> tried it for 4 years and that's just not the case.

So just fired up a VM with a clean install of Ubuntu.

No VSCode, No Rider.

> wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/20.10/packages-... -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb

> sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb

> sudo apt update && sudo apt install apt-transport-https dotnet-sdk-5.0 -y

> mkdir test

> cd test

> dotnet new console --output sample1

> dotnet run --project sample1

This is all on the MS Docs website for getting started.

So I'm really not sure what part you find difficult. Getting hello world is no more difficult than me getting hello world working for golang, nodejs, python.

> For me, even simple things like getting C# aliases working was a pain.

Aliases for what?!?

EDIT: Simplified the commands cos I can't format in comments.