[bob1029]

I would say it depends on your objective.

If you are looking for something that will maximize your capability as a professional developer, absolutely yes. If you are looking for something to dabble in just for fun, I'd say its a much less important thing to worry about.

For me, the magic of C#/.NET (when used appropriately) is that the language can fall away and allow you to think almost directly in business terms. Features like LINQ are a major part of this experience. When I am working with a complex business domain, I really don't like the idea of playing code golf with my tools. Making the customer happy is far more rewarding to me than anything I could do on my computer.

Also, being able to minimize your vendor footprint to just "Microsoft" helps out a ton at due diligence time if you are selling software to other businesses.

[mattcristal]

What about the developers tools and the developer environment? Since C# is cross-platform, it would be easy to develop software also in a UNIX-like setting, right?

[atraac]

It is easy. You can write C# in anything these days, Rider becoming a favorite pretty quickly for many. Everything like dotnet CLI just works on Linux too.

[sjsanc]

I'd say close to just works. I've spent the last 6 months developing with Rider on Arch and it hasn't been a completely smooth ride. Admittedly, a lot of my pain just came from inexperience. I screwed up permissions; it took me ages to setup the right .net packages due to the nomenclature (which, when I installed Visual Studio on Windows, is easily glossed over); function apps took a while to get working.

But it really is satisfying once you've got everything working.

[fgonzag]

For Linux, the best way by far to install jetbrains products is to use the toolbox.

I had the same issues you had until someone recommended installing through the toolbox, and it's worked flawlessly in multiple PCs since then.