I’m curious about the use of VS Code in this disto.
Is that common? It seems to me that with the increase of “en$itfication” going, we should be making things like Kate and emacs more accessible to the next generation, rather than getting them hooked on fast food…
From the stackoverflow survey from last year:
Kate is at 1.58% and emacs is 4.69%, and both are installable on ublue systems if people want to use them.
VS Code is included in the bluefin-dx image. But there’s also the more basic bluefin image which does not include VS Code and various advanced cloud-native tools. I personally don’t care about VS Code and I’m happy running my editor of choice on bluefin.
The editor wars not over yet are.< /yoda>
bluefin currently comes with vim and the Gnome Text Editor which covers most user’s basic needs for text editing. The choice of editor is an old question and different people have different answers to it. We can’t include all the editors in the atomic image. It makes much more sense to let people install their editor of choice themselves.
bluefin-dx is an opinionated selection of software that has a high chance of being relevant to people who want to do cloud-native operations and development.
Maybe there will be a flavor of Bluefin in the future that comes with Kate and Emacs out of the box. We just need someone to actually put it together.
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ahem.
If we are deciding which packages to use based on the number of current users, there’s no reason to use Bluefin.
Blue exists today because people like me adopted and endured rpm-ostree and podman back when everyone was using dnf and docker-compose.
I hope we should at least get some resources from microsoft if we’re going to do product placement
and yes I’m fully aware that emacs has the 2nd worst onboarding experience (vim will always be number 1 there)
and maybe it’s a matter of getting someone to do the packaging, I get it. I just hope we’re not spending too much volunteer resource adding value to Microsoft’s product, because they won’t think twice about stabbing us in the back.
I do both. I had to learn vi (painful), vim, neovim when working on baremetal and needing to get to get something less painful working as quick as possible.
There’s terminal emulators that rely strongly on composition, Wayland graphic stuff, pretty fonts, even LSP so you get squiggly lines. Some come preconfigured out of the box but at that point you’re in a full Linux environment and you still are doing tweaking. You’re at the mercy of one maintainer. And you still lack VSCode polish.
I hate devcontainers and how tasks took over make files, the heavy reliance on obscure extensions. But it is a nice interface if not bloated to a degree.
But that doesn’t matter: if you work on a large team they are not usually enthusiasts and want stuff you or I don’t give them. Like why is spell check and not part of the build process? Even if the build is ctrl+s justine run linting/spellcheck. Or maybe the debugger is useless and wrong.
But if you have a 200 developer team who think no squiggly line it works, VSCode is made for that.
Plus the interface is slick when you get used to it. I mean it’s a professional product.
You know how Bazel keeps every dependency locally somewhere? I do that with VSCode. So I’ll build it IDE independent, then check my version IDE independent out and have a dev build that that git ignores a folder called vscode and an install script. I don’t do anything the build generates it but generally I like to see only code in my repo. I’m all for if it helps people be productive so be it on pre-commit or post-commit it’ll do linting and stuff but spacing indents I don’t care as long as it adheres to a style guide. I do like features that tell me about a new language feature or better way to structure it. This was big when JetBrains made a VS plug-in and some suggestions were confusing but when the new linq features came out it helped me quickly learn what was possible.
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Universal Blue wouldn’t exist without the multiple Microsoft employees who have contributed since the beginning of the project. And they still contibute, almost every day. 
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Just over 4 years ago, we were all sent home to work, and nothing had been figured out. It was VSCode and the ssh/remote extensions that enabled us to actually get things done the very next day.
Since then I’ve used it every working day. I’m under no illusions about Microsoft but VSCode is surprisingly (perhaps) good, extensive, and used by many many of us to get things done.
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OK. That makes sense, as long as they aren’t getting a free ride. It’s a faustian bargain I’m willing to make.
That’s a nice summary of the dx variants which I also agree with
If you were giving away money, someone would complain.
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I actually do think post like these
I am personally delighted by the “dx” variants, but, for the sake the the argument, let’s say i would, probably like @Blaise, still be a developer but wouldn’t be using some of the opinionated software shipped in the dx variants (for example: Neovim instead of VSCode)
Then, would the “dx” aka “developer experience” variants still be fit in my case ?
It would not bring much benefits, so using the “dx” variant would not be a superior “developer experience” there
Asking for why semi-proprietary software such as VSCode have been opinionatedly chosen for the “dx” variants is not a bad question
And “because it’s the most used IDE” and “it’s the best integrated with cloud native solutions” is also not a bad answer
Challenging everything is how you continually improve
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It can also be done without implying that it is “en$itfication”.
Could be, there are other things that might be beneficial, such as the batteries-included container support, Tailscale, the dozens/hundreds of other details. Most anything can be added, run in a distrobox, etc., just as they could be added to Fedora, Arch, Debian, et. al.
Agreed.
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This is a GREAT summary!
It’s great to reduce barriers to entry and many new users are familiar with VS code.
If you were giving away money, someone would complain.
yes, I agree.
…and, for the newcomers who may not know me, I was not complaining about the choice. My curiosity was motivated by the observation that proprietary apps have a shelf life and tend to fall in and out of fashion (eg. Sublime Text was once a thing, with a big plugin ecosystem).
I think it’s great that M$FT is contributing and with four decades of experience with Microsoft, I know that things can change.
For instance, Apple Mac has been my primary desktop at home since 1985 and I finally switched to Aurora for daily driving.
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It’s also worth noting that we’re a long way from the Steve Ballmer days. Microsoft is one of the primary linux suppliers and has numerous paid kernel developers working on it. They, by volume of code, have far more kernel contributions than most other companies that we’d consider “better” in our world. We wouldn’t be where we’re at without Microsoft at this point. Further, Linus regularly consults for Microsoft and flies up to the Redmond campus on a pretty regular basis. At one point he was basically employed by MSFT.
I get the edgy putting $'s and all that, and there’s definitely something to be said about the huge size of the big companies in tech, but if we didn’t have them involved in Linux, we wouldn’t likely have Linux where it is right now and that’s a fact.
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