Github has made it impossible to create an account when using a VPN and a privacy browser with fully spoofed hardware identifiers. (Use Firefox or Firefox-based Privacy Browser, VPN, install Canvasblocker to test this.) I create an account with Google or Apple (both requiring hardware identifiers and numbers and birthdates) or I can use an email. When I use an email, it comes back with this horrible test, and even if I do it completely correctly, it tells me after I didn’t do the test right, gaslighting me with a picture of what I chose (which I didn’t choose) and showing me the correct picture (which I did choose and it claims I didn’t select).
It’s fucking bullshit and it’s more corporate control of open source software. For people who have their discussion or issue tracker, I can’t even participate without hardware identifiers likely linked to me some other way and phone numbers. It’s fucking bullshit. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, FUCK YOU!!!
I am so tired of this bullshit. I just want to post an issue about a piece of software. You don’t need my fingerprint, hardware or personal, or biometric shit. This is a slippery slope. Fuck them.
I really hope more developers just get the fuck off Github. Honestly, if you are developing privacy-oriented software and using github, there’s a mistmatch and it’s bullshit, and I know it’s time consuming and annoying to move, but please do. This is fucking bullshit and it’s not like it’s going to become LESS annoying over time. FUCK THIS.
Codeberg for the win.
What about GitLab? When Microsoft bought GitHub, people got angry, and migrated their code to GitLab. When that happened, GitLab was all over the headlines for a while, but I haven’t read much about it ever since.
They seem to be going for IPO so codeberg it is.
Gitlab has a horrible UI when you have a smaller screen or lower end device, and I heard also not really great server-side performance compared to forgejo and gitea.
Also, the gitlab.com instance randomly blocks people or demands their credit card data.
If you want a cloud alternative to GitHub run by a non-profit and hosted outside of the U.S.
If you want to get your data out of the cloud entirely, or at least under a VPS you control, self host your own git repo (Using the same software as Codeberg)
Done, thanks for the links. 👍
/<deleted by creator/>
Noted. Thanks 👍
Tell me how you really feel 😅
They also own Visual Studio Code, control VSCode, and effectively control the VSCodium soft fork.
They decided they wanted to own software development and here we are ;/
Fuck ms
This is why you use Emacs, Kate, Neovim and so on. Never understood how anyone could use a software as confusing as VSCode.
It feels like people are just punching themselves in the face.
Yes, Microsoft has taken over a lot of projects which made coding easy. So either you submit to Microsoft’s control or you spend the time to learn to use the alternatives.
Emacs is basically older than computers, stable and has a huge amount of support and plug-ins. Nvim is newer, but vi/vim have existed since before electrons learned to jump bandgaps and has a similarly deep level of community expertise/support.
If you’re just starting off, your school is likely deep in Micrsoft’s sphere of influence so you probably learned VS Code/Visual Studio. Moving to Emacs or Nvim is much harder than it would be if you had learned them in the first place, but believe me (a random stranger on the Internet wouldn’t lie to you!) it is worth the time to learn.
Centralized platforms for multiple uses and a huge tool ecosystem. That is it. It is simply much much much easier to set up and get a consistent experience.
Embedded coding (as an example) has an extremely scattered ecosystem of vendor-run IDE forks which are usually a pretty bad experience.
Their commandline documentation is often complete trash so instead of fixing that, they just make a simple plugin for vscode and they have a cross-compatible IDE that already works with all of their customers’ favorite plugins with very little work.
Also, code-server. There is no other IDE that has an experience like that as far as I know.
I understand and agree with you.
Various companies go out of their way to make plugin-ins for the platform that everyone uses and everyone uses the platform because of the additional support that it receives on account of being the most popular.
Microsoft is the one that ultimately benefits by being able to make anti-consumer decisions because each individual decision by Microsoft isn’t as bad as the friction required to switch and learn to a new IDE. Microsoft can move the product in any direction that they want as long as they do it in steps tiny enough to not scare people away from their platform.
In the end we’re the frogs that they’re boiling, eventually you gotta jump out of the pot.
VSCode (well codium actually) actually felt quite nifty until Micro$lop started EEEing it by blocking the app store (there are workarounds for that) and then blocking their C extension from being installed in non-vanilla VSCode (pin it to the previous version).
But all in all, vim with cscope is my bare minimum.
This is why I use Zed as an alternative with the added upside that Zed runs about 500x better than VSCode
+1 for Zed, switched to it and it is significantly more responsive. it also ACTUALLY supports Wayland instead of some cursed chromium ozone abomination
What do you mean about VSCodium? Obviously it’s just a differently compiled version of Microsoft’s text editor, but what does Microsoft have to do with it, otherwise?
it’s effectively the same as chrome vs chromium. google/microsoft invests the resources to develop it, and someone simply comes and forks it without the closed source parts or telemetry.
which is fine, but means they still get to dictate how the software works. the best real world example i have is chrome and adblockers, or google-made web “standards”.
Yeah. Your example: How many forks of Chome/Chromium have rejected Google’s Manifest v3 changes? Zero, because they’re all soft forks and don’t have the resources to hard fork.
Didn’t Vivaldi? I don’t really use them cause I mostly avoid non-FOSS software, but I seem to remember them announcing they’d be keeping support.
Both Edge and Brave still support Manifest V2.
That’s good to hear.
Edge is proprietary and Microsoft has deep pockets, which explains how they’re able to do this. I wouldn’t assume they’ll continue to do this, and no one can fork their code should they switch to Manifest v3.
Brave seems to have managed to both remain open source and maintain several revenue streams that add up to quite a lot.
Edit to add: Brave’s Manifest v2 support appears to be limited, and Microsoft has already started their planned retirement of Manifest v2.
“Otherwise” is doing Herculean lifting here when the code is nearly 100% Microsoft. The way they control it is by changing VSCode’s code, which is then dutifully incorporated into VSCodium, with the exception of telemetry code.
VSCodium has never promoted itself as anything more than a compilation of VSCode’s base with telemetry disabled and proprietary components, naturally, not included. It has never promised anything else than that. Of course the changes are “dutifully incorporated” into Codium. It’s not a point of that project to be different. Your first remark made it seem like Microsoft has somehow infiltrated the VSCodium project and changed what it does.
Did something happen with Codium or do you just mean in general due to controlling extension marketplace, access to their closed source ones etc.
Edit: missed your other comment, never mind
You dont need hardware verifications with vscode, nor an account, it works with a vpn, u can disable copilot.
Those aren’t the types of control I alluded to, as you can see upthread.
Any recommendations on a good general use IDE? I’ve enjoyed Geany a bit here and there myself but honestly I’m just using vim for most things these days. CLI is just so quick and efficient for most use cases, but I still hold out hope for something different.
I don’t have any general recommendations. IMO most of them disappoint, because most of them don’t understand the languages they support very well. It was Microsoft that invented Language Server Protocol and almost every editor adopted. I’m not very impressed by it, and it seems to be stagnant.
AFAIK the best example of an IDE having a deep understanding of its language is DrRacket, which is specific to Racket. The best one that I’ve actually used is JetBrains’s IDEs, enough so that I pay money for it.
This YT video is specifically about a Clojure IDE by one of its developers, but it explains some general shortcoming of a lot of code editors, and why IDEs that understand their language(s) well can be so powerful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOi8V4qsdVY
Sponsors, Copilot, Azure, Codespaces, npm, Teams, Outlook, LinkedIn. Heck Microsoft also has massive control in Rust too.
I keep Zed and, ideally, Lapce on my system and use them where possible. VsCode is my backup.
I use codeberg.org for my stuff.
It would be nice if codeberg supported the FUNDING.yml and had their own way to donate to the open source projects I like.
Microsoft made Sponsors so they can siphon a portion of the payment fees. There is no reason to make Codeberg add that sort of bloat when you can add a hyperlink to the README.* or in a section of your application to a third-party service that hopefully can be as focused on doing one thing as Codeberg largely has (non-profit hosted Forgejo).
It’s the same story for basically anything MS touches.
a coworker invited me to his company GitHub team or something recently, and I tried to join several times. each time, I got stuck with a 10 question test to “verify I was human”. it was not quick. eventually, I had time to actually complete it without timing out.
after completing it correctly twice without success, I gave up
Selfhosted git doesn’t require anything
Sure it does. Like mitigating constant DDoS attacks / AI scrapers. (To be clear, I’m not advocating using GitHub instead. I’m just saying freedom ain’t free.)
Bro literallly posted a photo of a pile of shit, lmaoo
I can’t figure out if Free software projects don’t know or don’t care that GitHub is run by Microslop.
It was bought by Microsoft after becoming established. Most free software projects don’t care enough to move if they don’t self host.
If something is controlled by a giant corporation and keeping your data and privacy are offered for free, the price is your personel data.🔏
Agree completely, these shenanigans are a big reason I’m on a selfhosting rampage at the minute. Speaking of, does anyone have favourite self-hosted alternatives?
Ty for link
I’ve been enjoying using FreshRSS, RecipeSage, Kavita (ebook library/reader) and Flatnotes. My server OS is OpenMediaVault which i’ve been very happy with.
Seconding this. I recommend OMV if you’re new or inexperienced with Linux and self hosting. I started my server when it was a gaming PC running Windows and OMV has felt like an easy transition for me.
But Docker is all but required in my opinion. I like working with Docker Compose files and I keep OMV on a separate drive in case I want to move to pure Debian or other distro.
Tons of alternatives out there
Also just, you know, git
There’s also a lot of worthy alternatives to Git too. There are many VCSs out there.
Been that way for a long time. They rejected me years ago. Much like Google, MS is in the ad business, and they want your personal details to sell to advertisers. Letting you sign up with fake account is contrary to their interests.
It infuriates me to no end that so many FOSS devs are still using Github. No one fucking cares about privacy or sovereignty until it personally fucks them.
Sure but that’s about 8 years too late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub#Acquisition_by_Microsoft















