I have been a .NET dev for the past 8 years and have switched fully to Rider. The only thing I miss from VS is the quick nav to see all the properties and methods in a file on the top bar. Everything else is vastly better:

- Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI suggestions are better) - Refactoring across files is often faster - Package management is undoubtedly the latest performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10 seconds in Rider. - In VS there's always a noticeable delay when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved in Rider. - The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's, though not as good as Windows Terminal

Rider is very nice and a perfectly competent development environment. It gets first class support and often has the ability to test preview features from dotnet upcoming language and runtimes.

It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to move over.

It does away with some bloat and also provides some features of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.

You can quite literally use this as your primary development environment.

> How is Rider v. VS?

Rider is far better than VS for everything apart from Desktop UI Apps and perhaps Blazor WASM hot reloading, which is itself far behind the UX of JS/Vite hot reloading, so I avoid it and just use Blazor static rendering. Otherwise VS tooling is far behind Intellij/Rider for authoring Web dev assets, inc. TypeScript.

I switched to Rider/VS Code long before moving to Linux, which I'm happy to find works just as well in Linux. Not a fan of JetBrains built-in AI Integration (which IMO they've fumbled for years), but happy with Augment Code's Intellij Plugin which I use in both Rider and VS Code.

Rider is where I live for dev work.

If you do web work it's night and day compared to VS, it pretty much includes all WebStorm features in it as well.

VS - great if you are Windows only shop for dev and want all the bells and whistles

Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).

VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough. Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.

I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.

the debugger is a tiny bit nicer in VS, but otherwise Rider has much better ergonomics and features that are actually useful.