Is this purely about convenience tools in an IDE or are there some things actually locked into the Windows environment? Is .NET a lot like Xcode where it's not like you can just download the libraries + compiler + a text editor and have all you need? The latter is broadly true for every language I've really dove into so this feels like a foreign concept.

Edit: what I could stand to gain is that I work weekly in four or five languages. Already well tooled up in Ubuntu and vscode. Nothing frustrates me more than having to keep multiple IDEs consistent. Imagine driving two cars all day that have their controls in all different places.

Depends on what you're doing. Some technologies are only supported on Windows (like the official UI frameworks), but most things like webdev and gamedev libraries are supported on all platforms. Giving up Visual Studio can be a hard sell, as from my experience C# + Visual Studio (+ ReSharper) is one of the most productive programming environments you can have.

You can download the SDK from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/ and use it on any platform with your editor of choice, including JetBrains Rider, which is a cross-platform .NET IDE.

Depending on your UI needs, may want to look at Eto.Forms and MonoGame. :-) That said, I agree on productivity for C# + VS. I find I'm more productive with node + npm + vs code though.

.Net Core hasn't been too bad outside VS... I do wish they'd stuck to the JSON project format. I also wish dotnet had a task runner like npm in it.

The question here is - what do you gain? You're giving up arguably one of the best developer tools available for what? A slightly different desktop skin? Remapped shortcuts? Using slightly different command line commands?

VSCode really isn't even a same type of product than Visual Studio proper and it's nowhere near a replacement for VS heavy workflows.

I get by with it okay... generally only open full on VS when I HAVE to.

I don't doubt that. But that's not the point - I'm sure plenty of people get by with Paint or Paint.NET, but noone sane would call them a replacement for Photoshop and its workflows.

Same with VS vs. VSCode - I'm happy that it works great for you, but I'm not sure why you'd think they're comparable tools.