I remember him being very pro Windows. If so then this is a welcome change of spirit. I hope he is daily driving a Linux system at home and I hope everyone else here does as well.
It wasn't the sort of anti-linux sentiment that you're implying.
VS is hands down the best IDE in the world, bar none. And I say this as someone who runs linux on everything except my gaming pc and my work laptop.
Once you step outside of visual studio though ... nothing compares with those setups (I use vim, but the sentiment is the same). It's because you have easy access to the entire OS, not anything specific to vim/emacs (although there's a lot of great things to say about them too).
I use it for .NET development but I don't think it is better than Rider.
I definitely think it's better.
Often rider lags behind understanding newer C# languages and .net features and the debugger is slower to launch in rider (rider in general is slower than VS in my experience). I also find rider slower in general and I think features rider has are mis-features.
If you're coming from a java background with IntelliJ experience then rider will probably feel more comfortable in terms of UI philosophies, keybindings, etc, and I'm not trying to discount comfort, but even technically I don't think rider can touch VS.
And I'm not discounting rider, I'm saying VS really is that good. It's not perfect by any means, but even on technical merit alone I think rider loses.
And I have a jetbrains "all inclusive" license, I'm a huge fan of their tools. I just don't think rider is as good as VS. If VS were ever ported to linux I'd stop using Rider alltogether.
Although I will admit, I can't like DataGrip and I've really tried. Just something about it doesn't sit well with my sensibilities, I think because it tries to be jack of all things data wise and it loses something as a result.