How does the .NET ecosystem fare these days compared to Java's? Whatever the differences between the languages, on the surface of things it looks like one must be insane not to use Java: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?language
Personally I think this is a better source: https://octoverse.github.com#top-languages
Or this: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology
What .NET still is not really good in, is first party apps. There is no Kafka or Kubernetes programmed in .NET.
But realistically if you're not doing .NET on windows, you're still an early adopter who's going to run into weird issues that you won't have to deal with on java.
.NET 5 is going to change this completely. .NET Core has already changed.
I love Kotlin and I don't really get a hankering for LINQ when I'm using it, but I wish people would stop trying to say "but we can do that too!" when they really can't.
LINQ brought System.Linq.Expressions and IQueryable to .NET which allows so much more than just filtering and grouping data. You can write entire data providers with LINQ and parse arbitrary expression trees in any way you like.
Entity Framework (Core) utilizes this very well. It doesn't just query an SQL database and then use LINQ's Where, Select etc. to manipulate the data but parses everything the developer has written to an expression tree and then generates an SQL statement at runtime.
Expression<Func<T>>As someone with background from Java but who has worked a lot with .Net Core lately, I guess it might depend on what part of .Net you talk about.
.Net Core worked extremely well on Linux for all use cases I saw, mostly web applications, cli tooling and batch/queue processing. I cannot remember a single case where we had actual problems because of Linux.
In fact, FWIW for small console applications it ran extremely much faster on Linux than on Windows, on the same hardware.
Another point where it is really hard to get people to actually understand the magnitude of the difference is in IDE support, what exists and what you get out of the box.
I mostly enjoy programming in .Net Core a lot but there are times when the difference becomes extremely visible.
Many big projects roll out drivers for the JVM (Java/Scala/Kotlin compatible), Python, and Go first. I agree that C# is a 'nicer language' than Java, but at this point, that doesn't make up for the lack of ecosystem.