As dumb this change was, companies that fire their employees over this are somehow even dumber.
If there’s a company policy against, who knows, sending any company’s IP to a random third party known for shitting on both license terms and their own ToS, having your work marked like this is a big red flag. And since it “accidentally” happened to everyone, either you dismiss all the suspected bogus entries and let the rats in, or you have to carefully review everything.
It’s big trouble either way.
Beyond VSCodium (which I have switched to since this news), what are everyone’s favorite alternatives that are easy to switch to?
I say easy to switch to because no one is jumping to Vim or whatever on this news. I don’t mean to offend the deeply Linuxed, but they aren’t.
I may finally give Pulsar a go (a maintained Atom fork).
I really missed Atom when it died.
AstroNvim is nice. It’s an opinionated and pre-configured nvim distro, so you don’t have to spend as much time finding the right plugins and configurations.
Lmao, of course nobody is jumping to Vim. We’re all on NeoVim now.
Maybe KDE’s Kate. It’s available for everything with a mouse and keyboard and works just fine. Not as ultra fancy as Codium, but if you need a quick and easy text editor that isn’t all Electron bells and whistles… Kate.
lapce feels like vscode but is built from scratch in rust iirc. lapce.dev
I was many years user of JetBrains stuff. Tried vscode multiple times and last time I checked it was full Microsoft bullshit.
Finally I settled with Zed. It’s amazing. Still has some missing features but overall great experience once you set it all up to your liking.
Unrelated to this, I’ve been having issues with VSCode, that also showed up in VSCodium. I’ve been on old school vim with Konsole terminal tiling and honestly I’m not sure if I want to go back anymore. I’m learning new git tools every day, I’m keeping myself decluttered, and I’m wasting less time tinkering.
Vim/Konsole are an Apples to Oranges comparison. Modern TUIs are closer in feature parity. Personally I use Zellij with NeoVim and LazyVim as the base config. If you use an LLM, customization becomes easier.
Personal preferences are personal preferences though if VSCode is working for you.
The last time I tried vscodium the devcontainers support was very poor. That is the main thing keeping me on vscode.
I would actually support this if the code was generated by the Copilot plugin, but this is just adding a blanket “Sent from my iPhone” on all code commits wtf.
I’m sure they added it by mistake 🙂
It’s more insidious than that: by adding it to all even when they don’t use AI, they give cover to people who are vibe-coding. “Nah man, I totally wrote it myself. VS Code just puts that message on everything.”
No it won’t.
Shameless plug for codium: https://vscodium.com/
Afaik, they only remove telemetry and branding. Although they are lagging behind a little, so this change didn’t reach vscodium: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/2823
Copilot is part of the github extension I believe not base vscode
It’s part of the git extension, not github, according to https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226 My understanding is that there is a separate extension for github: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/extensions/github Or do you need both for this co-authored thing?
In any case, the point is that vscodium is still based on the same source code, and Microsoft can do anything with it.
Dmitriy Vasyura
linkedin says russian
…and?
I use Codeblocks
I’m still stumped why anyone tech savvy enough to code is not already on Linux and code berg.
Like outside of any job demanding otherwise that is
I think you’re seriously overestimating many of the people hired and told to produce code.
Career software engineer here, love terminal/CLI, hate using a mouse - keyboard shortcuts are king.
Every 3-4 months I try to switch to Linux and I lose 2-3 days trying 5+ distros only to arrive back on my debloated Windows because things just. don’t. work.
Shortlist of things that don’t work at all or don’t work in a performant manner:
- RDP/ParSec/AnyDesk/RustDesk/xRDP/VNC
- Customizable window tiling managers
- Drivers - whether it’s my earbuds, my keyboard, my mouse, or other various things - at least one thing doesn’t work right
- Font / display scaling
- Teams, which I need for some jobs
I really would love to make it work, but every time I try and something comes up and I ask online about how I can address it the answer is typically, “you can’t” or “you just need to be OK without that”
I’ve been using some variation of Linux since the mid 90’s but never been able to fully switch over. That said I am on my longest and perhaps permanent switch over with KDE EndevourOS (Arch based). I don’t believe this is what you are hoping for but I do believe it is close so perhaps something to keep an eye on for the future.
I have gotten Teams to run once for a about an hour before it crashed and now I can’t figure out what proton/wine voodoo witch doctor recipe I used.
No idea what luck you will have with RDP or RustDesk.
KDE plasma’s window tiling manager is really damn cool but has no documentation. Still you can do neat stuff with it like having a floating window tile on top of another tile (basically an always on top state but on steroids) with distinct tiling arrangements for each virtual desk space.
Scaling has been good but font support is still at the “almost but still not perfect”. A graphics designer might be in trouble.
Drivers - This is where Arch’s pacman (software package manager) and pkgbuild really shine. If it can compile and is available as a git repo, an rpm, or deb file then there is a good chance you can get it working. That said there are still an unfortunate mountain of unsupported stuff.
Otherwise, with all the improvements to Wine via proton and the other forks, it is getting easier to run a lot more Window’s applications.
Like I said, EndevourOS/Arch with KDE is getting pretty close to being an easy jump from Windows but not 100% perfect.
You can rdp from nix to win pretty easily, but rdping to linux requires fuckery that works about 80% of the time, even in the most ideal environs.
I’m using RDP from my CachyOS machine to access my Raspberry Pi and a home server with Linux Mint. The Remmina RDP client works quite well.
I’m quite new to running Linux at home and as an admin, and I recall it took me a bit to get RDP working on my servers but I’ve been very happy with it.
I’ll check it out! I’m a glutton for punishment. Thanks for the suggestion.
If you want punishment go for NixOS!
- Fundamental philosophy changes over its lifetime.
- No idea (when starting) which documentation or patterns go with which version.
But once it clicks you have a fully declarative setup**. I edit a file, activate, commit to git. On another system, pull, activate.
** The config system is expansive but not exhaustive. I still have to login to Slack, pick my theme, etc. My VPN on the other hand is just ready credentials and all.
I never have to remember the 100 little tweaks I made, every tweak is in git. Noise canceling pipewire filter, what software I had installed, service configurations, secret management, disk partitions, all portable between different systems.
A lighter introduction is probably home manager, works in any Linux system or macOS. Manages your home directory as the name implies.
You can also go lighter with a repo flake.nix and a devShell. Its like a generic virtual environment. Auto activate with direnv. A step up from a devShell would be https://devenv.sh/ which tracks more like home manager with configurable modules. A devShell is really a bash script with these programs available from Nix.
Not wanting to start any distro wars, its all a matter of taste but I could advise you to try cachyos its also arch based, but with a few performance tweaks, what I believe that it could help you is that on cachyos start screen it gives you the option to install and setup winboat and winboat is great when you need to run windows applications.
While I understand the sentiment, this have nothing to do with vscode, which you can perfectly use on Linux and with whatever cvs you want.
On the flip side, it pushed me to move away from vscode. Whoever did this, thanks.
Genuinely curious, to what?
The plugin ecosystem of vscode is why I’m still here.
Neovim. Also there for the plugin ecosystem. Some popular feature rich presets, all customizable.
https://www.lazyvim.org/ https://astronvim.com/ https://nvchad.com/
Quick search suggests Emacs is the only other major rival to VSCode/Neovim so you’re stuck with a TUI or a VSCode fork for a rich plugin ecosystem (non-athoritive statement, 30s web search).
Plain old Vim, with YouCompleteMe, NERDTree and TagBar installed; plus a few bindings to the leader key, is a much better IDE than anything else I’ve found. Sometimes it would be nice to a couple of the buttons that Eclipse or IDEA provide, but for pure text editing it’s unbeatable.
I’ve also found that “fancy Git dialogs” just get in the way, and learning how to use it properly from the command line stomps them all hands down. Plus, you can still use all your skills in a remote terminal.
Neovim. It’s painful at the beginning, but I’m getting more confident and productive. IMO, it’s worth it if you’re into CLI.
I also considered JetBrains products and Zed.
Speed and battery consumption are important to me, and JetBrains is too monstrous to satisfy these criteria. Besides, JetBrains doesn’t really offer a basic code editor that you can extend with plugins. IntelliJ IDEA is meant to be like that, but it’s a huge Java IDE whether you need it or not.
Zed looked good, but I decided not to invest my time into another code editor with paid features - they tend to enshittify over time.
