Do you have any recommendations for people who do not have C#/.NET experience who want to rip their toes in F#? The last time I tried the language I bumped my head on the .NET parts. :/
For the most part I didn't need most of the built in .NET libraries; the F# stuff was fine, but the ones I ended up using a lot were the threadsafe libraries for when I needed mutation across threads. ConcurrentDictionary was one I used an awful lot, ConcurrentBag occasionally, SemaphorSlim, and Interlocked Incrementors.
The reason that the .NET compatibility was handy to me was because it made it easy to get third party libraries without much fuss, which was great because they were generally pretty well supported.
The rule of thumb that I used was that F#, while it kind of looks like Haskell, is not Haskell, and specifically it's not lazy, and as such I always kind of pretended I was in the `do` block. Things execute top down, and you can mix in side effects wherever, so you kind of have to pretend everything is in an IO monad, or at least if you see anything that has a side effect in there.
[1] I was hired at Jet.com specifically because I had Haskell and Erlang experience prior. I had never written any significant C# code before.
Also, having the documentation split between the F# parts on one site and the .NET parts on another site was a bit of a pain.
It might have gone better if I was starting with a book instead of picking docs off the web.
FWIW I think it works fine with Nix, so if you're not opposed to using that package manager it should pretty trivial to get different versions working with a nix shell and/or flake.
In F#'s case, there are plenty of good books, and then it is really needed to learn the platform.
Some well known ones => Stylish F#, F# in Action, Domain Modeling Made Functional