That’s just a rebranded Xamarin IDE - but for .NET development on Mac, I’ve found JetBrains Rider does most of what the full Visual Studio package does

I like Rider better even on Windows. My favorite thing about Visual Studio on Windows was always the debugger, and I think Clion and Rider have lapped them there in the past two years.

Yes it's just Xamarin modified to look like a native Visual Studio for Mac.

Much better off using Rider (also works nicely on Linux).

IntelliJ is still a little broken on wayland I think. Last I checked they were waiting on a patch to Swing, so right now it's only running under XWayland, it's fairly buggy and doesn't scale nicely. You also need to set some env variables or you'll get a blank screen. It still works pretty well though, which is better than any other similar IDE.

Seconding Rider if you're on macOS. It shares its analysis code with ReSharper, so it's extremely featureful. In fact, it's usually faster than VS + ReSharper because it isn't running two code analysis engines at once and it doesn't have to run the analysis out-of-process.

Note that if OP expects anything like the "real" Visual Studio that runs on Windows, this is really nothing compared to it. I'd even go further and actually prefer Vscode with the right extensions compared to this "Visual Studio".

sounds like when we try to run iTunes on Windows - each competitor is intentionally crapping on the other's users

Don't worry, the Music app on macOS is just as bad as iTunes on Windows...

It's more that Visual Studio is a massive project that was built around running on Windows. It would be a huge undertaking to bring it over to another OS and probably not add nearly enough value. The only reason macOS has "Visual Studio" at all is because Microsoft bought out Xamarin and rebranded their Xamarin Studio product.

Yup it would just not be worth it to bring real VS to macOS. Then why decrease its brand value by marketing a crappy product like Xamarin (which I think has always been bad, and I honestly don't know why MS bothered to buy it) as if it was VS? Just call it Xamarin, or VS "lite", or anything, but not VS as it is not VS.

Consistent branding. Visual Studio is the name they're using for all their code editing software. I don't think it's a good idea given the confusion it causes when people talk about the various programs, but they are distinctly named Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio for Mac.

Microsoft has never been good at naming things. They made that mess of Windows naming at multiple points and they are still making a mess with the Xbox brand.

iTunes is crappy in Macs, too!!