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.

.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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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/.

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.

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.

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. (:

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.

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.

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.