run on the actual platform you'll be deploying to. You could dual boot just for work (that's what I do) or try running in a VM, but I assume your work is hard enough without generating new friction.

I never thought I'd say this but... in your case, for work at least I would actually stick to Windows! It looks like most of your tools are from Microsoft and that the environment they will normally run on is Windows. It seems most pragmatic to stay there.

For gaming though (as I've argue few times and can be seen from my history), Proton works well, even for AAA games, unsupported (officially) games and VR. ProtonDB helps you to quickly assess if that's the case for your specific games.

Anyway, what I would suggest though is step back, i.e WHY do you want to step away from Windows. If it's technical then "just" dual boot and properly separating fun from work might be sufficient. If it's more moral and ethical, then earning money from tools that are NOT from Microsoft to gradually decouple, remove the dependency on it, seems like the "right" thing to do.

I ran a dual boot on my work laptop with Windows and Mint until I was fully ready to transition over to Linux. Might be worth doing the same? Recently got rid of the Windows boot and am now fully on Linux for work development. However, I'm not in the web development space so can't comment on that. I use CLion, Intellij, and PyCharm for work.

My home pc is fully Linux running Fedora which I use for gaming, no issues there running Proton through Steam. Have Lutris setup as well for League Of Legends, although that'll be disappearing once Vanguard is integrated.

You could always just boot up a windows VM and set up a shared folder to code on Linux/test on windows if your application has issues running on Linux.

I am a dotnet dev using Linux as my primary OS. Dotnet core fully works on Linux now, there's a native Linux dotnet cli that works almost identically to the windows one

SQL server I think has been able to run on Linux for a while anyway

You'll have to learn to live without full fat visual studio but honestly you're better without it anyway it just stops you from learning the stuff you really ought to know by doing it all for you

VSCode is a pretty good replacement and actually nicer to use if you know what you're doing, neovim if you want to end up spending all your time configuring it (said as a neovim user)

Gaming is absolutely not an issue unless you play certain competitive games with weird anticheat (valorant for example)

As others have mentioned, docker and VMs exist if you have a reasonably powerful machine so nothing should be completely inaccessible to you anyway, on the windows machine I have to use at work I ironically do most of my dotnet dev on a Linux VM anyway

You can run a Windows VM for anything Windows.

Get a second drive and install Linux on it. You can then flick between the two on boot. I've done this and now booting into Arch more than Windows. I'll still boot into Windows for reasons but Arch is my main OS now.

Fellow .NET dev here, switched to Linux for side-gigs recently.

In general, the experience is a lot better than Windows / WSL. Some general remarks on the setup (relevant mostly for Debian-based distros, so YMMV):

• Rider / VSCode suggestion is spot on; go with the former if you have cash to spare and you're fine with snaps, otherwise - DevKit can do DevKit things (with the only problem here being lack of .dcproj support in VSCode; can be ignored with proper integration test setup).
• Containerization of DBMS: by all means, go for it if you have the resources to spare.
• Possible gotchas:
  • If you're going to use MS apt feed for .NET runtime / SDK, set up apt preferences to point to their feed for dotnet packages. Otherwise, you're in for a bad time when running updates.
  • Docker: personally, I recommend Rancher Desktop for this purpose, as Docker Desktop on Windows left a bad taste in my mouth. If you're fine with the latter, it's up to your own preferences then.
  • Test containers: if you do use it with anything else than standard, bare-bones Docker setup, you'll need a custom config; stumbled upon that the first time I tried running integration tests.

don't know if I can run & debug .net 8 applications on a linux machine

The .NET SDK is cross-platform. Try install it then run dotnet run in the same directory as your project file (.csproj).

Most .NET APIs are cross-platform, but there's a few that still only work on Windows, and it's also possible to write code that only works on Windows, like using P/Invoke to call a Win32 API.

VSCode or JetBrains Rider are good options for .net development, both available on Linux.

For the work part in particular, you may find that a virtual machine will get the job done pretty well. With modern CPUs there's basically no overhead, so it's often easier to just run the OS you need in a VM.

You can just run it in the background, run your .NET and SQL server and stuff, possibly VSCode remote into it. PowerShell over SSH. If you need to run a GUI application, you can just RDP into it. FreeRDP has a cool feature where it can RDP a single application so it pops up as any other app on the host. Works great when you just need the database's GUI or whatever.

With virtio drivers and everything, it will be essentially as fast as if native. GUI will be slow because of software rendering, but the point is to use it as a server and only use the GUI as necessary, and for server stuff RDP isn't too bad given it's basically localhost network.

There's also the fun but painful world of VFIO and passing through a real GPU into the VM and feeding back the video to the host with Looking Glass. It's so good you can game on that (anticheat still won't work though, they don't like VMs), so if RDP bothers you that's an option. Although in my experience, Visual Studio is just as slow and buggy natively, so I wouldn't bother and just RDP.

If you add virtiofs to the mix, in theory you can share the code folder and use VSCode on the host and compile on the guest, or even compile on the host and run on the guest. Or send compile commands to Windows over SSH from VSCode. I have my entire Steam library (and Proton containers) on virtiofs and it works perfectly, so I have to imagine a code project should work nicely as well.

Virtual machines are an awesome tool. There's also the benefit of keeping all the work stuff in a big isolated container. If you have multiple projects you can make multiple VMs and not worry about one project needing version X and the other version Y of whatever.

You can do .net on Linux but Windows is much better for that. I recommend using Windows for work and Linux for everything else.

I don't play games, but I do plenty of dev work including a lot in Visual Studio & SSMS. I always have a few Linux boxes running & try every few months to live on Linux rather than Windows.

Visual Studio can be swapped out for Rider. Rider is quite different feeling than VS, but I guess a lot of devs use another Jetbrains IDE of some kind, in which case it's a fairly easy switch.

SQL Server runs happily on Linux. But SSMS is harder for me to do without. I have Aqua Data Studio & Jetbrains DataGrip, but they don't feel as seamless as SSMS.

In the end though, it's hard to beat Windows + WSL2 now that Windows VSCode & Jetbrains IDEs seamlessly connect to Linux projects. And if you enable nested virtualization and MAC address spoofing then Hyper-V can run anything WSL can't.

Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens. One day Linux fractional scaling will be perfected or 200+dpi desktop screens will become affordable. Then I might stay on Linux.

Tips for switching to linux:

1. Determine if your hardware will play nice with linux. If you have Broadcom or Realtek wifi/bluetooth be aware that linux doesn't always have great drivers for those. Nvidia gpus don't always play nice with wayland.

2. Certain anti-cheats for games just don't work on linux.

3. (might not apply to you since you're in IT) Try to avoid using obscure linux distros or bleeding edge distros like Arch. You'll run into issues and not many people will be able to help. Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu seem to be the popular distros rn for most people.