> Installation takes me to a Microsoft support page, then I'm installing PPAs and copy-pasting lines of Bash

Which Microsoft support page are you looking at? The one I copied the below commands from[1] literally just lists these commands. On occasion, an additional repository and Microsoft keys need to be added, but everything else just works™.

    sudo pacman -S dotnet-sdk
    sudo apt install dotnet-sdk-7.0
    sudo dnf install dotnet-sdk-7.0
    sudo yum install dotnet-sdk-7.0
    sudo zypper install dotnet-sdk-7.0

And for lolz:

    winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.7

All work on their respective distros/OSes. Once installed:

    dotnet new console

to create a new console app. Fire up any editor (doesn't need to be Visual Studio Enterprise 2022) and start coding.

The only place where installing the .NET SDK is complicated is macOS, but that goes for anything there, honestly. Even getting non-Apple Clang + LLVM on macOS is a pain.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux

Interesting. I just did a quick Google and ended up here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-...

I just tried installing your way on Fedora and it worked a treat. Very nice! Thanks for the info. I haven't really kept up since the Mono days.

> then I'm installing PPAs and copy-pasting lines of Bash. Gross.

That's not exactly Microsoft's unique flavour, lots of open-source projects don't end up in the centrally maintained and approved repositories of your distro of choice and are instead distributed in all kinds of god-forsaken ways. Have you ever tried to install Conda on Linux? Just go and look at its installer, now that is gross.

And then there's packages that are in distro repos, but are so difficult to build correctly that the developers' advice is to not use the distro package, but instead download a tarball and compile it yourself (despite the user being no less prone to build pitfalls than distro maintainers are). This is how the spaced repetition flash card app Anki is, and it means that getting it up and running on a proprietary OS, which properly built binaries are readily available for, is easier and more consistent.