Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.

There is no "just works" technical solution for a problem caused mainly by naivete and gullibility. Governments and the private sector know this, of course; as others have said, the real purpose is to control users, not to protect them.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of servers work much better with VSCode than other editors. Whether this was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to EEE their own product, or simply a convenient result of their own incompetence, is ambiguous.

OP blames FOSS for not providing an IDE protocol a decade earlier, but doesn't ask the rather obvious question of why language-specific tooling is not only still around, but as market-viable as ever. I'd argue it's because what LSP tries to do is just stupid to begin with, or at least exceptionally hard to get right. All of the best language tooling I've used is ad-hoc and tailored to the specific strengths of a single language. LSP makes the same mistake Microsoft made with UWP: trying to cram the same peg into every hole.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still develops their proprietary Intellisense stuff because it actually works. They competed with themselves and won.

(Minor edit: I forgot that MS alone didn't standardize LSP.)

Hardware support issues are certainly understandable, but blaming "opinionated nerds" for them is asinine. It cannot be understated how difficult it is to deal with certain OEMs.

I expected it to be a little less convenient to leave Microsoft's beaten path. I did not expect it to be a massive waste of time. This is what I meant by futile. Not only is it apparently very brittle, it's missing large swaths of VSC's ecosystem. Hell, I don't even know if the extension I wanted is available on OpenVSX because it's still down!

If Microsoft hadn't openwashed their product, I wouldn't care nearly as much.

Besides, Emacs still provides a streamlined system for managing packages on top of being hackable. It even makes installing and upgrading packages straight from a Git repo easy. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too.

It's left a very sour taste in my mouth. I've used Emacs for ages and despite being a much more niche editor, it's never been so hard-dependent on centralized repositories, and the centralized repositories it does have (ELPA/MELPA) are apparently a lot more reliable than OpenVSX. Installing Emacs packages manually from source is a breeze, doing so with VSC is masochistic.

VSC is not really "open source" in any meaningful sense. It is just plainly unusable if you don't do things the way Microsoft wants you to. I do respect the VSCodium devs for trying to make VSC more properly open, but it does feel like a futile effort.

Someone has yet to explain to me how the Linux desktop is supposed to just agree on a universal standard for everything without a proprietary ecosystem, at which point it would just be a shittier Windows. And that's not even touching on the fact that alternatives often exist for valid reasons, i.e. Pipewire being obviously better than Pulse, which used to be a de facto standard. Or the fact that some companies like Bitwig have already demonstrated that commercial Linux software via Flatpak is viable - Adobe simply does not care, and they never will.

The irony of Windows users sharing their opinions on the Linux desktop is that they often sound how they picture existing Linux desktop users: people who treat their computers as toys. We're fully aware that using Linux has major caveats.

It's okay to just not like Linux, man. Nobody is forcing you to.

Python in particular makes it very easy to be too clever, since its extremely rigid syntax was designed specifically to discourage it, but it ended up giving the user the necessary tools to be clever anyway, and the end result is usually... not pretty.

The end result was still a much better language than bash, of course, but that's a very low bar.