I noticed this the other day when I installed VSCodium on my new Windows box. I had a functional setup for one day, then the next day I couldn't install a language extension I direly needed.
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.
I feel that you're conflating few concepts, hackability, "open source", single point of failure architectures.
Yes, VSC is less hackable than emacs, but I don't think it's necessarily the same thing. VSC (and others like it) are going for a more streamlined "App Store" experience, while emacs is going for a more DIY/hackable style editor.
You can always fetching the VSIX file and sideload it is if the "store" is down though.
Yes, VSC is less "open source" than emacs. if "open sourceness" is a score out of 10 or something. Pretty sure RMS would argue linux is less "open source" than emacs too.
Not sure why this is futile for the VSCodium devs. They are taking a dependency on a service for installing extensions. The solutions is more readonly mirrors for the official OpenVSX endpoint.
If your main archlinux mirror is down, you don't cry about the centralized state of our life. You use a different mirror. You throw in 5 or 10 in case one or two are down. I understand why a company like Microsoft might want a more centralized service to distribute the extensions. But for an open source clone? is Microsoft also expected to create the mirror clone?
For context, Open VSX is run by the Eclipse foundation, which also develops the Eclipse Theia editor, which is basically a clone of VS Code (not a fork, like VS Codium).
The Open VSX registry is open source (https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx) and self-hostable, although I have no experience with that. I assume it's possible to host your own instance with the extensions you want instead of relying on the free public instance.
Personally I'm more of a Sublime guy, but people looking for an open VSC alternative should consider Theia over VSC forks. It seems like the smarter long term investment if you want to get out from Microsoft's control.
The model is called Open Core, so is well understood so I am not sure what is causing this confusion. The editor is open source as evident from a dozen forks. The complete experience which includes extensions has closed source pieces which the forks won't access to. But OSS community can build replacement or other companies can provide alternatives.
Just because pylance is available doesn't stop jetbrains/Google/OSS from creating an LS. Maybe no such exists as if now, but not from a technical blocker. Just no one created one.
It’s plenty open source — that is why all these forks exist!
VS Code itself does not work without various propriety stuff, but that is a different thing. A large number of open-source projects work that way. If you don’t like the proprietary stuff, the recourse is to fork it, modify it, and implement the remaining stuff yourself.
Pointless was my thought after initially installing it years ago. Ok, I’m installing this open source “clean” version, just to install a bunch of MS proprietary spyware extensions? Why not just use the real thing?
I mean, it's Microsoft. We all knew that to an extent going in.
Google, on the other hand, pretended to be the FOSS crusader while setting themselves up for a ton of vendor lock-in that would not only have gotten 90s MS convicted on antitrust, but Bill Gates crucified on the National Mall.
Maybe I'm just old, but I find it so strange that you have to compare something from Microsoft to something else to indicate how evil it is. It's Microsoft.
There is not much to see on a server that is down, so let me share some free advice instead.
Visit Eclipse Theia in the mean time when you are serious about de-risking from VSCode. I think VSCodium is doing an uphill battle here, while Microsoft can't help them self being a sales company first. In Theia, everything is open and free of spyware. MS is under no obligation to provide an OSS editor, but playing tricks after luring people in is not nice.
EDIT:
1. Eclipse Theia is a different platform than Eclipse the Java IDE.
Each time I try to use Theia IDE I have such a bad experience:
* On each start, Ada & SPARK extension pops up a dialog that I have to close by clicking 12 times (I counted it) on its "Cancel" button.
* I can't permanently remove items from the left sidebar. It looks like Theia is unable to persist some things between runs.
* The IDE notifies me about bad tasks.json config and proposes to open it to fix, but the "Open" button doesn't do anything.
* Open VSX extensions do not update automatically. [1] I have to manually switch their versions to the newer ones.
* Just now I've manually updated Ada & SPARK extension. Not only was I presented with several options with exactly the same version (perhaps each was meant for different CPU arch or operating system?), but after choosing the first one and reloading editor as the IDE asked me to, the extension disappeared completely.
None of these happen with VSCodium, or with VS Code of course.
> Please note that a few parts of the VS Code extension API are only stubbed in Theia. Extensions will be installable, but some features might not work as expected.
Also, I thought Theia was a cloud IDE, and it seems like I was mostly right in that 2/3rds of their offering is (localhost:3000 & docker) but they also now apparently bundle it in Electron which I haven't tried
From my experience having attempted to migrate away from VSCodium (in the attempts to de-VSCode) and build atop Theia as a platform, there are few things to consider:
- The build system is finicky and can easily take hours to figure/fix.
- The error-reporting is severely lacking. You can be lost why something internal isn't working and go on a rabbit-trail with your favorite AI-copilot, etc.
- Documentation is lacking. You have to dive into the platform code to actually figure things out.
- This can be seen positively but there are quite a few new things being introduced regularly (especially AI-related) which, for a platform, isn't always ideal.
> MS is under no obligation to provide an OSS editor, but playing tricks after luring people in is not nice.
Microsoft is partly to blame, but people have been warning about this over and over and over ad nauseam and people still choose to use VSCode. You couldn't even get people to not use the proprietary extensions for C/C++, Python and remote development.
The problem is that Microsoft dedicates enough resource to development that everybody else looks like a rounding error.
For example, anybody could have produced the Language Server Protocol, but nobody had the critical mass until Microsoft shoved it down everybody's throats.
Until somebody puts a significant amount of money behind an alternative, Microsoft is going to continue to win this battle.
(I was going to also say "or the OSS guys all unify behind a choice" but Hell will freeze over before that happens.)
Open Source projects used to all be hosted on hundreds of random mirrors. The hosting of which was free and donated, because it was just an HTTP/FTP/RSYNC directory on a file server in a closet in some corporation or university. Didn't even need to be reliable, as there were hundreds of mirrors. Linux distributions, and some very old projects, are still maintained this way.
Nowadays you must have a flashy website. You must host everything on a single managed VCS provider, or a programming package ecosystem hoster. You must depend on corporations to give you free things, in exchange for you giving them everything about you (otherwise you must pay out of pocket for everything). You must do what everyone else does.
Maybe it's impossible to go back to a simpler time. But it's not impossible to change the state of things today.
> Nowadays you must have a flashy website. You must host everything on a single managed VCS provider, or a programming package ecosystem hoster. You must depend on corporations to give you free things, in exchange for you giving them everything about you (otherwise you must pay out of pocket for everything). You must do what everyone else does.
You keep saying _must_. Why _must_ you do what everyone else does? To what end? To get contributors to your project? To get funding? No one is stopping anyone from starting a project on sourceforge.
I fail to see the problem with this, to be honest. Microsoft provides a free IDE for everyone to use on any platform, but it's not good enough because the language runtimes and proprietary third party tools aren't completely free?
Maybe Microsoft should've made VSCode source-available. Sure, companies taking Microsoft's free labour would need to develop an IDE of their own (or maybe someone can hack Eclipse to work as a browser project?), but at least Microsoft wouldn't take the heat for not doing enough free work for everyone else.
Thanks for the share. Yeah, building upon VSCode (MIT) is a stupid idea. Regarding OpenVSX, it was developed whilst I was at Gitpod and transferred to the Eclipse Foundation. It's been many years now, so my memory might be a little dated as to what came first, but OpenVSX/Gitpod/Thiea/Eclipse origins can all be traced back to https://www.typefox.io/.
Anyway. OpenVSX is classic XKCD https://xkcd.com/2347/ territory—run by a small crew of brilliant volunteers, but the entire world depends/freeloads upon them.
Lots of vim/emacs mentions so I feel obliged to mention Helix (https://helix-editor.com/). Used neovim for _years_, tried Helix for a few weeks and never looked back
This right on the heels of the GitLab 17.11 release announcement [0] which mentioned that they added OpenVSX support to their Web IDE. One of the biggest blockers for my team to use the Web IDE/GitLab's equivalent of "Codespaces" was the lack of extensions support.
As developers, we're spoiled for widespread (e.g.) vim keybindings support in just about any IDE via extensions. When unable to use it in something like Web IDE, it is very frustrating and makes it less useful as a product.
If I didn't hate GitLab's gitlab-org/gitlab issue tracker so much I'd go look to see if them offering OpenVSX registry was on the roadmap, because then an organization could mirror the .vsix into their GitLab instance and not suffer outages (in addition to the supply chain safety aspects)
Also, I wonder how hard it would be to teach VSCodium/Theia to pull extensions from OCI because it seems to work great as a distribution mechanism for Homebrew and allows shipping a .vsix from your own GitHub/GitLab account, since both of those offer no-cost OCI image registries scoped to the project
Now it's as good a time as ever to try out Lazy Vim. Came to it from Lunar Vim and it just works.
Working with anything is a breeze.
I'm just not too familiar with refactoring tooling and how to configure it, but there's rarely any reason for me to use something more complicated than sed, and in those occasions I can just use ast-grep.
Trying out emacs again after vsvode broke remote ssh for no apparent reason (other than their insane decision to install the whole text editor remotely). Tramps in emacs has some quirks (need to make connection timeouts faster somehow) but it just works.
I happened to be poking around in their issues to see if there were mirrors and observed that in addition to the linked status page on this thread, the underlying Eclipse Foundation has their own (multiple) status tracking channels
the tl;dr seems to be a massive storage failure affecting a bunch of Eclipse services, and just like any storage problem putting all the bytes back is some "please wait"
Worth noting that you can configure VSCodium to use Microsoft's extension repo, and you can even trick extensions into thinking VSCodium is VSCode. It just can't be distributed that way out of the box for legal reasons.
Do you have a particular configuration or set of extensions you've been looking at? I mostly use JetBrains IDEs but have been trying to get a decent neovim setup as well. I followed some random tutorial and eventually got a decent setup working but it feels fragile and I'm not sure I could reproduce it if I had to. I am looking at AstroNvim now as a potentially more stable/reproducible setup.
What are good, open source, alternatives to VS Code? That are modern IDEs with decent support for frontend, backend, data science, and embedded (possibly via extensions)? That mostly work out of the box, without having to set up and configure NN things.
They don't exist. If you want out-of-the-box, use Jetbrains and pay for it. If you want free-as-in-beer, VSCode proper. For free-as-in-speech you'll spend hours to learn/configure neovim/helix/emacs, or even hunting down free VSCodium plugins, I guess.
I think working on out-of-the-box experience is not very attractive for volunteer contributors, so I guess the situation won't change unless we find a way to sponsor that work.
Basically we've seen this movie before -look at the trajectory OSX took. As far as I know, it's not really possible to build a useable pure darwin installable OS. Puredarwin itself is stuck in whatever was released in 2018 or earlier.
Like Darwin, there may be an 'open' skeleton that vscode hangs upon, but all of the things that make it useful and attractive are being increasingly pulled behind paywalls.
I'm pretty sure most of us saw this coming a mile away. I've played a little with VS Code here and there but never put a lot of time into it because I'd rather invest my time in things I know will be here in 2035 -like vim/neovim.
fr4nkr|10 months ago
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.
eddythompson80|10 months ago
Yes, VSC is less hackable than emacs, but I don't think it's necessarily the same thing. VSC (and others like it) are going for a more streamlined "App Store" experience, while emacs is going for a more DIY/hackable style editor. You can always fetching the VSIX file and sideload it is if the "store" is down though.
Yes, VSC is less "open source" than emacs. if "open sourceness" is a score out of 10 or something. Pretty sure RMS would argue linux is less "open source" than emacs too.
Not sure why this is futile for the VSCodium devs. They are taking a dependency on a service for installing extensions. The solutions is more readonly mirrors for the official OpenVSX endpoint.
If your main archlinux mirror is down, you don't cry about the centralized state of our life. You use a different mirror. You throw in 5 or 10 in case one or two are down. I understand why a company like Microsoft might want a more centralized service to distribute the extensions. But for an open source clone? is Microsoft also expected to create the mirror clone?
bogwog|10 months ago
The Open VSX registry is open source (https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx) and self-hostable, although I have no experience with that. I assume it's possible to host your own instance with the extensions you want instead of relying on the free public instance.
Personally I'm more of a Sublime guy, but people looking for an open VSC alternative should consider Theia over VSC forks. It seems like the smarter long term investment if you want to get out from Microsoft's control.
blackoil|10 months ago
Just because pylance is available doesn't stop jetbrains/Google/OSS from creating an LS. Maybe no such exists as if now, but not from a technical blocker. Just no one created one.
veidr|10 months ago
VS Code itself does not work without various propriety stuff, but that is a different thing. A large number of open-source projects work that way. If you don’t like the proprietary stuff, the recourse is to fork it, modify it, and implement the remaining stuff yourself.
arccy|10 months ago
999900000999|10 months ago
I’m not sure how this could actually work without a centralized repo.
If I’m going to use VSCode I’ll just use it, I don’t need to play with forks, etc
tiahura|10 months ago
theanonymousone|10 months ago
joshstrange|10 months ago
VSCode is Android. Or rather, VSCode's source is AOSP and the marketplace, plugins, etc are Google Play Services.
I say that with maximum derision.
amadeuspagel|10 months ago
Yes, an open source project that creates immense value, but fails to fulfill some purist fantasy.
ghuntley|10 months ago
38|10 months ago
ohgr|10 months ago
lenerdenator|10 months ago
Google, on the other hand, pretended to be the FOSS crusader while setting themselves up for a ton of vendor lock-in that would not only have gotten 90s MS convicted on antitrust, but Bill Gates crucified on the National Mall.
lowbloodsugar|10 months ago
exceptione|10 months ago
Visit Eclipse Theia in the mean time when you are serious about de-risking from VSCode. I think VSCodium is doing an uphill battle here, while Microsoft can't help them self being a sales company first. In Theia, everything is open and free of spyware. MS is under no obligation to provide an OSS editor, but playing tricks after luring people in is not nice.
EDIT:
1. Eclipse Theia is a different platform than Eclipse the Java IDE.
2. link: https://theia-ide.org/#theiaidedownload
0rzech|10 months ago
* On each start, Ada & SPARK extension pops up a dialog that I have to close by clicking 12 times (I counted it) on its "Cancel" button.
* I can't permanently remove items from the left sidebar. It looks like Theia is unable to persist some things between runs.
* The IDE notifies me about bad tasks.json config and proposes to open it to fix, but the "Open" button doesn't do anything.
* Open VSX extensions do not update automatically. [1] I have to manually switch their versions to the newer ones.
* Just now I've manually updated Ada & SPARK extension. Not only was I presented with several options with exactly the same version (perhaps each was meant for different CPU arch or operating system?), but after choosing the first one and reloading editor as the IDE asked me to, the extension disappeared completely.
None of these happen with VSCodium, or with VS Code of course.
[1] https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/9295
mdaniel|10 months ago
> Please note that a few parts of the VS Code extension API are only stubbed in Theia. Extensions will be installable, but some features might not work as expected.
Also, I thought Theia was a cloud IDE, and it seems like I was mostly right in that 2/3rds of their offering is (localhost:3000 & docker) but they also now apparently bundle it in Electron which I haven't tried
j0e1|10 months ago
- The build system is finicky and can easily take hours to figure/fix.
- The error-reporting is severely lacking. You can be lost why something internal isn't working and go on a rabbit-trail with your favorite AI-copilot, etc.
- Documentation is lacking. You have to dive into the platform code to actually figure things out.
- This can be seen positively but there are quite a few new things being introduced regularly (especially AI-related) which, for a platform, isn't always ideal.
blackoil|10 months ago
sergiotapia|10 months ago
bsder|10 months ago
Microsoft is partly to blame, but people have been warning about this over and over and over ad nauseam and people still choose to use VSCode. You couldn't even get people to not use the proprietary extensions for C/C++, Python and remote development.
The problem is that Microsoft dedicates enough resource to development that everybody else looks like a rounding error.
For example, anybody could have produced the Language Server Protocol, but nobody had the critical mass until Microsoft shoved it down everybody's throats.
Until somebody puts a significant amount of money behind an alternative, Microsoft is going to continue to win this battle.
(I was going to also say "or the OSS guys all unify behind a choice" but Hell will freeze over before that happens.)
imcritic|10 months ago
0xbadcafebee|10 months ago
Nowadays you must have a flashy website. You must host everything on a single managed VCS provider, or a programming package ecosystem hoster. You must depend on corporations to give you free things, in exchange for you giving them everything about you (otherwise you must pay out of pocket for everything). You must do what everyone else does.
Maybe it's impossible to go back to a simpler time. But it's not impossible to change the state of things today.
campbel|10 months ago
hiatus|10 months ago
You keep saying _must_. Why _must_ you do what everyone else does? To what end? To get contributors to your project? To get funding? No one is stopping anyone from starting a project on sourceforge.
loloquwowndueo|10 months ago
jeroenhd|10 months ago
Maybe Microsoft should've made VSCode source-available. Sure, companies taking Microsoft's free labour would need to develop an IDE of their own (or maybe someone can hack Eclipse to work as a browser project?), but at least Microsoft wouldn't take the heat for not doing enough free work for everyone else.
theanonymousone|10 months ago
[0] https://github.com/coder/code-server
ghuntley|10 months ago
Anyway. OpenVSX is classic XKCD https://xkcd.com/2347/ territory—run by a small crew of brilliant volunteers, but the entire world depends/freeloads upon them.
john-h-k|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
dodos|10 months ago
rockyj|10 months ago
myaccountonhn|10 months ago
notnmeyer|10 months ago
jamisonbryant|10 months ago
As developers, we're spoiled for widespread (e.g.) vim keybindings support in just about any IDE via extensions. When unable to use it in something like Web IDE, it is very frustrating and makes it less useful as a product.
[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2025/04/17/gitlab-17-11-re...
mdaniel|10 months ago
Also, I wonder how hard it would be to teach VSCodium/Theia to pull extensions from OCI because it seems to work great as a distribution mechanism for Homebrew and allows shipping a .vsix from your own GitHub/GitLab account, since both of those offer no-cost OCI image registries scoped to the project
gchamonlive|10 months ago
Working with anything is a breeze.
I'm just not too familiar with refactoring tooling and how to configure it, but there's rarely any reason for me to use something more complicated than sed, and in those occasions I can just use ast-grep.
shiandow|10 months ago
khimaros|10 months ago
mdaniel|10 months ago
most relevant: https://www.eclipsestatus.io/incident/549796?mp=true
their helpdesk ticket: https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/helpdesk/-/issues/5924...
the issue in their GitHub issue tracking for the site: https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/issues/3805
the tl;dr seems to be a massive storage failure affecting a bunch of Eclipse services, and just like any storage problem putting all the bytes back is some "please wait"
throwaway42167|10 months ago
falcor84|10 months ago
[0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/prepare_vsc...
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44057402/using-extension...
Havoc|10 months ago
NoboruWataya|10 months ago
c-hendricks|10 months ago
- https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/distant.nvim
- https://github.com/mikew/nvrh
jononor|10 months ago
Matumio|10 months ago
I think working on out-of-the-box experience is not very attractive for volunteer contributors, so I guess the situation won't change unless we find a way to sponsor that work.
dharmab|10 months ago
Dwedit|10 months ago
wejick|10 months ago
thomond|10 months ago
mrWiz|10 months ago
Spunkie|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
rnd0|10 months ago
Like Darwin, there may be an 'open' skeleton that vscode hangs upon, but all of the things that make it useful and attractive are being increasingly pulled behind paywalls.
I'm pretty sure most of us saw this coming a mile away. I've played a little with VS Code here and there but never put a lot of time into it because I'd rather invest my time in things I know will be here in 2035 -like vim/neovim.
rvz|10 months ago
#hugops
zoobab|10 months ago