Instead of trying to run heavy and complex apps on an OS that were never designed for, use Windows for work, and then use gaming and your personal life on Linux. Another thing you can do is switch the kind of programming you do, so it’s more linux-related, so overtime, you can only have Linux machines. But for the time being, if you’re doing windows programming, use a windows machine for work.

Afaik the only solution to your .net needs would be mono

.NET and the .NET SDK has Linux support, but you’ll have to write csproj files manually, and as far as I know, there’s nothing even close to Visual Studio’s live debuggin tools.

With the games, make sure that you don’t want to play multiplayer games with unsupported anti cheat. They will probably never work on Linux without support from the game developers. See https://areweanticheatyet.com/.

.NET is now fully cross platform. you can absolutely run and debug applications on linux as you would in windows.

However Visual Studio IDE is windows only (theres a mac version but isn’t the same).

You can use vscode + .net development pack.

Personally I use Jetbrains rider (for home and work)

SQL Server has a linux version I believe, but its been years since Ive done an install (for development I run sql server in a container)

If you can shell out for it, get jetbrains rider. It’s just as good (better?) as visual studio for dotnet including the more obscure bits like xamarin etc

If you don’t play the latest game titles with DRM you should be good to go on Linux: Steam runs great in a flatpak sandbox.

I don’t know how compatible mono is with dotnet. Interestingly, some game launchers need it and protontricks can handle many issues. Have look at protondb. Back to work: Someone needs to confirm whether MSSQL server can be run on Linux, but I am almost sure that you won’t be able to run the gui of it. But you can connect to it using DBeaver (Java-based) or a VSCode plugin. As for C# development on Linux, I don’t know.

I wish I could switch to Linux at work, too, but standardization of work environments seems to be the problem. I would even consider Ubuntu 22.04 LTS if my employer woul allow it. Last time I asked, time was the real reason. Time savings in the long run, currently don’t matter. I will ask later and if they still tell me, it’s too risky, I will look elsewhere.

Our dev setup doesn’t even have the constraints you have for your work. It is all docker-based with Ubuntu Linux containers. It would run faster on Linux even if we could switch to WSL2. And I would argue, that Linux is more standardized than Windows.

I hope you get your stuff running on Linux; market share needs to go up so that all the managers don’t fear it. (:

Lutris can be pretty handy for many things…

I don’t have too much exp with these things, but I would suggest (as an IT support person) narrowing down and isolating problems into specifics, like:

• I need dot.net for x thing and I tried y thing and it didn’t work.

You’ll be able to get better answers. I’m pretty interested in the suggestions, my usual solution is ‘find something open source that is not as good but works.’

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.

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

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.

You can run a Windows VM for anything Windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux

Yes, you can develop in .NET on VSCode and the debugger works on Linux too.

There is a Docker version of SQL Server which funnily enough is equivalent to the enterprise version (rather than limited like SQL Express). You can use it for free as long as it’s for development purposes only.

There is no SQL Management Studio though.

One option would be to use PostgreSQL instead. Entity Framework makes it almost free to replace the database anyways (unless you are doing some db-specific things).

There are some other minor annoyances or missing features, it might bother you; but depending on how you are used to work, you might not even notice. But, hey! you are on Linux now, you get all the benefits of a UNIX operating system, it will be worth it for sure, right? (Yes, imho)

As for gaming, I only do light gaming so I probably don’t count. I use Heroic Launcher and it works wonderfully out of the box 50% of the time, the remaining 50% you can probably make it work as good as on Windows if you are persistent enough.

Oh, and sometimes some games run better on Linux than on Windows, but I would say most of the time they run a bit worse.