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Comment by vjust | Hacker News Reader

Dialing up the annoyance level to a 11. Microsoft has spent the last 6 years or more glacially gravitating its OS-developer features towards Ubuntu. Because they couldn't do better - VSCode being the one crowning glory - and not an insignificant one. The side annoyances of a barely functional Cortana & Edge, were things I looked past, now add one more, a required account - we'll be led into unknown realms of integration (not of tools) but of 'marketing identity' and SSO .

Developers by the very nature of their job are OK with torture, so I guess this will go un-noticed. Hopefully it will be unobtrusive as well, I mean how many more roadblocks can MS put up on that path to WSL prompt/environment. Its a small price to pay - (negative shout-out to System 76). But hopefully Win11 is more intuitive/bearable for people who live on the CLI.

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> Developers by the very nature of their job are OK with torture,

Not if you're a back-end coder or a system admin/DevOps. You might tolerate some level of torture, but you for sure won't be happy about it. Ripping out Cortana, Edge and the Windows 10 start menu are literally the first items on my "setting up a new machine" checklist.

Aside from that, I have never been okay with Teams (beyond voice calls, that's the one thing I'll defend them on) or SharePoint, even if I do have to use both occasionally. It's not like I have any say, but when I have a chance to say my piece, I complain about them openly.

So far, doing most of my work on a Linux VM on a laptop that was well managed by the internal IT team (and with local admin permission granted as needed) was the only reason why I put up with the nonsense that was Windows 10 anywhere.

VSCode is great, Github only got better under Microsoft, and I'm actually one of the people who likes Teams... But even as a general fanboy (Win98 was the system that really got me into computers), it is just too much bullshit at this point. While before I had a Linux partition for specific work, and my main "digital life" on windows, I'm going to switch this around now.

And it sucks so much, there is no good reason but short-sighted greed to push for this, I'm happy to pay for a windows version I own and feel like an owner of, this kind of product just isn't developed anymore apparently.

In WinXP there was something about WMP checking for the rights to MP3's that were already on your computer to verify that you were legally allowed to play them.

I don't think users of Windows have been the primary focus for a long time.

That's a common misconception. What it would do was when indexing a folder with DRM'd music files, it would automatically try to add the rights to the store on your local computer. They weren't using that specific functionality to scan and report. And, it was opt in (when you first started wmp)

Getting track titles automatically (gracenote, etc) might be what you're mixing in - and that was also opt in, and even open source software has that functionality now (VLC, for example)

Misconception? It's what it said during installation. I guess you can pretend it was for whatever reason you want, but never forget the Zune.

I just looked it up for fun. "Enhanced Content Provider Services: Send unique Player ID to content providers [ ]"

At the time, the RIAA was ruining the lives of MP3 downloaders. Trying to pass laws like the DMCA. And here's your buddy Microsoft asking you to voluntarily identify yourself to those bastards. It's even grosser than I remember.

I actually hate VS Code after earnestly trying it for a year (2019). It is decades behind other IDEs in terms of capability.

It is really good for remote coding and collaborative coding. Seems okay for everything else. It doesn't really compete with JetBrains IDEs, but I'm sure it's competitive with other free IDEs.

It's a code editor, not an IDE... they never claimed otherwise.

Sure, there are extensions now that almost make it an IDE (integrated debugger, support for some build systems, etc.) but if you need the real thing, get the real thing.

For debugging native code I always bring up Visual Studio or WinDBG, but as an editor, VSCode is significantly lighter and faster (despite it being built on Electron) than full VS.

The I in IDE is key. Modern Visual Studio, the IDE, will even provide a fully integrated development environment for open source stuff. Trying to do this with a code editor like VSCode is like trying to carry plywood on a VW Beetle. It can do it, but it looks kind of funny, and maybe you should have just rented the truck/IDE from the store...

> and not an insignificant one.

And it's all due to how Code is both open-source in spirit and in truth, and aren't beholden to silly sales targets. You can see what this sort of thing does to a project when the Visual Studio 2022 team tried to move `dotnet watch` HMR functionality to Visual Studio 2022[0] instead of leaving it in VS Code.

0: https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22217

VS Code isn't really FOSS, try using VSCodium.

VS Code binaries might be under a different license that governs auto update and telemetry, but the code for all of VS Code itself is OSS. VSCodium is explicitly just a build of VS Code without any MS extras, and it's a stark difference from licensing the code so that there's zero competition in hosting the product as a managed service.

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