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Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft tries to make you think it’s not, but VSCode is proprietary if you download the official builds. Don’t use it!

The Vscodium project [0] exists and provides builds directly from the source.

This version has none of the user-hostile behavior! It also makes you realize Microsoft’s new round of EEE overreach when you see that the maintainers have to provide the extensions through their own repository and the default C# debugger doesn’t work for licensing reasons (everything else works perfectly).

Don’t trust Microsoft. Use the code they give you (which is generally fine), not their proprietary products (which are generally very much not fine).

[0]: https://vscodium.com

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Don’t trust Microsoft extends to GitHub as well. Same company and same issues. GitHub probably has even more of developer mindshare and should get equal outrage as this. At least VS Code is open source.

Incredibly smart move from MS to buy github.

Certainly is neo-EEE as developer "influencers" claim M$ has turned a new leaf

Never rely on GitHub features, like issues, wiki or actions.

While the repo itself cannot lock you in, theses can.

This kills me because I use and love GitHub. I’ve tried Gitlab a few times and we do use it at my day job, but I keep coming back to GitHub for personal use.

GitLab is fine and well-integrated, but it can be heavy and slow. There are alternatives. Sourcehut, Gitea, Codeberg (runs Gitea), GNU Savannah, or just plain cgit. It isn't a binary choice.

I think GitHub might actually be best suited for personal projects. Projects aimed at others is now making contributors accept GitHub's proprietary ToS, vendor lock-in, and whatever experimental ways they plan to scan and profit from your code by offering it for "free".

Sadly the main thing I use vscode for doesn't work in vscodium, so it's completely useless to me: remote projects. Without that I may as well just go back to sublime, which is lighter and faster.

I assume that means it is missing the tight integration with wsl which is my primary use case.

… or the other way around. It works fine-ish, better than using Windows directly in any case, for me at least.

It's not just WSL. There is "remote-ssh" for vscodium either.

What does this do? Or better What is the use case? I never really worked with VSC other than the basics and I rarely connect to servers to edit files or sourcecode

I use "Remote - SSH" to develop on a VM. I try to keep the amount of software I run on my laptop to a minimum to keep it cooler and quieter. I have a VM on my workstation PC at home, which has a much better CPU than my laptop. The VM runs vscode backend, while the laptop runs vscode frontend, slack and a web browser.

Okay, I get this, guess I would just ssh -x for that purpose, but that assumes a full Linux environment.

Keeping a laptop cool and quite while running slack and vscodium is a task in itself. I guess I would create a CI Pipeline and just commit via git

vscode remote ssh mode is a much better experience than x forwarding. Like, it's not even close. It is hands down the best remote editing experience I've ever used in any kind of editor or ide, and running anything electron through remote X11 is basically like trying to kill a flea with a tractor.

So the Linux is forcing you to use proprietary version of SW? That's wild.

For reference, "EEE", especially in the context of Microsoft, stands for "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish|Exterminate".

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

From Wikipedia:

>"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

everything else works perfectly

Isn't it also the case that pylance doesn't work and has some form of DRM to prevent it from being used with the open source version? I'm not saying that as a reason not to use the open source version, just wondering if Microsoft has already rounded the corner on that second "E" in EEE.

"strategic product strategy businesses feature decision" as literally said by their PM.

Yes, the official VSCode binaries from Microsoft come with a binary blob to implement DRM. From the documentation (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Differences-between...): "The distribution includes a native node module that allows the extension to use a "handshake" to adhere to the license by ensuring it is being used from Visual Studio Code"

How is building proprietary plugins for the editor they themselves created and maintain at all part of EEE? Unless it's someway to extinguish LSP, which they also created?

Why don't you use an editor which has nothing to do with Microsoft? "generally fine" is not a good reason to be involved with a predatory company.

Because it’s hard to beat the ecosystem around VSCode. VSCode extensions take it from an OK text editor to an almost-emacs replacement.

Funny thing, I waited a little and then added some new, great emacs implementations of everything people were saying was so great about VSCode.

Yeah, lsp-mode for Emacs exists because Microsoft created LSP for VS Code, so I'm glad VS Code was created even though I'll never use it.

(I installed VS Code to see what the fuss was about and the first thing I wanted to do was hide the tabs because tabs are a useless eyesore in a text editor. But when I searched for a way to hide them, I read that it wasn't possible. Madness. I'll never understand how tech enthusiasts can enjoy using software that provides them with so little control.)

It's cool they use the same source so it's always the current version. I always assume projects like these aren't current or are several versions behind.

And the Microsoft extensions, like for C++, fetch and run big binary analyzer daemons that do all the work behind the scenes. Use clangd and its extension instead.

Looks like they don't ship Apple Silicon builds, unfortunately.

Ha, I considered mentioning it. Here are the Apple Silicon builds: https://github.com/tibeer/vscodium/releases

They’re still working on making them official.

Or just disable telemetry and be done with it.

This is your first day on earth? You sound like you have no experience how these tech companies grow and consume everything in their path. "Just disable it"... Sure. :)

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