The cncnet installer also uses Tore's client though lol, at least the full game Linux one lol
I ended up using Rampastring's client, although I still prefer Tore's for various reasons (Rampastring's client seems to not allow me to use custom resolutions, and it also seems to include Firestorm music in the vanilla TS campaign) and got kinda roped into becoming a tester for the cross-platform port on Linux.
But no, Tore's installer just fails regardless of whether I already manually install .Net beforehand or not, it insists on downloading it itself and failing.