[tasogare]

> really unclear guidance from numerous sources who all really wanted you to use THEIR stack and thus end up paying THEM

Sorry but at this point it is hard to believe you are posting in good faith and not trolling. Even back in the Windows only days the runtime was free and there was free dev tools (VS C# Express). Mono was free too, and open source. I know no paying runtime and I've been using the language and tools as a daily driver for a decade.

It's been possible to build micro-services in ASP.net Core running on Linux (and in Docker containers) for the last 3 years very easily.

[gregoryl]

Agree, I decided not to reply - if, a year ago, you ended up on the path of "compile to run on mono", you didn't bother to read any of the .net5 documentation - and without checking, likely just the main download page for dotnet core. /shrug