This is a step-by-step guide on how to install Xamarin.Android on any Linux distro, using DistroBox.

Note: The 'rider' package has been removed in Chaotic-AUR, also, there were some GPG/mirror issues with Chaotic-AUR in the past. Therefore I decided to remove Chaotic-AUR from this tutorial.

1. Install DistroBox and Podman/Docker using your package manager

2. Create and enter an Arch Linux Box

   2.1. With a custom home folder (recommended)

   distrobox create -n archriderbox -i archlinux:latest --home ~/distrobox/archriderbox && distrobox enter -nw archriderbox
   

   2.2. Without a custom home folder

   distrobox create -n archriderbox -i archlinux:latest && distrobox enter archriderbox
   

3. Install packages (This should take a while... ☕)

sudo pacman -Sy --needed git base-devel extra/mono-msbuild libxtst fakeroot extra/jdk11-openjdk extra/libxcursor extra/libxcomposite extra/flac extra/lame extra/libasyncns extra/libogg extra/libsndfile extra/libvorbis extra/mpg123 extra/opus extra/libpulse extra/dotnet-sdk-6.0 --noconfirm && \
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git && cd yay && makepkg -si --noconfirm && \
yay -S xamarin-android --noconfirm

4. Download and extract Rider (or the JetBrains Toolbox)

cd ~/ && curl --user-agent "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" https://download.jetbrains.com/rider/JetBrains.Rider-2023.2.tar.gz -L -o ~/rider.tar.gz && tar -xf rider.tar.gz && rm rider.tar.gz && ln -sf JetBrains\ Rider-2023.2/ Rider

5. Start Rider

~/Rider/bin/rider.sh

6. Within Rider, download the Android SDK and set the correct paths (Android SDK+NDK and Java)

Simply start Rider, from your local shell, with the following command:

distrobox enter -nw archriderbox -- Rider/bin/rider.sh

You can use alacarte to easily add Rider to your system menu in Gnome

Make sure to start your emulator using software rendering. Edit your emulator, and set "Graphics" under "Emulated Performance" to "Software - GLES 2.0"

1. fast deployment is turned off or log contains fpctx->head.magic == FPSIMD_MAGIC' not met
   1.1 Add or replace the following line in your Android.csproj file:
   <AndroidSupportedAbis>x86;x86_64;armeabi-v7a;arm64-v8a</AndroidSupportedAbis>