Most of us hate Microsoft, and yet many of us use VSCode

flashgnash@lemm.ee to Linux@lemmy.ml – 393 points –

I get that it's open source provided you use codium not code but I still find that interesting

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I hate Windows and dislike a lot of Microsoft products, but I think we're way past Microsoft being the bad guy. They kinda like Linux now, and probably do more good than bad for it. There are much worse companies in tech, I think Microsoft's worst crimes as of late is creating Teams and being boring.

Please look up "Embrace, extend, extinguish". VScode is open-source for now, but all the microsoft extensions you need to turn it into an IDE have DRM on them and microsoft puts work into trying to make those extensions not work with VScode forks.

WSL is the same thing. They start by embracing linux and soon they'll start installing MS crap into the guest system or shipping their own distro that's filled with it. This is the extend part. The final goal is to extinguish desktop linux and make everything WSL to be able to track it all and harvest shitloads of data.

I'm well familiar with EEE, I've used Linux off and on for something like 20 years, back when Microsoft really was the boogeyman. I don't think VS code qualifies for this category since it was originally (ish, has roots in Atom I think) open source and Microsoft. It was never embraced/extended, and extinguishing their own product makes no sense. (btw I don't even use VS Code, shit vim plugins in my experience, jetbrains all the way)

WSL IMO is a concession on Microsoft's part, because most dev tools nowadays are being made primarily with Linux in mind. It's what makes Windows at all usable as a development platform in many situations. And pretty much nothing developed specifically for WSL. All WSL has on a normal Linux distro is integration with the host system AFAIK.