[HN Gopher] OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, ...
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OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24
hours
Author : aaronvg
Score : 103 points
Date : 2025-04-24 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (status.open-vsx.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (status.open-vsx.org)
| exceptione wrote:
| 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.
|
| 2. link: https://theia-ide.org/#theiaidedownload
| mdaniel wrote:
| https://theia-ide.org/docs/user_install_vscode_extensions/#c...
| _(sigh)_
|
| > 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
| exceptione wrote:
| Note they say that most extensions are compatible, and those
| not listed as compatible might still be.
|
| The API surface covers almost 100% that of vscode, I only see
| some AI integration API's that are stubbed, and that is
| because Theia has their own vision here and doesn't want to
| depend on MS.
|
| The complete API compatibility list is here, the stubbed
| API's are not core imho:
|
| https://eclipse-theia.github.io/vscode-theia-
| comparator/stat...
| imcritic wrote:
| Why would I switch from vscodium to theia?
| bangaladore wrote:
| Theia is not a fork of vscode (even though it looks like it).
| It uses VSCode's code editor (Monoco) and is written from the
| ground up. Presumably allowing it to support extensions, that
| for example, vscode does not.
|
| However, its early days.
| bsder wrote:
| > 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.)
| owebmaster wrote:
| > (I was going to also say "or the OSS guys all unify behind
| a choice" but Hell will freeze over before that happens.)
|
| The editor war is going as strong as ever, emacs vs vim will
| still be here in 20 years. Compared to 10 years ago, the
| amount of people using emacs and vim only grew, although
| VSCode growth was 1000x faster.
| j0e1 wrote:
| 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.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Why in earth would they stain their efforts with the "eclipse"
| name. Screenshots look great!
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Remember vs code is designed to fracture and the forks are an
| integral part of that. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
| ghuntley wrote:
| 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.
| aaronvg wrote:
| it's kind of wild -- none of the multimillion dollar VSCode
| forks (Cursor, windsurf) are working properly at the moment.
| It seems open-vsx is quite a vulnerable single point of
| failure. Searching extensions gives a 503.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Is that any different from a GitHub/AWS outage?
| nawgz wrote:
| Yes - no one is making 7 figures in order to keep OpenVSX
| online
| rvz wrote:
| Looking forward to the post-mortem of this outage.
|
| #hugops
| joshstrange wrote:
| I'm sure some (many?) will disagree with me but:
|
| 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.
| 38 wrote:
| as someone who has reversed the Google Play Services API, its
| utterly evil and you are correct that its about as far from
| open source as you can get
| ghuntley wrote:
| you are correct. vscode (mit) is utterly evil - see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43786380
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > VSCode is Android
|
| Yes, an open source project that creates immense value, but
| fails to fulfill some purist fantasy.
| dizhn wrote:
| Like have a working keyboard?
| JLCarveth wrote:
| My android phone doesn't have a working keyboard?
| 3np wrote:
| You use stock Android Open Source keyboard, not closed-
| sourced Gboard? Can you type in Chinese?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Components that are not used, that almost always get
| replaced by vendors do not get much love. That the base
| AOSP should be optimized ti use out of the box is a purist
| fantasy. In reality AOSP is made with the understanding
| that vendors are going to customize it. A lot of Android is
| designed to be modular, you can easily install a different
| keyboard app.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| A good analogy. I always felt a little dirty using VScode. Back
| to tmux, vim a few months back like it has been for the last 20
| odd years.
| fr4nkr wrote:
| 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.
| bogwog wrote:
| 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.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| 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.
| shiandow wrote:
| 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.
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