[oaiey]

Agree to the annoying practical situations for the distributions. Unfortunately, a structural Linux problem. Is not that the old Firefox problem. They need to protect brand and reputation and cannot trust downstream packages.

Disagree with chrome comparison. Chrome adds tons of feature packages which are blobs or heavily proprietary stuff. VS Code does nothing of that. They add config settings and icons.

In regards of the open source built: Microsoft does that with .NET and it seems a pain. I mean, what is an open source build? A package different for 20 distributions with each 5 versions. Or a build script (which I hope they have :))

[correct_horse]

I'm not familiar with the history or the closed-source feature set of chrome. This [1] search result shows rather minor features compared to a browser - codecs, flash player, auto-update (I suppose this is a big deal on non-linux). VSCode, on the other hand has a proprietary Visual Studio Marketplace extension, (extra?) telemetry and an updater. [2] (I found a better link)

I actually only want an open source build for macOS and Windows - on Linux I almost exclusively use what is in the package manager. I just wish "Code - OSS" had a more recognizable name (and icon), like "VS Code OSS edition" (with a different color of the same logo) Code OSS is just impossible to search.

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differen... [2] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Differences-between...

[oaiey]

Ok, I stand corrected. The comparison with Chrome is roughly fair. My memory was mislead by this article https://www.ghacks.net/2019/04/09/microsoft-edge-google-feat... . And I still cannot belief this is all open source :)