I always use DuckDuckGo. It’s usually adequate, and certainly “the best of a bad lot”, if you want to look at it that way. I sometimes use bangs if I want to search directly on a site. For example, sometimes I’ll search for something like a code tutorial video directly from DuckDuckGo, and if I have trouble finding it, I’ll update my search to go directly to YouTube, e.g., “modern perl features” first, then “modern perl features !yt”.

I used to jump over to Google when I couldn’t find something through DuckDuckGo, but it’s such garbage now, I don’t even try. I haven’t used Google for months.

The last “tiny linux” that I used was BunsenLabs. That was for a netbook, though. No idea about Chromebook compatibility. https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

I was able to tweak one of the download links and get it:

1. Go to https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=322
2. Copy the USA - kernel.org link
3. Change https://mirrors.kernel.org/linuxmint/stable/22.2/linuxmint-22.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso to https://mirrors.kernel.org/linuxmint/stable/22.3/linuxmint-22.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso
4. wget https://mirrors.kernel.org/linuxmint/stable/22.3/linuxmint-22.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso

Clarification for Debian!

I recently installed on Debian 13 as well and these are the instructions I followed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-debian?tabs=dotnet8

The instructions say Debian 12, but they do work on Debian 13, FWIW.

Depending on your distro, you may have the .NET SDK in your packages already. Debian doesn’t have it. I’m not sure about Mint. I use Ubuntu MATE and .NET 8 is available. Check with this:

apt search dotnet-sdk

If you see something like dotnet-sdk-8.0 in the list, this will install everything you need:

sudo apt install dotnet-sdk-8.0

If it’s not available in the package repo, it’s not difficult to install manually. Follow the instructions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux?WT.mc_id=dotnet-35129-website#manual-installation

For my development environment, I use VS Code with the following extensions:

• C# Dev Kit (Microsoft) – This provides the full development experience: intellisense, debugger, project management, etc.
• C# Extensions (JosKreativ) – This provides handy helpers for scaffolding classes and other module types.
• Todo Tree (Gruntfuggly) – Locates TODO comments in your code and displays them in a dedicated tree view.

Once you’ve installed the SDK along with VS Code and the associated extensions, getting started is as easy as:

dotnet new console -o HelloWorld
cd HelloWorld
code .