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.
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.
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.”
I’m sure they added it by mistake 🙂
The mistake of having to show usage numbers to the investors.
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.
No it won’t.
I use Codeblocks
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.
Lmao, of course nobody is jumping to Vim. We’re all on NeoVim now.
The last time I tried vscodium the devcontainers support was very poor. That is the main thing keeping me on vscode.
Zed is an option. Just trying it out myself now after this fiasco.
lapce feels like vscode but is built from scratch in rust iirc. lapce.dev
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.
Kate is nice but it’s annoying to use with direnv/nix devshells unfortunately
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.
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.
I may finally give Pulsar a go (a maintained Atom fork).
I really missed Atom when it died.
I switched to Emacs (Doom Emacs for ok defaults) years ago and more recently went from that to Neovim (Lazyvim, also for defaults)
Learning (basic) Vim keybindings once is honestly a time saver compared to learning lots of editor-specific stuff.
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.
That’s my point. They’re not apples and oranges. A terminal basically always has feature parity with any other tool you want to use.
no one is jumping to Vim
I’m seriously thinking about going back to VIM. At this point the only thing holding me back is that I like the file tree view of GUI tools. It’s not much.
I looked into “lightweight” alternative, but their PR and “features” make them seems almost worst than vscode. Zed in particular; people praise it for being “simple”, but the biggest upside seems to be “GPU accelerated” and “not as sluggish as vscode” which, ok, I guess, but I don’t think an IDE needs to be GPU accelerated and vscode don’t feel sluggish at all even on my modest first gen NUC so…
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.
I couldn’t go without LSPs these days.
Real time diagnostics. Jump to implementation. Code actions.
Its just so much faster and my code rarely doesn’t run on first try outside of logic errors, but it still runs.
https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim was nice back in the day, but neovim and the plugin ecosystem takes it to another level.
Edit: I agree with you on git when learning. I’m old, over 15 years of experience on it. I don’t have anything to gain typing the same handful of commands I use everyday.
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.
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
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.
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 just vm’d my entire win7 install an duse that inside my kubuntu.
For stuff that I can’t- usually extended disk recovery and some vid mastering - i have a racked win machine literally disconnected from the network with a CRU for drives and a kvm to my main monitor.
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.
Its likely hard because its honestly niche.
Linux administration is terminal first so SSH is pretty much all you need. Some services have a WebUI to fill the gap, but its bound to that service. Most server variants of distros don’t even include a desktop environment.
KVM-over-IP (hardware device) is likely a more common approach because if you need video, might as well have BIOS access.
There may be something in the virtualization space where the hypervisor provides a remote desktop, but I’m not familiar with this space. A quick search for proxmox and remote desktop yielded mostly results for guest OS setups instead of at the host layer.
Vnc over ssh works fine
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.
Added to my last to try! Thanks!
Unfortunately, the hardware you use still matters. Hardware manufacturers just don’t care to invest in Linux support, so it’s basically all community driven. The community has done amazing work in spite of that, so a lot if hardware works, but unfortunately, if you want to make a permanent change to Linux, it really pays off to be mindful of that goal when you’re picking components. AMD hardware tends to work better than alternatives in my experience, especially in the GPU, but I don’t use and so can’t speak to any other peripherals.
But I’ve had great luck with some of these things. I used to RDP into my Linux desktop all the time just fine, including from a Windows laptop. I haven’t really played with tiling window managers, but I know there are some powerful ones out there if you’re willing to take the time to learn how to config to your personal taste. I think i3 and xmonad are common for X11 and Hyprland for Wayland. Font and display scaling is highly dependent on the desktop environment you use. I want to say GNOME and KDE have made big strides here in recent years as they try to become adaptable to tablets, phones, and other small hardware, so if you haven’t tried that in a long time, it may be worth a look again.
For specific software you just can’t live without like Teams, there’s two option. WINE is the less resource intensive option, and it’s basically a translation layer that turns Windows system calls into Linux ones, and it’s really good these days. In the rare (for me) case that WINE doesn’t work, if you have the spare resources on the machine, you can use a virtual machine running Windows. If you really need that VM to work fast, you can set up hardware pass through so the VM gets direct access to it. That’s generally pretty easy with CPU cores and RAM, but if you need to pass through the GPU for anything, that can get complicated fast last I knew. And of course, a VM is a heavy option for just making Teams work, but if you want on Linux bad enough, it may become worthwhile.
Really, I feel like the only thing here that should be insurmountable is drivers. Maybe Windows software that you need if you’re really unlucky, but most of that works well these days in my experience.
I think you’re seriously overestimating many of the people hired and told to produce code.
Dmitriy Vasyura
linkedin says russian
…and?
