Up until recently, packaging was a bit of an issue, but recently the official Mono repositories have started being much more up to date again, and now include recent versions of F# as well: http://www.mono-project.com/download/#download-lin
Getting vim support is still a case of cloning the project from github https://github.com/fsharp/fsharpbinding and running make in the vim directory - Vim 7.4+, make, python and a couple of other vim plugins required.
After that, things can start getting pretty nice. For (my only public) example, https://github.com/mavnn/Advent2014 shows how you can use fsx scripts and paket (a package manager compatible with nuget.org and taking source dependencies from github) to create a nice little project without needing to get into any of the Visual Studio project file nastiness. Of course, if you need to work on an existing project, the Vim bindings know about how to handle that too - but actually editing project files is still a pain.
One word of caution: there's currently a bug in the packaging for rpm: I'd go with Debian/Ubuntu packages at the moment. And as a final option, building from source is slow but has become pretty reliable over the last year or so.
Thanks for that. Having got past the setup and configuration issues, have you experienced any problems with the packages that are available? What's the ecosystem look like for F# on linux?
Packages generally work fine, although if they rely on native binaries they often require a bit of tweaking to point at the Linux .so rather than the windows .dll. That's uncommon in the .net world though.
The ecosystem is huge; http://nuget.org hosts the main .net package collection, and it fairly comprehension. Also, to be fair to MS the standard library is pretty "batteries included"; it just doesn't always have what I would consider the nicest APIs.
(Edit: although http://fsharp.org/use/linux/ covers the absolute basics pretty well)
Up until recently, packaging was a bit of an issue, but recently the official Mono repositories have started being much more up to date again, and now include recent versions of F# as well: http://www.mono-project.com/download/#download-lin
Getting vim support is still a case of cloning the project from github https://github.com/fsharp/fsharpbinding and running make in the vim directory - Vim 7.4+, make, python and a couple of other vim plugins required.
After that, things can start getting pretty nice. For (my only public) example, https://github.com/mavnn/Advent2014 shows how you can use fsx scripts and paket (a package manager compatible with nuget.org and taking source dependencies from github) to create a nice little project without needing to get into any of the Visual Studio project file nastiness. Of course, if you need to work on an existing project, the Vim bindings know about how to handle that too - but actually editing project files is still a pain.
One word of caution: there's currently a bug in the packaging for rpm: I'd go with Debian/Ubuntu packages at the moment. And as a final option, building from source is slow but has become pretty reliable over the last year or so.