The tooling is not entirely open or freely available. If you, for e.g., want to debug you have to use MS tooling.[0] You also can't use VSCodium because only t

The tooling is not entirely open or freely available. If you, for e.g., want to debug you have to use MS tooling.[0] You also can't use VSCodium because only the MS built/distributed version of VSCode contains the proprietary binary blobs necessary to debug C# (which also means you're forced into the aggressive telemetry and other data collection built into the non-open source distribution of VSCode). They've also taken steps to lock down the LSP support for C#, which once again requires that you use a MS sanctioned editor to write C#. [1] I really enjoy writing C# and think dotnet is a great platform to develop for, but the barriers preventing me from building more projects on it is that I don't want to be forced to use VSCode or Visual Studio. I also don't want to get too invested into a particular piece of tooling that is going to be rug pulled down the road by some MS product manager who isn't aligned with the "MS <3 OSS" side of the company. [0] https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/505 https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/505 [1] https://github.com/dotnet/vscode-csharp/issues/5276 https://github.com/dotnet/vscode-csharp/issues/5276