[HN Gopher] GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after C...
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation
Author : Handy-Man
Score : 846 points
Date : 2025-08-11 15:47 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| buyucu wrote:
| Expect Github to get worse. Much worse.
| Rochus wrote:
| Why?
| buyucu wrote:
| Microsoft customer experience is usually horrible.
| beefnugs wrote:
| What more damage can they do besides train AI on all code
| without consent? Oh wait i guess fisting ads into other peoples
| code somehow...
| bn-l wrote:
| It's Microsoft. Look how much they've mismanaged their
| current assets.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > What more damage can they do besides train AI on all code
|
| That's GitHub code -> AI.
|
| The damage will be AI code -> GitHub
|
| CoPilot already gives (bad) code reviews on GitHub PRs.
| ksherlock wrote:
| They could spam you with low-quality AI (but I repeat myself)
| PRs. Maybe add some vaguely plausible but utterly incorrect
| bug reports as well.
|
| Look at the some of the AI slop curl deals with --
| https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-
| thousand-s... -- and imagine your issues list filled with
| that.
| mbreese wrote:
| I'm envisioning VSCode Vibe Server 2026 edition.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| It's called "CoPilot Agent Mode"
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/visualstudio/ide/copilot-a...
| benoau wrote:
| One tried-and-true classic is to delete old stuff, and GitHub
| has a _lot_ of old stuff... in a couple years someone will
| calculate an amount they can save.
| dceddia wrote:
| Today we can still anonymously clone repos.
| aruggirello wrote:
| Who knows? Deprecate manual code writing someday? 'You're
| trying to commit some code, sir, but Microsoft Defender(c),
| Git Edition(tm) has determined it wasn't generated by any of
| our tools, as reported by telemetry, so changes have been
| blocked for your own convenience, safety and ultimately,
| wellbeing. Starting september, 2029 we're only accepting
| commands from Microsoft products such as Visual Studio
| Autocode(c), Cortana AGI Edition(tm) and Microsoft Office
| 2028 Clippy(c). Please ask Microsoft James Bond(r) to take
| action and he'll solve the issue for you [Charges may apply].
| We're also deprecating git push, pull, etc. since Microsoft
| Tools are so much more secure, optimized and convenient that
| nobody wants to use those ancient commands anymore.'
| bithive123 wrote:
| That didn't take long. There appears to be some kind of outage
| now, I'm seeing unicorns all over the place. I even got a 403
| from githubstatus.com.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| GitHub will now fall under Microsoft's CoreAI team, which give
| some indication of GitHub's purpose and direction going forward.
| dathinab wrote:
| right ... wtf
|
| We could barely convince the reviewers on the last review that
| using GitHub is okay as long as we take some extra steps, I
| guess we should prepare to switch to a different platform with
| the next review.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| reviewers?
| layer8 wrote:
| Auditors?
| dathinab wrote:
| yes auditors from a security audit
| whimsicalism wrote:
| you could barely convince your auditors that using github
| was okay? well, my opinion of security audits is
| reaffirmed
| anileated wrote:
| Security audits are just theater. If they were not, you
| could not ever convince them that using a platform
| feeding unlicensed source (including apparently from
| private repositories) to their commercial LLM is ever a
| pass.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Absolute theater. They do nothing to validate that you
| are compliant with whatever ISO cert you're pursuing.
| They make you install a root cert on your macbook and
| they say that's good enough to ensure compliance. You
| just attest that you don't do stupid shit like committing
| directly to master or testing in production and they
| believe you
| UK-AL wrote:
| People test in production in all the time via Canary
| releases.
| dathinab wrote:
| > compliant with whatever ISO cert you're pursuing
|
| ISO cert compatibility audits are very different from a
| proper security audit.
|
| And weather they do anything to check if depends on which
| you high, many of the slightly more expensive ones have
| the reputation to be "fast" and "overlook most issues".
|
| But that doesn't apply to all security audits (but most
| audits for ISO compatibility, like really it's bad).
|
| Anyway see my way to long answer about the on a sibling
| comment.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| From a company with a long history of leaking private
| data... That AFAIK never even claimed to have fixed their
| side of the Solar Winds issue...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| from private repos? they explicitly say they do not
|
| https://www.copilot.live/blog/does-github-copilot-use-
| your-c...
| dathinab wrote:
| > Security audits are just theater.
|
| It really depends on you auditor, audit approach and
| goals.
|
| There are many audit companies which have a "under the
| hand" reputation of not properly looking and being easy
| to convince that you are secure, naturally at a above
| average audit cost (same but worse btw. for certificates
| showing compatibility with industry standards).
|
| So if the audit was paid for by the company themself you
| can't trust it at all (which doesn't mean the company
| wanted to hide anything, this "bad" audit companies also
| tend finish the audit fast. So sometimes companies go for
| it, even if they don't have anything to hide).
|
| Similar sometimes audit companies ask if they can audit
| you, this is for boosting their publicity using your
| name. This can easily turn into a "one hand washes the
| other" situation where they won't overlook massive
| issues, but still judge issues leniently.
|
| Lastly there are some automated partial audit services
| which scan you public APIs/websites etc. Realistically
| they tend to be kinda dump, and might tell you they find
| a medium issue because (no joke) your REST API allows PUT
| and DELETE (1). Still I now take them a bit more serious
| after they pointed out, that there was a configuration
| error of a web gateway leading to some missing security
| headers.
|
| (1: There is some history behind that, it's still dump
| for 90% of REST APIs)
|
| Anyway, the situations so far are security audits which
| are at least 50% theater. BUT if a huge customers fully
| pays a audit company with a good/strict reputation then
| it often really isn't a security theater and can be quite
| a bad surprise if you company isn't prepared (because you
| have to fix so much). Like such reviews tend to not only
| be focused at your deployment or code but the whole
| software live cycle, including fun questions like "what
| measurements have you taken in case one of your
| developers tries to inject a supply chain attack" (which
| to be clear don't need to have perfect answers, just good
| enough, and most importantly clear and well documented).
| dathinab wrote:
| we are EU based and have besides other attorney
| customers.
|
| Cloud Act and more then just one or two cases of the US
| engaging in industry espionage against their allies(1)
| makes it a high legal liability to use more or less any
| service from a US company even if it's in the EU and a EU
| daughter company
|
| On GitHub we only have some code, which always anyway
| goes through additional testing and analysis before
| hitting production, this is why it's barely okay. No code
| from GitHub directly goes to production.
|
| The only reason we ever where on GitHub is because we
| didn't always had sensitive customers and switching CI
| over is always a pain.
|
| So I don't know if imply them being incompetent for
| allowing GitHub or for wanting to not allow it, but both
| point have very good reasons.
|
| (1): And I mean cases before Trump, the US (as in top
| government, not people) was always a highly egoistic,
| egocentric ally which never hesitated to screw over their
| allays when it came to economical benefits. The main
| difference is that in the past the US cared (quite a bit)
| about upholding a image of "traditional" values like
| honesty, integrity and reliability. Especially when it
| would affect their trade routes.
| paxys wrote:
| The industry has collectively decided that AI is the future of
| all of software development, so this move shouldn't be a
| surprise.
| layer8 wrote:
| Some more indication:
|
| > "Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being
| a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I
| want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to
| be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent
| factory," said Parikh [the CoreAI team lead].
|
| That Bill Gates analogy seems rather far-fetched, though.
| bgwalter wrote:
| And the prompt engineers running the agents will be sitting
| in Bangalore. Or perhaps outsourced to Infosys.
|
| Microsoft under Gates at least produced real things. I wonder
| when Apple gets an Indian CEO to facilitate outsourcing.
| fragmede wrote:
| It was the American CEO Tim Cook which spent some $250
| billion investing in training in China, which is more than
| the Marshall plan (inflation adjusted) or the CHIPS act,
| for outsourcing the factories to China in which their
| products get produced.
| coliveira wrote:
| But that $250 billion gave them $3T in market cap, so it
| was a fantastic investment.
| 9dev wrote:
| That sounds horrible. Who wants that??
| radicalbyte wrote:
| It sounds like the kind of plan which would come from the
| Xbox division.
| apexalpha wrote:
| Someone who expect to make a lot of money selling said
| Agents.
| jatins wrote:
| Had to read that sentence a couple of times -- what does it
| even mean? It's possible Verge may have butchered it
| layer8 wrote:
| The quote actually appears to be recited from an earlier
| Verge article [0]:
|
| > Parikh, who transformed Facebook engineering teams, now
| leads a transformation that he describes as building an AI
| "agent factory" for Microsoft's customers.
|
| > "I described this agent factory idea to Bill [Gates], not
| knowing that he and Paul [Allen] described Microsoft 50
| years ago as the software factory," Parikh says. "Just like
| how Bill had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of
| software developers building a bunch of software, I want
| our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be
| able to be the thing they turn into their own agent
| factory."
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-
| newsletter/672598...
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| No. Jay is an idiot.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| evidence of severely advanced brain rot
| IshKebab wrote:
| You mean all of Microsoft's direction? Look at how VSCode
| changelogs have morphed from editing features to 90% AI.
| moomin wrote:
| I can confidently predict that the breakout dev tool in the
| next few years will have LLM features, but won't have
| forgotten stuff like editing features. As Claude Code has
| already demonstrated, you do t even need an editor for good
| LLM integration.
| rs186 wrote:
| Thank you, this does not get discussed enough on HN. I used
| to look forward to monthly releases of VSCode and actually
| read the changelog carefully to see what new
| features/enhancements I could make use of. These days I just
| glance and ignore it completely -- almost everything is
| Copilot, MCP blahblah. Such a disappointment.
|
| You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver
| more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more
| Copilot.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text
| editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a
| mistake.
| 6thbit wrote:
| They were already under CoreAI team. The verge has amended the
| article with a footnote correction to note that.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I just switched from Github to Gitlab. For anyone who is
| interested in doing the same, but doubtful because of the
| effort required: Gitlab has a pretty good migration tool. You
| authenticate against your github account and gitlab will import
| all your repos for you. We've been using gitlab at work for a
| bit and the CI/CD took a little getting used to but I'm overall
| happy with Gitlab.
|
| Some people think a github presence is important for their
| personal portfolios/careers, but I've personally never seen any
| evidence that a recruiter or anyone has ever actually looked at
| my github profile. Plus I can just put gitlab on there instead
| now
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| It's not that simple; their CI workflow architectures are
| completely different. The way projects and permissions work
| are completely different. The entire way GitLab organizes the
| taxonomy is different.
| the8472 wrote:
| Commoditize your complement.
| cnst wrote:
| This is kinda pretty ridiculous.
|
| Isn't GitHub's entire visibility and pervasiveness is entirely
| due to the OSS?
|
| So, now they're basically saying to OSS, "so long, and thanks
| for all the fish"?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Github as a platform itself though, isn't open source.
| martin-t wrote:
| When all public code including GPL and AGPL has been stolen and
| plagiarized already and the fabled artificial intelligence is
| nowhere to be seen, stealing all the private and proprietary
| code will surely make all the difference.
|
| It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still
| good business. Convince people that statistical models of
| copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work
| both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most
| people seem OK with it.
| elAhmo wrote:
| This was inevitable and going towards the direction, but it is
| sad to see this part of CoreAI division. Copilot and other AI
| initiatives should not be the primary driver of GitHub's vision.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Github may have more value as the largest software training
| corpus in the world than as a paid VCS, and Microsoft gets to
| uniquely utilize that as they will have non rate limited
| internal APIs and/or dumps to train on.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I _assume_ they already had those APIs - Github was already
| owned by Microsoft. By prioritizing AI feature over the core
| experience it 's possible that Github stops being the largest
| software training corpus in the future.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| I assume they would make other major company to have an
| github integration out of the box
|
| so it would be feeding off itself from "vibe coder" an have
| an singularity generated corpus around AI tooling
| tremon wrote:
| This -- Github's future is as a training source for
| Microsoft's AI products, and as a honeypot for collecting
| more training data.
| martin-t wrote:
| You're looking at it from a developer's POV. Your goals are a
| quality product that helps you with your work.
|
| Microsoft's goal is to make money by making software or
| ~~selling~~ renting services. You are a cost center.
|
| And what do managers do to cost centers? They outsource them,
| either to artificial "intelligence" or actual Indians.
|
| By plagiarizing stolen code, disregarding its original license,
| they hope to make the former actually work.
| JaKXz wrote:
| Yikes
| dcchambers wrote:
| > GitHub moving into Core AI team
|
| On the one hand, this probably means it gets the funding it needs
| to keep going strong.
|
| On the other hand, I'm worried that this means that GitHub is
| going to focus exclusively on building AI features while the core
| product becomes stale/abandoned.
| netsharc wrote:
| Will it be Bob or Clippy?
|
| $ git commit
|
| The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob
| commit' to commit.
| brownriceowl wrote:
| Did GitHub have a funding problem? They doubled revenue last
| year, with 40% of that coming from GitHub Copilot. I imagine
| that for 2025, the increase will be much higher than even that.
|
| I expect that the problem that Microsoft aims to fix is that
| people can use GitHub effortlessly without locking into Azure
| and Power Platform
| dcchambers wrote:
| > Did GitHub have a funding problem?
|
| I don't believe so, and I didn't mean to imply that. Rather
| just that if they are part of the "Core AI" org then they
| will likely remain a priority area of investment for
| Microsoft...right now anyway.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > while the core product becomes stale/abandoned
|
| Im more concerned about random breakages. When you have org
| pressure to add features rapidly shit breaks. Stale would be
| best case scenario.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I moved to GitLab a year or so ago. It's been great, I actually
| prefer GitLab ci
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I did as well! No issues any worse than people using habitually
| using "github" to mean "the remote git repository in the
| cloud".
|
| I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product
| becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized
| trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are
| actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has
| faded into obsolescence.
|
| I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue
| tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab
| offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that
| may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I
| prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git
| repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning
| up other tools as needed.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| We use GitLab ci, issue tracking, dep scanning, everything at
| work and I can report it is amazing. All self hosted and
| never had any issues. I've got our entire deployment process
| setup through GitLab ci and it's been rock solid. It's
| $150/month per seat for the ultimate tier, but it's 100% been
| worth it for us.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| Doesn't GitLab suffer from the same problem of pushing AI? They
| have many AI features, and position themselves as "The most-
| comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform".
| Xiol32 wrote:
| As the kids would say, Gitlab CI is the GOAT.
| desolate_muffin wrote:
| It's not hard to imagine an alternative universe where Github is
| a steward of innovation for both git and the code review process;
| alas, this is not the world we live in.
| bn-l wrote:
| Damn. I remember being heavily downvoted and flamed when I said
| this would be the inevitable outcome on Reddit when they were
| bought.
|
| Always assume anyone carrying water for a mega corp is a shill or
| a bot or some combo.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Same. Everyone now is like _surprise pikachu face_ and all I
| can do is say "I told you so"
|
| Never make a deal with the devil.
| icepat wrote:
| I made the decision a few months back to go all in on self-
| hosting, and my own infrastructure. At least once a week I run
| into something that makes me realize I made the right decision.
| It's that time of the week again.
| hanklazard wrote:
| What are you using for git repos?
| icepat wrote:
| Forgejo
| icy wrote:
| Yeah, GitHub is cooked. Now's a good time to consider migrating
| to alternative forges like Tangled (https://tangled.sh; bit of a
| shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder). We've got a more
| advanced PR flow, jujutsu change-id support and we just launched
| our in-house CI! https://blog.tangled.sh/ci
|
| Long-term, we aim to be the new social coding platform,
| collectively built in the open.
| akomtu wrote:
| Github Pages is a must too.
| icy wrote:
| We're working on it!
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Damn, why all the downvotes?
| advisedwang wrote:
| Probably "bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-
| founder". Lots of HN users don't like feeling advertised to.
| icy wrote:
| Figured it would be better to be up front about it -- and
| people know they can ask questions.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| (I didn't downvote you.) I think being upfront about it
| is always good. What is even better is stating it in the
| first sentence and making sure your whole comment is not
| an ad, except for maybe the "what are you working on"
| type of threads. This is just my opinion and not
| something codified in the guidelines, etc.
| throitallaway wrote:
| Besides the plug, calling a company with $2B+ revenue
| "cooked" is annoying.
| ctenb wrote:
| Plug or not, this is relevant and on-topic. +1 to offset this
| unnecessary voting behavior.
| dijit wrote:
| Tangled is a pretty cool idea, but I'm sorry to say that I'm
| hoping Gerrit gets a resurgence.
|
| It fits my "do one thing, do it well" philosophy as it doesn't
| have opinions about CI, Issue trackers or even how you view the
| code online.
|
| I'll admit that it's a nasty bastard to set up properly though,
| and the options for viewing repositories are universally
| terrible when not bundled with a code-review system (like
| Gitea, Github and Gitlab). Alas.
| icy wrote:
| Yeah, fair enough. Gerrit is solid software but it's really
| just a review tool: not an alternative code forge -- which
| we're aiming to be.
| zdw wrote:
| There are .rpm/.deb packages for Gerrit that make
| installation/upgrades pretty simple.
|
| The fact that it stores everything in files on disk (no
| databases except for caches that can be regenerated) makes
| backup/restore and replication a breeze compared to many
| other more complicated systems.
| smcin wrote:
| You say "forge" and stuff like "collectively built in the
| open"? Do you consider the repos "public", "private" or what?
|
| You have a very short privacy policy
| [https://tangled.sh/privacy], but no guarantees of AI-bot-
| scraping protection. What if anything is your users'
| expectation of privacy of their repos against third parties,
| including malicious ones? Really you need to set that out
| clearly in your privacy policy.
| icy wrote:
| Not sure I understand your first comment. Repositories are
| currently public only since we're built on the AT Protocol,
| which doesn't yet have private data (in the works!).
|
| Thanks for the feedback re: the privacy policy. It's still
| actively being improved and we take a lot of effort to
| protect against AI scrapers. I'll update the policy verbiage
| to include that.
| smcin wrote:
| You were suggesting GitHub users migrate to your forge, and
| historically, one of GitHub's big features was private
| repos. And at least historically, Github private repos
| claimed to provide protections against unauthorized
| access/scrapers.
|
| But AT Protocol can't.
|
| So currently, you're only suitable for non-commercial
| users. (Can you name any commercial org using Tangled.sh on
| source code?)
|
| Does AT Protocol have any rough milestone (date?) for
| private data?
|
| > _we take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers._
|
| Sorry that's not stating a guarantee of anything, it's an
| unquantifiable aspiration. I asked what you guarantee your
| users. IP access logs? Alerts? Response times? Blocks? IP
| whitelisting?
| nlawalker wrote:
| I think many of the concerns are valid, but I'm not sure I'd read
| too much into the name of the absorbing org. Org names at
| Microsoft end up being misaligned and unintuitive all the time.
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| While that may be true, I don't think the specific name of the
| team at Microsoft absorbing GitHub is what's concerning users.
| I can't think of a team up there that wouldn't be a red flag in
| this case.
| odo1242 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the fact that it's the AI team is a pretty
| big factor. It would at least make sense if it was, for
| example, the Azure team.
| mixdup wrote:
| Surprised it took this long. I am working with Github sales team
| on straightening out our Github organization at my new job and it
| was weird to get a Zoom meeting invite from a company that has
| been part of Microsoft for nearly 10 years
| nashashmi wrote:
| Seven years. And that is because they didn't want to mess with
| it like all the other acquisitions.
| delfinom wrote:
| Would probably help if Teams wasn't such a clusterfuck. God
| help you if your other user is in a sovereign microsoft cloud
| on their desktop client.
| reversengineer wrote:
| GitLab is like, really good. No need to put your codebase in the
| "cloud."
| yoran wrote:
| I feel like all new AI tools only integrate with GitHub though,
| like Claude Code. We're actually thinking of moving from GitLab
| to GitHub, just for this reason.
| felixgallo wrote:
| Claude works great with forgejo/gitea. It's all just git,
| after all.
| mbonnet wrote:
| In some industries, all the tools you actually need (say,
| MISRA checking) all work with GitLab out of the box.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| same reason why we didn't leave github yet
|
| most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
| Catbert59 wrote:
| GitLab is great - but super fat. The performance will suffer
| heavily if you don't give it the resources it wants (all RAM
| you can find, lol).
|
| If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super
| mature. It runs happily on small VPS.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Gitea is neat, and the Actions compatibility is promising.
| Though I'd suggest a fork, Forgejo:
| https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
| Catbert59 wrote:
| Thank you for the recommendation.
|
| Will move to that fork in one of my future private
| infrastructure reconstructions.
| kriops wrote:
| I want to signal boost the following quote from the URL
| above:
|
| > Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit
| company took over the Gitea project. It exists under the
| umbrella of a non-profit organization, Codeberg e.V. and is
| developed in the interest of the general public. In the
| year that followed, this difference in governance led to
| choices that made Forgejo significantly and durably
| different from Gitea.
|
| If you take it at face value (at your peril), Gitea is
| about to start enshittification, while Forgejo will not at
| any point. My personal _opinion_ , is that this is
| credible.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| isn't that gitlab also for profit company???
| notpushkin wrote:
| They are, and always were. I think we're more
| accustomized to it though, and know they won't try to
| pull some shenanigans with the CE at least. I guess
| Codeberg didn't trust Gitea in the same way when they
| decided to fork, but I think as a result Forgejo would be
| more sustainable, them being a nonprofit and all.
| kriops wrote:
| Gitlab didn't arguably and allegedly hijack an
| established oss brand for their core product.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I prefer Forgejo, but both it and Gitea support actions like
| GitHub's. You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100%
| in-house, for free. I adore it for personal projects.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > Gitea support actions like GitHub's
|
| Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"
| milliams wrote:
| Yes it is. It's not identical, but it is "like" it.
| cowmix wrote:
| Most of my build config run on either platform (Gitea and
| Github) interchangeably.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Here's Gitea's own comparison to GitHub's Actions:
| https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/comparison
|
| Sure, it's not identical, and no one claims it is. I
| think it's defensibly _like_ them, though.
| dboreham wrote:
| We've run Gitea actions (and contributed here and there)
| for a couple of years, since-by-side with Github. We host
| in containers on the Gitea side so there are some
| marginal differences as to what can be run in a job, but
| our experience has been very positive.
| scubbo wrote:
| I bounced away from Gitea because they don't (last time I
| checked) have OIDC. I started[0] trying to revive-and-drive a
| previous PR[1] to add it, but the test failures are beyond my
| motivation to investigate and resolve.
|
| [0] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/33945
|
| [1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/25664
| smcin wrote:
| OIDC = OpenID Connect, an open authentication protocol
| maxloh wrote:
| Gitea's UI is ugly.
|
| While GitHub and GitLab have dedicated design and front-end
| teams to improve their UI/UX, Gitea and Forgejo aren't large
| enough to reach that scale, even after Gitea became a
| company.
|
| For example, look at the number of issues triaged with "UX"
| [0] or "UX Paper Cut" [1] on GitLab. It is an order of
| magnitude larger than you would find in any other FOSS
| option.
|
| [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
| org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...
|
| [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
| org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...
| jmclnx wrote:
| I went there last year due to Microsoft's destruction of
| github.
| mdaniel wrote:
| And, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you
| could be the change you want to see - they have a pretty
| welcoming contribution culture. Even if you don't want to
| change something, being able to read the source for it goes a
| long way toward aligning your understanding of the behavior,
| and that's not a diss on their usually pretty good
| documentation
| moffkalast wrote:
| Gitlab is like the SAP of git, something for bloated big
| corporations. I've never seen a single FOSS repo there.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Yeah, who's ever heard of this weird company named nvidia
| <https://gitlab.com/nvidia>, or inkscape
| <https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape>, or F-Droid
| <https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient>
| justinrubek wrote:
| In what world does nvidia fall under FOSS and not big
| corporation? That seems like an odd example to lead with.
| kube-system wrote:
| FOSS and "big corporation" are not antonyms. Today, many
| of the largest FOSS contributors _are_ big corporations.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Didn't nobody ever tell you to "never say never" ?
|
| Knot DNS[1] good enough for you ? GPL licensed.
|
| [1] https://gitlab.nic.cz/knot/knot-dns
| terminalbraid wrote:
| I don't care much for gitlab either, but for example inkscape
| lives there
|
| https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
| Gracana wrote:
| It seems somewhat popular for developers who want to avoid
| github. Gnome and KiCAD also use it.
| delfinom wrote:
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/ - Freedesktop which is the
| org for many projects such as Wayland uses gitlab
|
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/ - GNOME uses Gitlab
|
| https://gitlab.com/kicad/ - KiCad uses Gitlab
| tremon wrote:
| and https://salsa.debian.org/public - Debian uses Gitlab.
| incognito124 wrote:
| The entire KDE ecosystem is on gitlab
|
| https://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/GitLab
| dcchambers wrote:
| > No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
|
| Yes and no. If _all you want_ is a remote git server then no,
| there 's not. But there's plenty of legitimate reasons to use a
| SaaS tool like GitHub.
| mdaniel wrote:
| In my experience, the "really good" is that it comes batteries
| included:
|
| - completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about
| what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified
| .js from some rando"
|
| - they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions
| marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to
| how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature"
|
| - built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo
|
| - highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based
| access from the pipelines
|
| - good integration between the platform and _multiple_
| Kubernetes clusters
|
| - related to that, a strong "review environment" setup
|
| - they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but
| regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out
| of preview so I don't this second know where it stands
| dusanh wrote:
| I can map most of the list but I can't recall what would be
| the "review environment setup" What did you mean by that?
| mdaniel wrote:
| Pedantically I think GLCI treats _every_ environment the
| same, but by review environments I meant "disposable
| copies of the app such that one could interact with it
| during merge request review" e.g.
| https://mr-8675.example.com corresponding to
| /example/-/merge_request/8675 that would be provisioned
| when the MR was opened and torn down when the MR was merged
| or closed
|
| <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#environment> plus
| <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#dynamic-environments> et
| al
|
| I believe it aligns with this behavior in GitHub:
| <https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-
| tos/deploy/configure-...> with the distinction that it
| appears from the GH docs that they think of that as "needs
| administrative approval" whereas GLCI thinks of it as "if
| the pipeline has permissions to run provisioning, off to
| the races, because names are free"
|
| GitLab introduced the "deployment tier" I think as a means
| of communication to other users about the importance of the
| environment, but control over what credentials were made
| available to CI/CD was always controlled via
| <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/environments/#limit-the-
| environme...> which partially explains why the only reason
| to involve a repository administrator would be to install
| or update a secret needed to deploy successfully
|
| ---
|
| it the spirit of "they really, really drink their own
| champagne," one can see the environments for GitLab itself
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/environments
| pornel wrote:
| GitLab doesn't have an equivalent of GitHub actions (except
| an alpha-quality prototype).
|
| GitHub Actions can share runtime environment, which makes
| them cheap to compose. GitLab components are separately
| launched Docker containers, which makes them heavyweight and
| unsuitable for small things (e.g. a CI component can't
| install a dependency or set configuration for your build,
| because your build won't be running there).
|
| The components aren't even actual components. They're just
| YAML templates concatenated with other YAML that appends
| lines to a bash script. This means you can't write smart
| integrations that refer to things like "the output path of
| the Build component", because there's no such entity. It's
| just some bash with some env var.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| GitLab is wonderful but none of the AI tooling supports it and
| it's expensive.
| em-bee wrote:
| _none of the AI tooling supports it_
|
| i consider that a feature
| mbesto wrote:
| For a couple grand a year, not having to worry about upgrades,
| backups, hosting cost, etc. is 100% worth it.
| uncircle wrote:
| "Really good" under which metric? Because it is slow, even more
| confusing after the terrible sidebar redesign and, to quote a
| famous author, its usage does not spark any joy.
|
| Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early
| Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that's adding
| feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet
| corporate $$$.
| oefrha wrote:
| Really good if you go by a feature checklist, probably. A
| bloated clutter of more or less working features, checking
| enterprise boxes.
| darkwater wrote:
| I have to agree. I recently joined a company using Gitlab,
| coming from years of GitHub only. I have a soft spot for
| underdogs but I already found many features with bugs
| (especially related to hierarchy and inheritance) that
| makes you feel "meh".
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's... ok. But many of the really useful features are paid.
| E.g. merge trains or mandatory reviews.
|
| I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator
| because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and
| written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify
| it for some feature you want is near zero.
|
| I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point
| even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to
| deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid.
|
| I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator
| more (except for its lack of integrated CI).
| quesera wrote:
| > _written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually
| modify it for some feature you want is near zero_
|
| That's a silly thing to say.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It isn't. Ruby lacks static typing, and Rails heavily uses
| generated identifiers, which means navigating a huge
| codebase like Gitlab is basically impossible unless it's
| your full time job (or you get lucky). I've tried. I kept
| finding methods that - based on a grep - were never called
| from anywhere, and there's no IDE support for something
| like Find All References.
|
| I'm sure if it was your full time job you'd eventually
| learn the codebase, but there's no way you can just dip in
| and add a feature unless you _really_ persevere.
|
| But I did manage to add a few features to the gitlab-runner
| (used for CI) - because it's written in Go, and Go has
| static types and pretty great IDE support these days. Night
| and day.
|
| I've also added a few features to VSCode which is a
| similarly huge codebase. Again it's written in Typescript
| which has static types and good IDE support. It would have
| been effectively impossible if that wasn't the case.
| quesera wrote:
| This does not match my experience at all, and I think
| your "near zero" claim is silly.
|
| > _difficult to deploy from source_
|
| I won't argue with you here. There are a lot of moving
| pieces in a Rails deployment. This isn't _different_ from
| most web app frameworks, but it is _difficult_.
|
| That said, I've never worked on a Rails app where
| deployment was any more difficult than a variation on
| `bin/deploy v123 production`, because I wrote that script
| and it works 100% of the time.
|
| > _and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to
| actually modify it for some feature you want is near
| zero_
|
| But this is still silly. You just don't know Rails or
| Ruby well, and don't want to learn them. Fine, but if you
| hadn't already made that decision, you would find the
| solution simple enough. No judgement intended --
| different framework/language paradigms fit different
| people differently.
|
| Rails has great IDE support also. Static typing can be a
| useful language feature, but a lack of same has not ever,
| in my experience, made it more difficult to understand
| real-world code.
|
| There is a lot to love about Go too, don't get me wrong.
| But I would guess that the number of random developers
| who could drop in and be immediately productive in a
| Ruby/Rails app, vs a Go webapp, is basically equivalent.
| The overlap of projects where both would be highly
| appropriate choices is a bit thin.
|
| [I hire into Ruby/Rails jobs regularly. I often hire
| senior developers with no Ruby/Rails background, but I do
| not hire people into these positions who are not open to
| learning. It takes a senior dev (from the C/Algol family)
| one day to learn Ruby, and (from a web dev background) a
| week or less to learn Rails. I have never seen a failure.
|
| I also hire into Go jobs almost as frequently. The hiring
| criteria is a bit different (less emphasis on web
| awareness), but I do find it easier to teach Go to a Ruby
| dev, than Ruby to a Go dev. Make of that what you will.]
| mdaniel wrote:
| I am not trying to start trouble, or a heated debate, but
| I did want to say that my experience was the same as OPs
| and I am also coming from a static typing background so
| that likely explains my having a similar experience and
| expectations. I did for sure use RubyMine for attempting
| a change, so not "vim and yolo" but rather world class
| tooling and trying to discern where any random symbol
| came from was oppressively hard
|
| That's not even getting into attempting to use their
| "happy path" <https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
| org/gitlab/-/blob/v18.2.1-ee/.gitp...> ->
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-
| kit#local which I found just incredibly challenging
| getting it to use _my_ copies of the repos. But, just
| like in every one of these conversations, it 's been a
| number of years since I tried it so maybe it's much
| better now
| quesera wrote:
| I wasn't either, believe it or not! :)
|
| But I was responding specifically to " _in Ruby, so the
| chance of being able to actually modify it ... is near
| zero_ ", which does not address the real issue.
|
| It's perfectly possible to write simple, clear code in
| Ruby (and Rails!), but I'll concede that GitLab is not
| the best example of that.
|
| If OP had said ~" _... and the GitLab codebase is large
| and can be difficult to navigate and make drop-in
| contributions to ... also I have an aversion to
| dynamically-typed languages_ " :) ... then I wouldn't
| have bothered commenting.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| GitLab has a ton of options, And I find myself a bit
| overwhelmed by the user interface. It really needs a UX lead to
| simplify and create a better information architecture.
| maxloh wrote:
| It is rumored that Gitlab is about to be aquired. It may not
| still be open-source after that.
| shayief wrote:
| I'll plug another option Gitpatch, however it's pretty early
| beta and not open-source yet, but most likely will be under
| AGPL at some point. It has built-in patch stacks (aka stacked
| PRs) and probably faster than any other Git host out there.
| disclosure: I'm the author.
| ectospheno wrote:
| Every place I write code I use whatever GitHub like thing the
| admin installed. They all work well enough.
|
| At home I prefer fossil. It isn't without rough edges but for
| the small developer headcount stuff I do it is quite lovely.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929 - Aug 2025 (66
| comments)
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Never trust Microsoft, when they are approaching, it's always
| time to quit
|
| Looks like I made the right move
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Makes sense how it's part of core AI. All code in the future will
| be written by AI so it's relevant categorically.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| The CoreAI team is where DevDiv got reorged into earlier this
| year: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342793/microsoft-ai-
| eng...
|
| DevDiv was arguably the place where GitHub would have ended up
| had it become integrated earlier, so it makes sense that it would
| end up there.
| paxys wrote:
| Not too surprising considering how big a lead Github had in the
| generative coding space and how it managed to give it all up to a
| half dozen different companies over the last few years. An
| executive shakeup was long overdue.
| stogot wrote:
| Heres the thing: it was a dev company with a side-AI business,
| but now Microsoft has signaled it wants an AI-GitHub with a
| dev-side business.
|
| The features that will be prioritized will be AI not Git
| improvement
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Are there any improvements to be done to Git? It seems like
| kind of a solved problem, like word processors or
| spreadsheets... most "improvements" to those are diminishing
| returns.
|
| I don't mean to sounds like an MS apologist, btw. I fully
| predicted and hoped for an exodus from Github to GitLab or
| something back when it got acquired -- I'm from the Microsux
| generation.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| They could add stacked diffs, large monorepo features
| (allow user to view a slice of a repo), better submodule
| support (why can't I PR multiple repos at once?). A good
| desktop app that is faster than the slow web client.
| dmoy wrote:
| > large monorepo features (allow user to view a slice of
| a repo)
|
| I am reminded of this discussion between fb devs and git
| devs from 13 yrs ago:
|
| https://public-
| inbox.org/git/CB5074CF.3AD7A%25joshua.redston...
|
| git has definitely made improvements since that thread,
| e.g.:
|
| https://graphite.dev/guides/git-monorepo#tools-and-
| strategie...
|
| but it could still be better for the truly gargantuan of
| code bases. Might not be worth it? Idk. Maybe with llm
| generated code churn, suddenly it becomes worth it? haha.
| tedivm wrote:
| The current desktop client is missing support for a bunch
| of important things too, like signing commits.
| bhl wrote:
| Stacked diffs is a huge one, and also where improving git
| would also improve LLM workflows. The bottleneck after
| code generation is PR reviews, and stacked diffs help
| break down large PRs into more digest-able pieces.
|
| If you help humans collaborate better, you help LLMs
| collaborate better.
| siva7 wrote:
| Well, how about rethinking your workflow instead of
| stacking branch after branch?
| fleventynine wrote:
| > Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
|
| Github's workflow for stacked PRs is still terrible.
| There's plenty of room for improvement.
| delusional wrote:
| > Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
|
| That's absolutely the right question to ask. If MS just
| left GitHub alone, it would be fine for open source
| projects for years to come. The enterprise side is a little
| different, there they still have a lot of work to do to
| round out some of their more advanced features.
|
| What worries me isn't that they stop investing. What
| worries me is that they actively destroy the current
| project while turning it into AI garbage.
| shash wrote:
| Maybe not too many improvements are needed anymore? And
| maybe it's a viable business without being a "growth"
| space?
|
| Nah...
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Just to think of a few, I want improved project management
| tools, better code review UI/UX, and cost-competitive
| integrated serverless hosting a la Vercel. GitHub could be
| a true one-stop shop with a bit more polish.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| they have azure and they have github, being an cloudflare
| or vercel competitor is should be default and easy to
| achieve
|
| idk why they didn't do that tbh, all ingredients are
| already there
| coke12 wrote:
| This is arguably why it makes more sense to bring GH
| under the umbrella. Azure integrations need to happen
| yesterday. The future is full-stack batteries-included
| low-codeish platforms that are easy to launch with and
| then boom you're one click from the Azure product suite.
| Tighter integration is the only way to do this because of
| the inherent distribution advantages.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Yeah, MS just too focused on desktop office and Azure
| enterprise customers
|
| they should have launched an "firebase like" and full web
| framework "next.js like" to convert that into long term
| azure customer like its no brainer they didn't want to
| create that and recycling Teams forever
|
| this is also issue with game development, like I know MS
| is big at desktop dev but they don't have presence in
| game dev other than xbox game studios which is fine but
| they could create their own game engine with all
| resources they have. they could save both for their usage
| in their massive studio while also strengthening their
| development pipeline from code,game engine to azure
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Do you mean git or GitHub?
| j1elo wrote:
| _Fix cross-organisation "Allow edits from maintainers"
| #5634_
|
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/5634
|
| 4 years and counting...
|
| so if you create an Organization to host your project(s),
| now you cannot enable that maintainers make changes on
| incoming Pull Requests; something that is very useful and
| perfectly available for projects that live under a normal
| username.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| While git itself can be improved upon, the GitHub is not
| git; there are many improvements to GitHub that people have
| been requesting for many years now.Also, they could even
| just not make it worse and that would be a welcome change
| from their recent strategy
| uticus wrote:
| > Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
|
| Of course there are - lots of room for improving data
| collection and advertising revenue streams!
| bhandziuk wrote:
| GitHub personal access tokens could be a lot better. It'd
| be nice if you could assign tokens at the team level or you
| have more fine grained control over token permissions.
|
| And yes, I know "Fine Grained Tokens" exist but they don't
| seem to be usable almost anywhere and the fine grain level
| of control isn't actually very fine grained so they kind of
| suck.
| esafak wrote:
| Incorporate jujitsu, and code-based CI. YAML sucks %^#0
| packetlost wrote:
| GitHub Actions is hot fucking garbage basically everywhere.
| Coming from GitLab I hate every single minute of dealing
| with GH Actions.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| there's a lot that could be improved with conflict
| resolution and merge trains/stacked merges. see
| https://pijul.org for what's possible but not available in
| git
| taormina wrote:
| Github Pages STILL don't have any sort of built-in
| analytics available. I shouldn't need GA or something else
| to track the basic website metrics when you absolutely know
| that MS and GH have been tracking these things the whole
| time. People have had issues up asking for this for literal
| years.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Not to "git", but to repo/project management there's huge
| opportunities. They've been building a lot of this over the
| past few years.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Git is already fine.
|
| One idea though, they could make a nice site like SourceHut
| so you can host repos and browse through them.
|
| I mean, Microsoft has this GitHub social media site with
| stickers and AI, but something serious for programmers
| could be nice too.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Their CI / script runner tool is still total garbage.
| Starting with the rampant security holes (oh, make sure you
| pin everything you use by hash, which essentially nobody
| does; what was that about secure by default rather than
| secure by extra effort again?) and following with the only
| way to test it is to deploy over and over.
| joshkel wrote:
| For Git? Maybe not. For GitHub? IPv6 support would sure be
| nice: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539
| coke12 wrote:
| Github should have the product sophistication/complexity of
| Atlassian with the distribution advantage of Microsoft.
| Anything less is an execution failure IMO.
|
| Not even mentioning AI, which is a huge opportunity also.
| jennyholzer wrote:
| Microsoft would create billions of dollars in productivity
| if they were willing to port Magit features to Github.
| rawling wrote:
| I've just been shunted from TFS Git (Azure DevOps?) to
| GitHub.
|
| The PR UI is taking some getting used to.
|
| Dev changes code near a comment I made? Comment is marked
| "Outdated" and hidden. If I open it, can I see what change
| they made next to the comment? Nope, I have to go find it
| manually!
|
| It sorts X.Y below X.Y.A, X.Y.B etc. in the file listing.
|
| When I select a file in the listing I'd like to just have
| that file open, not scroll to it in a list of all the
| changes.
|
| The first PR I did showed a ton of changes that had already
| been merged from common history. I can see the merge commit
| you made, GitHub, I know you know none of these changes are
| actually being made.
|
| Not caring if a required action hasn't run automatically.
| No "run" option, not even a "this isn't ever going to run",
| just "waiting for result".
|
| Weirdly, showing the result of an action on the source
| branch, when it needs to pass on the merge commit.
|
| I've not yet figured out how to require different approvers
| for different branches, although that one might be on my
| org settings. It's either the people in the codeowners file
| or any contributor?
|
| No way to allow a ruleset to be bypassable while making the
| approvers still manually bypass it themselves. I want to
| know if I'm getting it wrong as much as I want to stop my
| junior devs messing up.
| timeon wrote:
| Git? Maybe not. Faster front-end would be decent
| improvement.
| smcin wrote:
| It's murky what Github's priorities going forward as part of
| CoreAI will be, and whether it will become even more of a
| subliminal marketing machine/ content source for AI
| codegen...
|
| GitHub has (only) $2bn direct revenues (2024; subscriptions +
| presumably per-usage billing of features like GitHub Actions)
| but also generates revenue via Copilot, Marketplace (selling
| tools and integrations).
|
| What are Microsoft CoreAI's revenues? surely >> GH's direct
| revenues. Hence, GH is likely to become a platform for
| pushing all sorts of AI revenue streams on its users. I
| wonder how Microsoft sees that, by segment.
| smsm42 wrote:
| For Microsoft it probably makes a lot of sense. For me as a
| Github user, I don't need "generative coding space" from github
| at all. That's not what I have been using it for for many
| years, and that's not what I want to use it for. I mean,
| Copilot is nice and useful but has preciously little to do with
| Github per se - if it didn't mention "Github" in the name, I'd
| see no relationship between the two at all. Code generation
| belongs in the IDE, Github is not an IDE - Github is what
| happens before and after the IDE, and keeping it separate works
| just fine. I'm afraid though Microsoft would try to push them
| together, and the result would be much worse than the starting
| point.
| shmerl wrote:
| Looks like the goal is to turn Github into an "agent factory".
| And they still can't even support IPv6.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's par for the course, since OpenAI's API endpoints don't
| either. ;)
| revskill wrote:
| Rails is hard to maintain tgat is why github is slow to innovate.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| I feel that GitHub has gotten worse lately.
|
| * Actions are more finicky, both private (paid) and public, they
| crash and hang more.
|
| * Publishing changes without testing them:
| https://github.com/actions/toolkit/pull/2106
|
| * 5+ second loads on the GitHub mobile app
|
| * AI buttons everywhere (Your administrator can pay for CoPilot)
|
| * Releasing Node24, completely skipping Node22 in their actions:
| https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/tag/v2.327.1
|
| One of the most disgusting features that they did build is the
| ability for administrators to check how often a user accepts the
| CoPilot suggestions.
|
| I was about to complain that they still don't have YAML anchors,
| but it seems that that was merged in 7 days ago:
| https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182#issuecomment-3...
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Lots of actions repos are stopping active development,
| including actions/checkout and actions/cache:
| https://mastodon.social/@hugovk/114987592399377240
| Puts wrote:
| I'm surprised no-one seem to have called for a boycott of Github
| because of Microsoft's involvement with the genocide in Gaza yet.
| ath3nd wrote:
| In the Netherlands we protested on Microsoft's roof:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/10/activists-in-n...
|
| But yeah, github has been largely unaffected.
| dizlexic wrote:
| I am shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
|
| I still remember Atom.
| Vipitis wrote:
| The GitHub website experience is already messed up with forcing
| Copilot into everything. But then asking for user feedback about
| new setting options for issues but denying any request for a user
| default.
|
| This surely isn't going in any good direction. What's next ads in
| commits?
| threetonesun wrote:
| Not commits, but view your repo and see ads for all the paid
| tier services of the packages you use.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I can't even use the Github site without hitting rate limits
| all the time.
|
| And the hot take is that Azure devops, including git and the
| pipelines, is actually better. That Github yaml trash is just a
| pain.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it
| out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly
| over.
|
| Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without
| backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly
| after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac,
| what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and
| WebAssembly workloads.
|
| .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt
| VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly
| Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has
| the same VS license.
|
| A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
|
| Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all
| directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what
| sticks.
|
| Github even with the previous CEO was already a delivery
| mechanism for Azure and AI efforts, now it will be full steam
| ahead, as per new org chart.
|
| VC++ after betting other compilers in C++20 support, seems to
| have lost its resources struggling to deliver C++23, and also
| probably affected by the Secure Future Initiative, and decisions
| for safer languages.
|
| But hey 4 trillion valuation, so from shareholders point of view,
| everything is going great.
| brightball wrote:
| I'm glad Gitlab is still an option, just sitting there waiting
| to absorb the market pivot if Microsoft takes it the wrong way.
| ikidd wrote:
| I see more people jump for Codeberg these days.
| mindcrash wrote:
| Or even better, claim full sovereignty (again) and install
| Forgejo (https://forgejo.org/) on your own hardware.
|
| You'll get the same experience as Codeberg, because
| Codeberg is in fact running on Forgejo
| taxborn wrote:
| It's a great piece of software. I set it up in a Docker
| container, and have a few of their CI runners on a couple
| machines I own. Great experience so far.
| Talinx wrote:
| OneDev (https://onedev.io/) is self-hostable, too, and
| works great.
| rockskon wrote:
| Hosting costs for self-hosting a popular git repo are
| prohibitive for many people.
| beeb wrote:
| People aren't on these hosted platforms only for the git
| experience, they are for the social aspects and
| discoverability too.
| rsolva wrote:
| Forgejo is hard at work, defining and implementing
| federation, adding cross-forge interaction, social
| functionality and discovery: https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-
| there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| The UI looks very similar to Gitea. Are they related? And
| how do they compare?
| ionelaipatioaei wrote:
| Forgejo is a fork of Gitea.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| For hosting and publishing your code maybe.
|
| But the power of Github is more the social platform and
| collaboration at global scale.
|
| In that sense the only mature alternative I know is
| Radicle
|
| - https://radicle.xyz/
| hnlmorg wrote:
| This is what people forget about GitHub. Its popularity
| isn't because it has the best tools on the market. It is
| popular because of the network effect. It's the social
| network of developer tooling.
|
| I don't really want to be using a Microsoft product but I
| use github for the same reason I use Linkedin: because it
| benefits my career to be visible on these social
| networks.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Yes, that's why everyone is still on Sourceforge. I too
| check Freshmeat regularly for updates.
|
| It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell
| ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > Yes, that's why everyone is still on Sourceforge. I too
| check Freshmeat regularly for updates.
|
| Sourceforge and Freshmeat weren't social networks. Plus
| its not like other social networks haven't collapsed
| despite being popular, like MySpace.
|
| > It's time to move on from Github, LinkedIn, and hell
| ideally NPM too. Microsoft is polluting the ground water.
|
| As I said, I don't want to be using Microsoft products
| but it benefits my career to be visible on these social
| networks.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And this is a big part of the reason why it's pretty much
| a violation of professional deontology to use LinkedIn,
| GitHub (and Discord).
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That kind of ideology is great in principle, but if you
| struggle to get a job because you have limited presence
| in an employer's market, then you're practising
| deontology without a profession.
|
| I'm an opinionated MS-hater, like most of my peers who
| lived through 90s Microsoft, like I had. But I also have
| a family to feed and bills to pay. Sometimes pragmatism
| trumps ideology.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have PRs open on five different OSS projects at the
| moment. My throughput is being limited by trying to
| remember all the details of PRs I filed 3-6 weeks ago.
|
| I thinK I have to admit to myself that as little as I
| like github having all the projects, I'd be less
| effective having to track inboxes across half a dozen
| different hosting platforms.
|
| If you made something like Mastodon, where alerts
| propagate across instances, I could probably deal. But
| without that? No, I'll pass.
| anglesideangle wrote:
| The problem with a federation system like
| mastodon/activitypub is that relying on propagation hurts
| usability and discoverability.
| [tangled.sh](https://tangled.sh/) is to federated forgejo
| what bluesky is to mastodon, where it relies on atproto
| to have decentralization without sacrificing ux
| jzb wrote:
| I love Codeberg, but they're struggling with growth/scaling
| -- if folks want to see Codeberg succeed, they need to open
| their wallets.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Big limitation on private repos there.
| taxborn wrote:
| Additionally there is Codeburg/Forgejo, and for the atproto-
| enjoyers, tangled.sh is a new face that feels like it could
| be good.
| dboreham wrote:
| And gitea (originally a Forgejo fork).
| iamdamian wrote:
| > And gitea (originally a Forgejo fork).
|
| I don't think this is right. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitea#Forgejo_fork.
| fisiu wrote:
| Vice versa, forgejo is a gitea fork.
| overfeed wrote:
| Did you mean to say gitea was originally a _Gogs_ fork?
|
| The lineage of those projects is Gogs => Gitea => Forgejo
| ghc wrote:
| Among enterprises I work with, I'm seeing way more migration
| to self-hosted Gitlab than I was a few years ago. Even among
| Azure-dependent orgs.
| rpep wrote:
| I think there's some risk with this though too - more and
| more is behind the enterprise tier. People try to work
| around this in various ways but its an unsatisfying
| experience. For e.g. trying to enforce merge request
| approval with pipeline stages.
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| As a Deno user, this news also makes me see more value in
| JSR. (Relative to npm's ownership, that is.)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Gitlab is not really an option for me. Their pricing is
| absolutely out of this world.
| brabel wrote:
| https://www.opencode.net/
| hk__2 wrote:
| Yes, as long as you don't look at their pricing :/
| betteryourweb wrote:
| I can see Gitlab in the same position in the near future.
| Only a matter of time...
| waihtis wrote:
| You really think Microsoft has been "cool" for the past decade
| or so?
|
| First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every
| single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just
| to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
|
| I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7)
| but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit
| extraction.
|
| Dont get me started on Azure
| riffraff wrote:
| Not OP, but I do.
|
| The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as
| the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly"
| and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs
| code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely
| screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
|
| Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online
| thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
|
| This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or
| so.
| owebmaster wrote:
| They didn't become cool, some people just let themselves
| get fooled by what they were offering for free.
| coliveira wrote:
| Only people without any sense of reality believed this.
| Being exploitative is a core feature of MS, since its
| foundation. It's like believing a serpent won't bite you.
| They're in the middle of the embrace, extend and extinguish
| cycle for open source technologies.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yep, that is more of less the point I was making.
| anthk wrote:
| Windows was already adware with WIndows 98. Active Desktop
| anyone?
| crinkly wrote:
| Yeah that.
|
| HN has a short memory. About 10 years ago everyone was all
| over Satya like he was Jesus' second coming.
|
| Look where we are now.
| EGreg wrote:
| What about Wine? Is that still a thing?
|
| Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push,
| besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development
| environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I
| remember.
| benterix wrote:
| > Visual Studio Code ... open source
|
| Pick one.
| echoangle wrote:
| They meant VS Code (which is at least partially open
| source).
| kube-system wrote:
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I don't understand how VS Code is an "open source push". It's
| technically open source, but open source doesn't seem to be
| strategically important to it.
| beached_whale wrote:
| Not all of it is OSS. The core language servers are closed,
| I think.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| Wine is still active, but I think mostly with Valve's proton,
| if that's the Wine you're talking about.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Pedantic, but VS Code does not share a lineage with Atom,
| besides the fact that it is built on Electron (which was,
| admittedly, originally built for Atom.)
| EGreg wrote:
| I meant Atom used to be the base, and now it's VSCode
| johnmaguire wrote:
| VS Code was not based on Atom's code base.
| EGreg wrote:
| I didn't say it was!
| vkazanov wrote:
| Valve's steam deck runs on Linux/Wine. Wine is more popular
| than ever.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Wine, as part of Proton/SteamOS is a huge success.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Heard of Apple Game Porting Toolkit? That's built on the back
| of Wine.
|
| Microsoft has been open sourcing a bunch of their programs
| for a while now too. Majority are inconsequential but they
| are still nice to see. People on Linux OS's are excited about
| Microsoft calculator being open source but these open source
| projects still show that some people there have interest in
| the push.
| pbiggar wrote:
| Not just that, but Microsoft's reputation is in the process of
| taking a nose dive over its human rights record
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
| pfisch wrote:
| Nobody even knows about this, no one thinks "Microsoft, hell
| no, they are a key player in the gaza conflict."
|
| No one really associates human rights with Microsoft's
| reputation. That is the domain of Palantir, Meta, etc.
| 1attice wrote:
| as a former MSFT employee (who quit for reasons, well
| before the layoffs) I am not permitted to disparage or
| portray my former employer in a negative light.
|
| I'm just mentioning this for no reason whatsoever. It
| popped into my head, for some reason.
| jjani wrote:
| For life? How can you be bound by this? Unless you sold
| yourself out for an extra month pay.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That seems literally illegal, unless the disparagement
| would reference specific, classified programs.
| mikestew wrote:
| As a former MSFT employee who disparages Microsoft on a
| regular basis, I ask: 'dafuq did you get _that_ idea?
| mperham wrote:
| I guess you speak for everyone?
|
| I very much do look very negatively on Microsoft as a
| collaborator with modern fascist regimes, along with Meta,
| Palantir, X, etc.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| What about Apple there? Bringing golden offerings to their
| god-king and so supporting the further corruption of the
| regime. One of the few with the power/money to stand
| against them instead kneeling before Trump like a teen
| beauty pageant hopeful.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yet. How do you think Meta acquired that reputation ?
| specproc wrote:
| Like IBM in the forties.
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| nothingburger
| gamblor956 wrote:
| That's true of most of tech in general, these days. You have
| to pick your poison now.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You really don't have to.
|
| And as a developer you have the option to go for otherwise
| trickier alternatives, like not using iOS nor Android.
|
| But of course someone that uses the word 'tech' for a tiny
| subset of it might not see that...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is
| stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even
| among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to
| regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at
| best.
|
| Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that
| happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made
| noises that seemed not awful.
|
| In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time
| they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Even among tech people, they have good will
|
| Wait, do they?
|
| I mostly remember:
|
| - A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
|
| - Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have
| failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch
| everyone described it as
|
| - Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
|
| - Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on
| Liquid Glass
|
| It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely
| is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited
| about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| > but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple
| otherwise lately, as product or platform
|
| And probably fewer still consider switching to the
| alternatives. Apple is, for better or worse, usually the
| least bad option.
| yndoendo wrote:
| You have to pay me to use Apple, Microsoft, and Google
| products. None of those organizations are good.
|
| Apple and Google both use immutable locked down OSes on
| their main products that prevents improving device
| security, such as IP & DNS filtering / blocking.
|
| Microsoft user experience keeps getting worse. Latest
| version of Teams, as of today, says I'm at the "Calendar"
| screen and the navigation and content screen both show
| "Chat". "Calendar" was unpinned because I find Teams to
| be at interacting with content. No reason it should be a
| PDF viewer when the desktop application is actually
| usable allows for viewing chat and content at the same
| time.
|
| I understand developing for those platforms makes money
| or is needed for other products. Unless I have to develop
| products that support those companies, I will never pay
| with my personal income to support those organizations.
| herval wrote:
| So you don't use a smartphone?
| powgpu wrote:
| Me and many people don't.
|
| Just laptop is good enough. Although currently switched
| back to apple silicon ATM for LLM, price and convince
| reasons, and as soonest linux on Apple Silicon reach some
| maturity, will switch over completely.
|
| However not using a smartphone is probably good for one's
| mental and physical healthy now days. It is
| understandable if your work require you to have one, but
| if I'm not getting paid, why would I even get a
| smartphone?
|
| Back in the 80's there are investment people managing
| billions dollars and deals over pen paper and a land
| line!
| herval wrote:
| back in the 1880s, people didn't even need refrigerators!
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| I'm the opposite, I didn't own a personal computer from
| like 2015 until last year when I built a new gaming PC. I
| had a MacBook Pro from work of course, but I just got by
| on my phone / iPad for my personal life.
| echelon wrote:
| Because antitrust enforcement has been so lax, we only
| have two options.
|
| The DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. need to force a breakup of
| first party app stores, first party payment, first party
| web browser, and first party messaging. They also really
| need to require web installs without hidden menus and
| scare walls.
|
| We'll see a proliferation of offerings if that happens.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| For hardware only
| tonypapousek wrote:
| Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial
| software available. 26 feels like a misstep*, of course,
| but I'll take it over a Windows environment any day.
|
| * Xcode 26 is kinda neat, though
| criddell wrote:
| A mac can (legally) run more software than any other
| computer. Obviously, macOS apps work, but you can also
| run most Windows and Linux applications (in a VM).
| There's also a bunch of iOS/iPadOS apps that can work and
| some Android apps can run through BlueStacks.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > but you can also run most Windows and Linux
| applications (in a VM).
|
| This is really just a cheap rhetorical trick. Linux [0]
| can run just as much software, if you include VMs, but
| you can't legally virtualize MacOS, therefore buying a
| Mac is the only way to legally run their software, in
| addition to everything else. Now, you are technically
| correct, but the casual interpretation of
|
| > Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial
| software available.
|
| isn't really that you can simply run everything
| unavailable on MacOS in a VM (or several layers of VMs).
| It's the same as arguing that Powerpoint is all you ever
| need, as it is Turing complete.
|
| [0] And so can Windows, if you run said VMs in a Linux
| VM.
| worik wrote:
| No.
|
| Linux is better.
|
| That worm has turned, at least five years ago
| powgpu wrote:
| for X_86 family for sure, but the experience on other
| chip set such as Apple Silicon (maybe the arms) for
| desktop usage are quite rough around the edges.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Linux works fine on ARM devices. The problem is lack of
| good (non-Apple) ARM devices, not Linux.
| trelane wrote:
| "Apple silicon?" Man, how well does OSX run on a
| raspberry pi? Clearly it's the inferior OS. /s
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| When someone makes a SteamOS level "just works" distro
| for desktop / gaming I'll probably happily switch
| __loam wrote:
| The rocky start for apple intelligence is what excites me
| bee_rider wrote:
| They aren't doing a _great_ job exactly, but what is there
| to recommend to somebody who doesn't want to use the
| command line? SteamOS, maybe, haha.
| catigula wrote:
| It's also amazing that they convinced developers that
| running a non-standard CPU instruction set through a
| laundered Rosetta layer was somehow battery or compute
| friendly lb for lb when an AMD processor (or even Intel) is
| plenty efficient and cool.
|
| Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right
| now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage
| gains from ARM evaporate fast.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Delusional take. Rosetta is for maintaining compatibility
| during the transition. Efficiency is fine with Rosetta.
| But it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is
| essentially already done. Not true, unfortunately, for
| Windows.
|
| Aside from superior performance and battery life (even
| compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices
| are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running
| Intel and (less so) AMD.
| catigula wrote:
| What is the efficiency loss specifically? Do you even
| know, or are you just asserting it?
|
| >it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is
| essentially already done
|
| 'Essentially' is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, but,
| putting that aside, A. you're wrong, I've recently ran
| into Rosetta throttling and B. it's not a good reason to
| begin the project at all, it's only a good reason when
| it's already done. You're essentially ceding "Yes, I've
| been wrong and this has been a fool's errand for the past
| x years until right this moment as the project is done".
| It's not done and it'd a weak argument.
|
| >Aside from superior performance and battery life (even
| compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices
| are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running
| Intel and (less so) AMD.
|
| Specifically what are the numbers? Because I have
| performance/tdp numbers and the M-series performs well
| but it isn't a categorical difference. In fact, that's no
| difference, it performs okay but AMD is at the top of the
| heap currently. Sad.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| then post the numbers? You're just here doing the same
| thing, asserting that the efficiency is bad, only using
| more words.
|
| Performance and efficiency has been great for me. I've
| never run into rosetta throttling. I've got the numbers -
| trust me bro.
| catigula wrote:
| The null hypothesis is that Apple chips aren't better.
| You simply assumed they were into evidence. It's up to
| you to provide the figures that they are.
|
| Of course, they really aren't, which is pretty obvious.
| It doesn't make sense that Apple would randomly invent
| some categorically new CPU technology when they don't
| even own an instruction set or foundry and that they
| would simply be concocting some vendor lock-in supply
| chain scheme.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| > Because I have performance/tdp numbers
|
| It sounds like you've already done the work... why not
| just share the numbers. I'm just asking to see what you
| claim to have. Unless... you don't have them and you're
| just making stuff up.
| singhrac wrote:
| I switched from a 2019 MBP to a new M4 Pro a few weeks
| ago and I didn't even know Rosetta wasn't installed (I
| assumed on and installed by default) until I had to run a
| Go binary that hadn't been updated since 2020.
|
| I use a lot of nonstandard software (not just a browser),
| not a single piece needed Rosetta.
|
| I agree recent AMD chips are power efficient like the M
| series (though I don't have one to compare with) but I
| thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in 2020
| weren't?
| catigula wrote:
| Apple's marketing on this was a very impressive effort on
| this, evidenced by:
|
| >...I thought everyone agreed the comparable chips in
| 2020 weren't?
|
| Possibly, but it was likely far, far closer (see maybe
| the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U) than justified defense of the
| project.
|
| Anyways, with the addition of the Rosetta translation
| layer there's no way the Apple M1 was as efficient as the
| Ryzen.
| hinkley wrote:
| Pile onto that the fact that a lot of us are in the
| cloud, and the cloud has ARM processors, and they're
| generally priced as competetive, especially with m7i and
| m7a. So it's not the worst thing in the world to be using
| arm64 architecture on your dev machine.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Which matters very little in my experience whether the
| cloud is ARM or not. I still need to build my code in a
| Docker container with Amazon Linux even on my ARM based
| Mac when targeting an ARM based AWS runtime environment.
| herval wrote:
| Apple is certainly fumbling in recent years, and it's
| clearly behind in some games (Siri, AI in general, iPhones
| turning into a yearly snooze-fest). But of all the FAANG,
| I'd say it's the only one I trust, simply because they're
| not trying to sell my data and have a consistent stance on
| security.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Tim Cook giving Trump a gold-plated statue in exchange
| for tariff preferences seems like a very bad sign.
| elictronic wrote:
| It seems like they got the memo. Pay Trump personally or
| have your business destroyed.
|
| Im not really sure how that benefits me as a US citizen
| but that is who the majority of the population seems to
| want and once the rules are set you follow or face made
| up tariffs that rip you apart. Right.
| herval wrote:
| It certainly is. It's not exclusive to Apple, however -
| _all_ the big tech (and non-tech) companies offered
| tribute, in one form or another. Despite it being
| illegal, it seems to be the new government practice.
|
| Whether that'll lead to the government requiring Apple to
| break their encryption, it remains to be seen. I imagine
| Apple has a bit of an edge here anyway, since iCloud is
| allegedly e2e encrypted?
| pklausler wrote:
| Why? It was a relatively cheap way to dodge the
| capricious whims of a madman who is fortunately easy to
| distract with shiny objects.
| kriops wrote:
| Why? Regardless of your view of Trump, would you not
| expect mr. Cook to play the game? His only job is
| literally and figuratively to navigate hell or high
| waters to deliver value to the shareholders.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| He didn't give him a statue, he gave him a gold bar. A
| literal gold bar. With a plaque.
| worik wrote:
| > because they're not trying to sell my data
|
| Are you sure?
| echelon wrote:
| They use it internally for marketing and sales.
|
| They also use it for their growing ad platform.
|
| Can't let people find your app for free. You need to pay
| to defend your trademark and lead in a given app
| category.
|
| Plus they've severed the customer relationship and
| inserted themselves as Mafia middlemen. They'll sell that
| to companies too.
| hilux wrote:
| Apple is behind in AI because they've prioritized keeping
| private data on your device, rather than in the cloud,
| but today's best (or even good) inference models still
| require cloud-scale compute, i.e. they don't fit on a
| phone.
|
| I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.
| eadmund wrote:
| You forgot things like shipping decades-old free software
| with their OS because Apple are so implacably opposed to
| their users having freedom to use, examine, modify and
| share that software.
| junon wrote:
| SIP is the obvious contra, though.
| asveikau wrote:
| > A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
|
| It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written
| about Apple in 1998.
| Philadelphia wrote:
| Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for
| user-facing features, if not the underlying operating
| system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as
| that went.
| asveikau wrote:
| I was around at the time.
|
| Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful
| address space protections. A single bad pointer
| dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and
| a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire
| system.
|
| Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and
| outdated by technically minded people.
|
| By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or
| NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of
| replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with
| NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that,
| they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen
| classic Mac OS (Copland).
|
| Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive
| multitasking and much better address space isolation.
| Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and
| much better. It did take them two more releases to make
| it into the consumer product.
| deaddodo wrote:
| If all you did was look at it, sure. OS 8 was a mess
| internally with an archaic and badly designed kernel.
| Windows 98 was much better at multitasking, system
| recovery, process isolation, etc. And that's saying _a
| lot_ for the BSOD-ridden mess that _that_ was. Then you
| had NT, which made both look like children 's toys.
|
| And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you
| left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of
| the water.
|
| MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| MacOS 8 was not innovative by 1997 standards. I had it
| running on my PowerMac 6100/60. It was crash prone and
| Netscape could easily crash the entire OS, cooperative
| multitasking, you as an end user still had to manually
| allocate how much memory an app could have.
|
| None of these were issues on Windows 98.
| worik wrote:
| ....and their tools are very flash, bright colours and
| buttons...and they mostly work
|
| "Mostly" is not good enough. The user experience of Apple
| is still good, the developer experience is woeful
| nobleach wrote:
| If that's what you "mostly" remember, your memory is
| awfully selective. It's totally fine for you to have a
| bias, but you're overlooking decades of massively
| successful products and services.
|
| Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and
| Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's
| superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having
| an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well.
| I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that
| time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like
| Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's
| tech has a ton of good will.
| bananalychee wrote:
| Of course it does in the US tech bubble, if you talk to
| people who haven't been using Macs for 30 years you might
| hear a different story. While Apple makes good hardware
| they also have plenty of blunders, especially in recent
| years, much like Microsoft in its domain really. Both are
| coasting on their past successes and familiarity. I get
| it, many of my coworkers watch their announcement streams
| like they're video game announcements. From my standpoint
| they haven't put out anything exciting since the
| iPhone/iPod Touch, but I don't have the money for toys
| that cost thousands of dollars apiece like the Mac
| Studios or their VR headset, so maybe I'm missing out.
| brownriceowl wrote:
| We have different ideas of what qualifies as tech people if
| we're talking about Liquid Glass, Siri, and Vision Pro
|
| IMO, "consumer electronics enthusiasts" != "tech people"
| QuantumGood wrote:
| In my business (partly home studio support), it's hard to
| support MacOS for new-ish users.
|
| If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with
| things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG,
| you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev
| tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the
| average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity
| itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue
| for Mac.
|
| If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up
| going through the cost and time of certifying for each new
| Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who
| gave up several versions ago and won't support using all
| the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.
|
| If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal
| with special permissions if it didn't come from the app
| store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control
| your screen, you have to find and set two security
| permisssions.
|
| For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.
|
| UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users
| have a different experience than new users, which doesn't
| invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I
| encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.
| nativeit wrote:
| I'm a producer since Cool Edit Pro and Fruity Loops. I've
| used Windows and Macs for audio and video production
| extensively over the last two decades. I have no idea
| what you're on about.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I gave four specific examples that frequently slow me
| down when helping people who are new to studio stuff. You
| ignored my examples, and pointed out you have decades of
| experience. Why do you start by pointing out you're not
| the user I'm talking about and ignore the examples?
| zamalek wrote:
| > > Wait, do they?
|
| The echo chamber is still reverberating. People say that
| MacOS is good because other people have told them so. The
| people claiming that is better don't have an earnest effort
| outside of the ecosystem to support their claims. I was
| _forced_ to use MacOS at work up until a little over 1.5
| years ago, I have perspective on both, and it is
| categorically incompetent. It doesn 't hold a candle to dev
| on Linux.
|
| As for Windows? Windows 7/11 are probably still better than
| MacOS (as you implied with your comment about neglect), but
| it's probably as bad or slightly better than Win 11.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Apple is bribing the fascists and Microsoft hasn't yet. Cool
| is not a word I'd use.
| dijit wrote:
| Microsoft is so in bed with the government that bribes are
| _far_ from necessary.
| leoc wrote:
| In this case it's more that hardware isn't a critical
| business for MS, I think.
| fHr wrote:
| lol
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional
| stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will
|
| Good grief. Sometimes it's good to get a reminder that there
| are still people who think this way.
| raincole wrote:
| Yeah, I laughed audibly when I read that sentence...
| pjmlp wrote:
| On my office, only folks like myself that also do Windows
| development, have Thinkpads with Windows.
|
| Everyone else carries Apple devices.
|
| GNU/Linux only exists on local VMs for containers, or
| servers on cloud instances.
| JohnFen wrote:
| There's a huge regional variation on this. In some parts
| of the US, Apple is everywhere. In others, it's rare
| enough to be worthy of comment when it gets spotted in
| the wild.
| xp84 wrote:
| Since when does carrying Apple device(s) mean we have
| goodwill for Apple?
|
| I dev on a Mac all day and own 2 macs at home. Why?
|
| * not going to try to convince the whole family to change
| and I want the various family & imessage features that
| everyone uses to all work
|
| * all the developers at my company use macs and I don't
| want to have to set up my own unique configurations for
| everything using WSL and stuff.
|
| * In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're
| forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web
| which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an
| offshore team, and no execs use Android so there's no
| accountability when those apps suck.
|
| * Windows also has many recent disappointments (ads in
| the start menu, increasingly dumber and worse settings
| screens), so they're doing a bad job of winning over
| people like me, dampening my enthusiasm to switch.
|
| * Linux is cool but I'm too busy to want a project as my
| daily driver PC.
|
| I have nothing but scorn for Tim Cook's Apple and have
| zero goodwill for them. They haven't shipped an actual
| smart idea for any of their platforms besides maybe
| Shortcuts (which they bought), and even then it took them
| 3 years to let me run automations unattended.
| asveikau wrote:
| > In the US, often the Android versions of "apps" you're
| forced to use by random businesses (instead of the Web
| which usually would work fine), are pawned off on an
| offshore team
|
| I haven't seen this.
|
| Also I would imagine those businesses would do the same
| for their iOS development? It's odd that you would assume
| they don't.
| deaddodo wrote:
| While rarely offshored, a decade and a half of experience
| in the tech sphere shows that Android is almost
| universally treated as a second class citizen. Some
| companies won't bother supporting it at all, the majority
| will have an Android team 1/5-1/3 the size of the iOS
| team.
| leptons wrote:
| I, like many developers was handed a Macbook Pro upon
| starting my first day at the company. I gave MacOS a shot
| (again, I used to be a mac sysadmin at a design company),
| but was happier when I could install Windows on it.
| Finder is a joke, and so many other things about MacOS
| are just stupid. Sure, Windows has some crap too, but it
| lacks the pretentiousness and ridiculous things I dislike
| about Apple products. I also covered the white lit-up
| Apple logo on the laptop screen with red-circle-strikeout
| sticker, because I really disliked Apple after being a
| sysadmin getting all too familiar with their products and
| OS.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Ah yes, what could be more stylish and cool than a
| company assigned work device.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies.
|
| They are very different companies in very different
| businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a
| software company. That affects everything (and is why the two
| are not fundamentally competitors).
|
| I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other
| at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their
| time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more
| harm than Apple.
| leptons wrote:
| Apple does plenty of harm every day when they force Safari
| as the only web browser engine allowed on iOS.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| That's why there are so many great PWAs for Android and
| most companies avoid writing Android apps and just tell
| Android users to use the web apps.
|
| Oh wait, that's totally not the case.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, but with that sort of thing, the harm is at least
| limited to Apple customers.
| acdha wrote:
| That's more complicated because the alleged harms are
| quite limited (it's not like Android or desktop users are
| using PWAs much) and the biggest direct impact is the
| unalloyed good of "the web" not being synonymous with the
| Google Chrome roadmap. Everyone has benefited from
| proposed specs with significant negative privacy and
| security impacts not being adopted, so we have to ask how
| much the negatives outweigh the positives here.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Right? They are really limiting Google's development of
| their platform, the internet, by making some websites
| pander to a non-Chrome browser engine.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Even among tech people, they have good will
|
| Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple
| ecosystem.
| nobleach wrote:
| But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and
| Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't
| cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers
| and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at
| your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been
| "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a
| perfect one.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The joke was supposed to be that the "coolness peak" was
| incredibly lame. Haha.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I used to think that way, and I'm not rushing to apply to
| Microsoft, but I do notice the various divisions, studios,
| stock price growth and comparable RSU packages that all make
| me totally forget about its antiquated branding and
| association
| p1necone wrote:
| > Even among tech people, they have good will
|
| Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've
| seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and
| all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.
|
| As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil -
| they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-
| like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put
| up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and
| cooling issues.
|
| Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty
| fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in
| the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But
| you still have to use their locked down software stack and
| ecosystem.
| segphault wrote:
| Microsoft not being terrible was a zero interest rate
| phenomenon. The news today is a lot worse than just Github not
| being independent anymore. It sounds like literally the entire
| development division is being rolled into this "Core AI"
| business unit.
|
| When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by
| 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to
| ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever
| relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to
| cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at
| this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET
| engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
| hinkley wrote:
| fifteen years ago I predicted that if we ever have a bloody
| AI revolution, the most likely case would be that it would be
| Microsoft's fault because they are the kings of unintended
| consequences.
|
| The second most likely case being some AI figuring out how to
| hack AWS to steal compute time, probably by getting access to
| billing information.
|
| Microsoft seems to be slowly pulling ahead at the moment.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Wait Microsoft was cool at some point?
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable
| despite its many many flaws.
| wirrbel wrote:
| I always wonder at these attributions. Like all windows
| versions gave you bluescreen and ran Microsoft excel. To me
| not one stood out particularly bad or good compared to the
| others maybe after Windows 98 service pack something
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Windows 98 was so bad when it came to drivers, lol.
|
| It had the plug and play standard but that only worked
| half of the time, and if you messed up by doing something
| like connecting the peripherals before installing the
| driver you could BSOD while trying to install the drivers
| and have to rescue the whole OS. Happened to me enough
| for me to remember it.
|
| And my sister demonstrated how you could delete the
| recycle bin if you were bad enough at computers, which
| was fun.
|
| I've also had nearly as many kernel panics on OSX or
| hangs on Linux as I have had BSODs on Windows (when
| graphed as a ratio of use over time).
|
| All OSes have flaws and issues, there would never be a
| perfect operating system with our current understanding
| of computers, and that's ok.
|
| That being said, my critique does not include OSes that
| spy on you (for what will be considered a several
| trillion dollar crime syndicate when this era is written
| down in history), which is its own entire rant.
| geon wrote:
| Win98 was terrible. I used to reinstall it every month or
| so, as routine maintenance.
|
| Win2k was so much better it's not even comparable.
|
| XP had a bit of a rough start, but by sp3 it was a lot
| better than 2k.
|
| I skipped the other windows-es until 10. It has been
| solid.
| AgentME wrote:
| Windows Vista got saner permissions support and made the
| OS survive certain kinds of driver crashes, but on launch
| a lot of existing software and drivers weren't updated to
| support those changes so it got a bad reputation. Nobody
| gave Windows proper credit for these advancements until
| Windows 7 which had a cleaner launch since most software
| and drivers were already updated for Vista's changes.
| brabel wrote:
| I was on Windows 95 until a few years ago :D. That for me
| was the cooler one, given the improvements (in visuals at
| least) over Windows 3.11.
| worik wrote:
| > Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically
| unbeatable
|
| That is very puzzling... Did you compare them to anything
| else?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Did you missed the whole Microsoft <3 FOSS, right after Satya
| took over?
| mightysashiman wrote:
| did anyone believe it?!
| palata wrote:
| All those people who use Linux on their Windows machine
| instead of just installing a proper Linux distro.
| leoc wrote:
| You can see the reactions in 2014:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524082 . Pretty
| positive overall!
| ragnese wrote:
| It was AstroTurfed to hell and back here and on Reddit. I
| know that much.
| owebmaster wrote:
| You can see it very regularly when typescript is
| mentioned
| jacquesm wrote:
| No way anybody really believed that. Or did they?
| NickC25 wrote:
| Yeah. Xbox, GitHub, Sataya's early days embracing open
| source, Zune (admittedly not cool but i loved the product).
| newspaper1 wrote:
| This is an odd comment. Xamarin has never been relevant. GitHub
| is historically OSS focused. Xamarin was some weird niche
| product for Windows devs. Hardly any overlap with GitHub's core
| audience. I don't know what will happen next, but hodgepodge of
| weird MS tech isn't the lens to view this through.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Didn't the Xamarin guy became the CEO of GitHub at one point?
| pjmlp wrote:
| One of them, yes.
|
| Miguel never did, and is now focused on Swift and Apple.
| newspaper1 wrote:
| Yes, and that was an incredibly odd decision.
| yread wrote:
| Why do people need to create anthropomorphising narratives
| around companies? Don't be any company's cheerleader, use the
| stuff that's best for you (and the environment)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Agreed, but apparently company cheerleadering never goes
| away.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| The same way cheerleading USA presidents doesn't go away,
| but if you look around you see things like Switzerland with
| direct democracy that just works without it.
| sixothree wrote:
| Is he creating or is he relating what people think? I don't
| see this is him arguing so much as reporting.
| ozim wrote:
| I built my career on MSFT stack I am going to be their
| cheerleader, don't want them to go down or stagnate as I
| would have to switch stack.
|
| I don't understand people who are just consumers and have no
| actual business to root for MSFT or AAPL or any other
| company.
| motorest wrote:
| > Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all
| directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see
| what sticks.
|
| Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI
| frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on
| WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy
| framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as
| well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too
| here and there.
|
| I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps
| one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What
| exactly do you interptet as a concern?
|
| Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's
| main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps
| using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is
| replacing this?
|
| Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization
| framework to help with observability and manage distributed
| applications. What exactly is the overlap?
|
| I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What
| exactly are you trying to say?
| Lich wrote:
| > I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is
| placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not
| deprecating any legacy framework.
|
| WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3,
| but it is literally dead. There doesn't seem to be any team
| at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died,
| and the last build conf didn't have any WinUI3 talks, all AI
| stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development
| and support for it has stalled and I couldn't justify moving
| the companies product over to WinUI3.
| crinkly wrote:
| _> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all
| directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see
| what sticks._
|
| This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of
| victims out there.
|
| ... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app
| to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with
| much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years
| backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced,
| and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.
|
| We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our
| customers use RHEL.
| jongjong wrote:
| I once worked for a company which outsourced the development
| of a Silverlight app for $1 million and then canned the whole
| thing one year later. It's just crazy how these life-changing
| amounts of money are thrown around like garbage in this
| industry.
| pathartl wrote:
| > Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all
| directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see
| what sticks.
|
| ... what?
|
| They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the
| rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty
| much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API
| via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints
| are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class
| product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of
| distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Exactly that, now try to pick the best one of all of those on
| enterprise projects, depending on the version they are using,
| and there is no budget for updates.
| mightysashiman wrote:
| first time I've ever read "Microsoft" and "cool" in the same
| sentence.
| pferde wrote:
| Technically not true. We were muttering "Not cool, Microsoft,
| not cool!" quite regularly back in the 90s and early 00s. :)
| ackfoobar wrote:
| > .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't
| hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being
| mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which
| also has the same VS license.
|
| On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is
| outdated perception.
|
| Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is
| pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said
| for .NET?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| The server deploy experience for .NET is pretty much the same
| on Windows or Linux. The developer tooling experience has
| more options on Windows.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Pretty much no, it can't be said for .Net.
|
| It currently supports Linux as a running target for servers.
| It supports both running desktop software and development
| very badly.
| alternatex wrote:
| It supports Linux as a running target for console apps,
| which can be servers, background apps, systemd apps, etc.
| So everything except UI apps.
|
| The development experience with Rider is also great on
| Linux. I think you need to be more specific with the
| complaints because I have many beefs with Microsoft's
| approach to many things, but I could not pick up on what
| you meant.
| rahkiin wrote:
| Can run SDL on linux and macos just fine, rendering
| visuals to the screen in X or Wayland.
| okanat wrote:
| You can use Avalonia to develop cross-platform apps with
| .NET.
|
| GUI stuff from Windows depends deeply on Win32 and how
| Windows's core APIs work. So expecting Microsoft to port
| stuff like .Net Windows Forms is meaningless. They are
| open source though. Maybe with some completion effort
| Wine can run them.
| tetha wrote:
| Mh, I'm not the most experienced guy with .NET.
|
| We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure
| on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.
|
| But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency
| and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or
| Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you,
| a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
| okanat wrote:
| I think the success of Proton and Wine in games clouds the
| vision of Linux community. The contributors did great work
| on them. However the gaming API of Windows is a very
| limited slice of the vast API.
|
| Games are quite standalone programs they don't depend
| deeply integrated Win32 stuff. They don't even use standard
| UI stuff from Win32. With Vulkan, porting DirectX became
| very viable and that was the grunt work. There are no DCOM
| servers or OLE stuff in games which is where Windows API
| actually becomes huge and sometimes nastier. Business apps
| however deeply depend on those.
| jayd16 wrote:
| If you're writing a server or a web app then its good and
| runs well.
|
| Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need
| to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using
| Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
|
| The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its
| far more advanced than other languages but their newest
| attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But
| what other language is graded for its great native GUI
| library?
|
| I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the
| goalposts are different.
| rahkiin wrote:
| I do not understand the hungup on visual studio.
|
| We dont do the same for java, rust, or c... there are good
| IDEs for each of them and none are made by the maintainers
| of the language.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I do get the sentiment to some degree. Part of it is that
| Microsoft does have a conflict of interest as an OS
| vender. They do need to show that they aren't/won't be
| abusing that. That does put them in a position where
| they're asked to go above and beyond as a form of litmus
| test.
| ezst wrote:
| Re: GUI library situation, are you implying that they
| finally came up with something that's cross platform? What
| is it?
| jayd16 wrote:
| MAUI apparently has Windows, Mac and Mobile support but
| no distro Linux support (unless Wine counts). You could
| use the web stack to be truly cross platform.
| okanat wrote:
| There is actually a much better but less well-known open
| source library in .NET: Avalonia. Look it up their
| gallery of apps. Avalonia is the cross platform version
| of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) libs. It is
| quite good for desktop apps and many commercial pieces of
| software uses it.
| ezoe wrote:
| You forgot to mention the gaming section.
|
| Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold
| for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all
| employees.
|
| I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation
| cause more profit than developing a real product.
|
| I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes,
| GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I
| can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off
| many employees so casually.
| ivape wrote:
| _Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on
| hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all
| employees._
|
| Sounds like they just bought the IP.
| tough wrote:
| which begs the question is it just good old EEE?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, the whole XBox division has been a mess, especially
| after ABK.
|
| However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of
| the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough
| slice of the market.
|
| Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with
| cross-platform games.
|
| Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how
| big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs
| and such.
|
| SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a
| netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or
| whatever else Microsoft might think of.
|
| Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to
| bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of
| translating Windows games.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| I would not be surprised if Steam came to Xbox
| sleepybrett wrote:
| The only way microsoft would allow that is if they got a
| cut of every sale.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't
| hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being
| mostly Windows only,
|
| The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows
| licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used
| on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have
| 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a
| aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive
| for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital
| ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I
| wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the
| server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off
| of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to
| 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio,
| but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is,
| server is running and there is zero azure involved.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
|
| That happened three decades ago.
| pjmlp wrote:
| There was a new wind after Satya took over, but apparently it
| is slowly gone now.
| pferde wrote:
| That was a mask the corporation put on in a bid to lure in
| the younger crowd who doesn't remember all the underhanded
| stuff Microsoft did in the past. But they haven't really
| changed at all.
| hinkley wrote:
| The thing that surprises me the most about Satya is how
| he managed to survive in MS so long if he really is
| different from the previous administration.
| jacquesm wrote:
| To me it never made a difference. There was a concerted
| effort to put lipstick on the pig but it was still a pig.
| lepicz wrote:
| to put lipstick on the wrong end of a pig :)
|
| this is a mystery to me: ms has all the money in the
| world to make it right.. yet they can't. windows
| ecosystem is like one of those eastern european
| barnyards, where animals live and die between old halves
| tractors and rusty Lada(s).
| hinkley wrote:
| More like put lipstick on the scorpion.
|
| It is in their nature. It takes a _lot_ of work to excise
| bad practices from an organization and removing the
| guilty parties is only step one. Everything continues to
| work the way the bad actors wanted them to work for a
| long, long time.
|
| Gates was bad. Balmer was worse. He was still in charge
| 11 years ago, in a company he helped build 40 years ago.
| Their personalities are the bones of that organization.
| righthand wrote:
| No need to extinguish what you can infinitely embrace with
| capital and extend into a puzzle.
| martin-t wrote:
| I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that
| "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open
| source now".
|
| Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when
| open source was clearly winning:
|
| - most servers were running linux
|
| - most phones and tablets were running android
|
| - people were buying tablets instead of desktops
|
| - Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
|
| - large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as
| open source
|
| Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding
| the industry back (remember IE6?).
|
| So they did what any good corporations does - they went along
| with the winning side.
|
| And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs'
| minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do
| what corporations do best - making money by abusing their
| position with barely any competition.
|
| ---
|
| The lesson here are: - Corporations should simply not have this
| amount of power. - Corporations are amoral, they don't have
| values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for
| optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not
| because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-
| human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-
| system interaction.
| okanat wrote:
| I think big corporations are not amoral, they are immoral.
| There is no wealth that has been built obeying morality or
| showing emphaty. Once them two become obstacles for profits,
| they will be thrown out.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Microsoft being the cool guys? The _cool guys_? Mwuhahahhaa.
|
| This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.
|
| For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
|
| - being the no. 1 enemy of free software
|
| - shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+
| market share
|
| - making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie
| them to their office software suite
|
| - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open
| technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM,
| etc.)
|
| - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune,
| Windows Phone)
|
| The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys"
| was sometime in the 90s.
| jrepinc wrote:
| And today they are even complicit in genocide and avid
| supporters of fascist USA dictator Trump, can hardly get less
| cool then that
| scarface_74 wrote:
| As is half the US who voted for him...
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| And every large company, whether they want to or not,
| because if they don't bend the knee...
| Melatonic wrote:
| Zune was actually kinda nice - although I agree nobody bought
| it!
| rideontime wrote:
| The same was reportedly true of Windows Phone 7. "Cringe
| hardware" seems to simply mean hardware that was good, but
| couldn't gain market share.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users
| tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux
| user).
|
| I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup
| of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-
| Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
|
| Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
| dingnuts wrote:
| The grandparent was also wryly highlighting the crevasse
| between post-Nadella Microsoft's PR, which you seem to
| believe, and their actions.
|
| Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're
| just referencing a very successful era of marketing.
|
| And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very
| "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to
| defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow
| kids..)
| gmueckl wrote:
| Then you surely have a laundry list of examples from the
| last 10 years where MS showed the same anticompetitive
| nature that they had in the 90s.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Yes, people keep bringing up VSCode all the time, but
| fanboys are gonna fanboy.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| And Windows, that one obscure product from Microsoft that
| people here keep forgetting about.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I try not to drink the Kool-Aid either on Microsoft's
| side (again, they are not necessarily my cup of tea), but
| the prevalence of the people with the "Hey! Remember that
| Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer? Micro$$$hit!!"
| attitude sucks my energy dry.
| fuzztester wrote:
| who at microsoft said open source is unamerican
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=who+at+microsoft+said+ope
| n+s...
|
| one of the results:
|
| Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-
| American:
|
| https://www.linux.com/news/weekly-news-wrapup-microsoft-
| clai...
|
| from 2001.
|
| well, gosh, I feel sorry for those American Linux
| developers of that time. I guess they were unAmerican,
| according to Allchin. if they were of this time, i guess
| they would have been deported by ICE.
|
| sorry for the victim now ...
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-48lNCrmqxA
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| Well, for starters: Linux is of Finnish origin.
|
| Linus Torvalds might be a U.S. citizen today, but during
| the first years of Linux he was certainly not thinking
| U.S. values and that someday his biggest userbase would
| be there.
|
| > _Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-
| American:_
|
| Yeah, typical Ballmer-era.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Microsoft continues to produce absolute garbage (except now
| it's also adware) and continues to utilise aggressive
| tactics to gain market share.
|
| They deserve plenty of hate.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I can agree anti-consumer behaviour is still ingrained in
| parts of Microsoft, as a dormant beast waiting to be
| Ballmer-ized for a new round.
|
| But again, why the baseless argument based on hate?
|
| You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the
| telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the
| invasive Copilot.
|
| After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.
|
| I should have the right to have a clean Windows out-of-
| the-box, but de-bloating is still a viable path.
| pjerem wrote:
| > You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the
| telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the
| invasive Copilot. > After de-bloating, it's a decent OS
| on its own.
|
| Sure you can. I, as a tech savvy person, can debloat
| Windows 11. If I dare to do it. If I know I can do it. If
| I search for information on the internet on how to do it.
| If I know how to search and follow those instructions. If
| I follow all the steps (and hope my tutorial covers
| everything). If Microsoft doesn't push an update to bloat
| it again.
|
| And with that, well I still don't know how to install it
| without a Microsoft account. It's so incredibly user
| hostile that even the insufferable Apple Walled Garden
| don't force you into all of this shit.
| prinny_ wrote:
| The thought that I would have to go through the trouble
| of reading some git repo to run a script that will
| debloat my OS, no matter how easy or straightforward
| might be, makes me feel tired. I don't want to fight my
| OS, I want it to work with me. Between searching and
| learning stuff for my job and searching and learning
| stuff for my personal development or hobbies, investing
| time in tinkering windows of all things doesn't exactly
| feel me with excitement. I would rather switch to Mac or
| invest time tinkering a linux distribution that actually
| respects me.
| pxc wrote:
| Not really. You can't fully remove large parts of the
| bloat without breaking Windows Update, and true removal
| of some features is invasive enough that it has to be
| done offline.
|
| When you actually look at those de-bloating scripts or
| techniques in detail, it's clear that they only barely
| address the issues with Windows, and they're always
| chasing a moving target of anti-user bullshit.
| yencabulator wrote:
| You _are_ defending Microsoft.
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/exten
| s...
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/exten
| s...
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-
| cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I am _not_.
|
| Also, I am not a VSCode user or would-be VSCodium user.
|
| I am happily married to JetBrains IDEs. Thanks.
|
| I don't need Electron nor WebView2 bloat on my nice,
| beautiful ThinkPad.
| yencabulator wrote:
| You literally said
|
| > these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era
| (part of 2014 and earlier).
|
| in response to parent's
|
| > - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill
| open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI,
| MSJVM, etc.)
|
| and VSCode is a perfect example of that happening right
| now.
| eastbound wrote:
| Microsoft is also LinkedIn, GitHub, Typescript, NPM (NPM!
| Where do you host your dependencies?), games and OpenAI.
|
| I love how each sector they're invested in is a practical
| monopoly.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >LinkedIn, [...] NPM [...] and OpenAI
|
| Your honor, I rest my case!
| rideontime wrote:
| ActiveX plugins? MSJVM? Last 25 years? You might need to
| update your script.
| gmueckl wrote:
| This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the
| biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own
| code under permissive licenses.
|
| IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even
| close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
|
| They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
|
| I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to
| use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have
| missed a few instances.
|
| Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And
| they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young
| adults don't know any other side of MS now.
| rustystump wrote:
| Idk i can think of a long list of awful stuff coming out of
| ms that is modern. They put fing ads in an os among other
| atrocities.
|
| I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think
| google is less evil which speaks volumes.
|
| The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but
| that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.
| tw04 wrote:
| > They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
|
| As did Ubuntu.
|
| >I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think
| google is less evil which speaks volumes.
|
| Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even
| if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads
| based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an
| Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any
| and all ad blockers?
|
| They aren't even close...
| rikafurude21 wrote:
| Windows normalized having ads in the OS.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| Ads in the OS? That isn't Microsoft's idea, or even
| Apple's (they have places they do it too). No, that was
| popularized by the mobile OS made by an ad company,
| Android.
| free652 wrote:
| Weirdly that I don't get any ads in Android.... My phone
| was made by the same ad company.
| LtWorf wrote:
| No? Try installing 1 app without seeing ads for 10 other
| useless apps.
| free652 wrote:
| Haven't installed an app in ages, but seeing an ad in a
| store isn't as bad as seeing an ad in my app launcher.
| And yes, windows puts ads in the start menu.
| tw04 wrote:
| Ubuntu had ads in the terminal in 2022:
| https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-
| plac...
|
| Unless you're going to call letting users know they have
| access to onedrive for free an "ad", Microsoft didn't do
| anything until Windows 11 in 2024.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-
| ads-t...
| soraminazuki wrote:
| Windows 10 is still too fresh in people's mind to
| gaslight people into thinking there were no ads in it.
|
| 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20121004004109/http://c
| ommunity....
|
| 2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20151015182852/http://b
| etanews.c...
|
| 2015: https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-solitaire-
| requires-a-subs...
|
| 2016: https://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-
| ads-on-your-...
|
| 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160602204008/http://i
| skandar.m...
|
| 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20250721092516/https://
| www.theve...
|
| 2018: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/192251/
| microsoft...
|
| 2020: https://winaero.com/wordpad-is-gettings-ads-in-
| windows-10/
| xnyan wrote:
| Don't Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their
| OS also?
| Wololooo wrote:
| I have yet to see a single ad on either the menus on
| Ubuntu or in OSX. Care to elaborate on what you mean by
| that?
| petepete wrote:
| A few times over the years Ubuntu included Amazon ads in
| the OS. Each time, afaik, the community reacted angrily
| and it didn't last.
| pjerem wrote:
| Apple barely does it and only for their products. I agree
| with you that that's already too much and too annoying
| but that's an order of magnitude less than Microsoft who
| advertise their products pretty aggressively AND ALSO are
| advertising for whoever gave them money too.
|
| Ubuntu I didn't use it for years, there are tons of other
| distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked,
| there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That's
| an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and
| its meaning to Amazon but it's nothing when compared to
| Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.
| kokanee wrote:
| Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank
| FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more
| afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-
| school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to
| ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are
| quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of
| the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming
| the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to
| consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital
| beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years
| ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright
| infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't
| think we even fully understand.
|
| My ranking from most evil to least would be:
|
| 1. Google
|
| 2. Meta
|
| 3. Microsoft
|
| 4. Amazon
|
| 5. Apple
|
| 6. Netflix
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Don't forget their military and surveillance
| contributions
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of
| global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta.
| While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping
| Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler)
| rahkiin wrote:
| VsCode is in a weird licensing limbo, or some of its
| microsoft plugins are anyway
| thiht wrote:
| No, it's pretty clear. Some extensions are NOT open
| source. It's not ambiguous, and there's nothing wrong
| with that as long as these extensions don't have
| superpowers (ie. access to unexposed VSCode APIs)
| yencabulator wrote:
| > I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare
| someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
|
| Try using VSCodium legally with the same functionality as
| VSCode; remote development, Python language server, C++
| debugging, and so on.
|
| People who think Microsoft is doing open source work for
| the good of their hearts are _still_ in for a lesson in
| EEE.
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/exten
| s...
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/exten
| s...
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-
| cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingui
| s...
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| As GP said:
|
| > _Long story short: MS isn 't a saint. They are a
| business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so
| long that some young adults don't know any other side of
| MS now._
|
| They are a business. You seem to misunderstand that
| businesses cannot behave like charities.
|
| Being a business implies being _for-profit._
|
| Nobody said open source had to be free as in _free beer,_
| it just had to be free as in _freedom._
|
| It's their prerogative to make the plugins marketplace to
| alternative editors _or not._ Servers cost money. It 's a
| business.
|
| Does Matt Mullenweg has to let WPEngine sap server
| resources? Arguably not; and this opinion comes from a
| guy (me) that strongly dislikes WordPress (and by
| extension: Matt and Automattic).
| yencabulator wrote:
| I am responding to this:
|
| > I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare
| someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Matt Mullenweg did nothing wrong
| thiht wrote:
| These are extensions. No one is preventing OSS
| communities from developing their own remote dev, Python,
| and C++ extensions. The VSCode extension API allows it.
| There are actually some efforts being made to do it.
| yencabulator wrote:
| You're moving the goalposts! I am responding to
|
| > I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare
| someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Ah, but coming hot on their heels are the embracions and
| extingushions!
| soraminazuki wrote:
| > I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare
| someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
|
| VS Code?
|
| https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-
| ar...
|
| > they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some
| young adults don't know any other side of MS now
|
| Windows has been going out of its way to be hostile to
| users for over a decade now.
| owebmaster wrote:
| This comment could not be more actual. The tools changed,
| even the methods changed, but Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
| is still Microsoft's strategy.
| jedberg wrote:
| > making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased
|
| Their keyboards were arguably the best ones around. I'm
| literally typing this on a 20 year old MS keyboard right now.
| p1necone wrote:
| Likewise the Intellimouse Pro is my favourite mouse. Sadly
| they seem to have discontinued it in favor of the Surface
| mouse which has atrocious ergonomics.
| jedberg wrote:
| They also discontinued the ergo keyboard that I am using
| to type this. I'm very worried that when this keyboard
| goes out I won't have another option.
|
| There is a clone on the market, which I use at home, that
| so far has been pretty promising, but we'll see if it has
| they lasting power that this one does.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Kinesis makes a keyboard that's basically the Microsoft
| ergo layout but mechanical and you can remap the keys. I
| have one and like it. https://kinesis-
| ergo.com/keyboards/mwave/
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Glove80 is a lot nicer in several ways if you're ok with
| the Chocs
| pyrale wrote:
| I'll disagree loudly with my IBM keyboards (my old model M
| as well as the thinkpads I've used).
| jedberg wrote:
| Sorry, I can't hear you over that racket!
|
| But in reality my favorite keyboard before I switched to
| the MS keyboards was the one that came with my original
| IBM PC with the clicky keys. The biggest downside was
| that my mom and dad always knew when I was on the
| computer!
| mv4 wrote:
| While I mostly agree with your assessment, I feel like the
| Xbox is pretty cool.
| meindnoch wrote:
| At this point it's an open secret that there won't be
| another Xbox. So yeah, they made something cool, and
| managed to fumble it.
| djhn wrote:
| How come? Any TL;DR? Not a gamer, so I'm not up to date
| on consoles.
| jorvi wrote:
| Nothing of the sort has been leaked or said by Microsoft.
|
| However, their strategy seems to be going all-in on
| Gamepass. And if you subscribe to Gamepass, Microsoft
| does not care if you play on your Steam Deck, iPad or
| Xbox.
|
| This is also why they mentioned they might open up the
| Xbox to other stores (Steam), and why they have been
| releasing first party titles onto the PS5[0].
|
| If you couple that info with them axing their own
| handheld and instead licensing out the Xbox name to Asus
| with the ROG Ally Xbox, it isn't a huge leap to assume
| they'll just license out the Xbox name to whichever OEM
| feels like making a console. The Xbox One and Series X /
| S already run the Windows Core kernel which would make
| going more wide on the hardware support quite easy, and
| the current hardware is semi off-the-shelf stuff from AMD
| anyway.
|
| [0] this led to some memery: https://images3.memedroid.co
| m/images/UPLOADED187/67a6bce7291...
| tapoxi wrote:
| Basically, PS5 sales recently reached 80 million. Xbox
| Series X/S is estimated about 30 million. They lost the
| generation where digital libraries were built and can't
| gain the market back.
|
| There's been a lot of rumor lately that Xbox becomes a
| shell on top of Windows and just runs regular Windows
| games. The announcement of the Xbox ROG Ally using this
| same approach gives it a lot of weight.
| hinkley wrote:
| 30 years, not 25. A lot of early contributions to Linux
| basically came with a "PS: Fuck Microsoft" at the bottom.
| sixothree wrote:
| I don't know where you've been the last decade, but it's
| clear they have been perceived this way. Him describing that
| perception only to be ridiculed by you is a pretty low blow.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased
| (Zune, Windows Phone)
|
| The Surface looks cool to me, but since it runs Windows, I
| will never use it. Does it only look cool, or is actually a
| cool device?
| deaddodo wrote:
| Linux runs perfectly fine on most of the Surfaces:
|
| https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-
| surface/wiki/Supporte...
|
| There's the usual asterisk here or there, as with most
| laptops; but, outside of some golden devices, it's about on
| par with most.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Great, but I'm not looking to run Linux either.
|
| You've completely answered by not answering the actual
| question though. Is it actually a cool device?
| deaddodo wrote:
| You specifically stated "since it runs Windows, I will
| never use it" and I addressed _that_ point. If your
| qualifier is "runs MacOS/iOS", then your following
| question is moot for _every_ non-Apple device.
|
| Either way, no one can answer your subjective opinion-
| based query. Go test it out at the dozens of kiosks in
| any city in a Western nation (or, barring that, watch a
| youtube video) and judge for yourself.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Clearly, you are not someone that can provide their
| opinion on the device otherwise you would have. Thanks
| for playing.
|
| I don't care what OS the device is using for someone else
| to use. I just want to know if the device is a decent
| device made by Microsoft, or if the original claim that
| they make crap devices also applies to the Surface. I
| provided the explanation why I don't have personal
| knowledge on if it is cool or not while asking others to
| provide feedback.
| jameshart wrote:
| > making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased
| (Zune, Windows Phone)
|
| The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost
| exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched.
| Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released
| in that time period.
|
| Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999,
| which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a
| mouseball roller would describe as 'cringe'.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| >For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
|
| That was 10 years ago
| Tyce3312 wrote:
| I agree with you
| Tyce3312 wrote:
| Don't Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS
| also?
| hilux wrote:
| Microsoft hasn't been the cool guys since at least 1995, and
| probably long before that.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| How is Rider v. VS?
|
| This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
| sixothree wrote:
| Rider is very nice and a perfectly competent development
| environment. It gets first class support and often has the
| ability to test preview features from dotnet upcoming
| language and runtimes.
|
| It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is
| very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to
| move over.
|
| It does away with some bloat and also provides some features
| of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.
|
| You can quite literally use this as your primary development
| environment.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| VS - great if you are Windows only shop for dev and want all
| the bells and whistles
|
| Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the
| best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels
| a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).
|
| VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for
| .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough.
| Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.
|
| I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find
| you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.
| pathartl wrote:
| I have been a .NET dev for the past 8 years and have switched
| fully to Rider. The only thing I miss from VS is the quick
| nav to see all the properties and methods in a file on the
| top bar. Everything else is vastly better:
|
| - Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI
| suggestions are better) - Refactoring across files is often
| faster - Package management is undoubtedly the latest
| performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes
| from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10
| seconds in Rider. - In VS there's always a noticeable delay
| when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE
| takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved
| in Rider. - The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's,
| though not as good as Windows Terminal
| pier25 wrote:
| I love C# and .NET is amazing for some specific use cases like
| REST APIs but there's so much stuff that just doesn't work or
| needs a lot more effort to get somewhere.
|
| MAUI is a mess.
|
| Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web
| apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of
| WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad.
| Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just
| so far ahead.
|
| C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever
| be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.
|
| Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still
| fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming
| in .NET 10).
|
| They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool
| but is it more important than core features?
|
| And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm
| starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
| sixothree wrote:
| Is MAUI now just a simple wrapper for Blazor projects?
| the_real_cher wrote:
| They're releasing a feature on Windows which literally records
| your screen every few seconds!
|
| These guys are extremely bad guys.
| maxrmk wrote:
| Do you work in devdiv at Microsoft? I can see the org chart in
| this comment haha
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I've been in the industry for 30 years professionally and 10
| years as hobbyist who paid as much attention to the industry as
| one could before the internet in the 80s early 90s including
| lying as a 9th grader pretending to be a big spender to get a
| free subscription to MacWeek and PCWeek.
|
| At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
| ozim wrote:
| _.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn 't
| hurt VS sales_ - I think MSFT doesn't care just as they don't
| care about GUI workloads, because only thing they care now is
| having developers run their stuff on Azure. You don't need VS
| for those cloud .NET apps and you don't need front end
| frameworks like Forms, Xamarin or MAUI. Seems like C++ is also
| something they would not be interested investing into when they
| can get people into cloud easier with C#.
| NullCascade wrote:
| It's funny. Nobody complains that there is a lack of free
| multi-platform desktop GUI profiling tools for Go, Python,
| Ruby, Elixir etc. Somehow we just accept those languages are
| only for web services, web apps, and command-line utilities.
|
| What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have"
| desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when
| everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives
| needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer
| tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.
| JCM9 wrote:
| Not surprising. The OpenAI partnership is fading. The GenAI as a
| product space overall is looking a bit frothy and house of cards-
| ish. GitHub is a strong product that is ripe for GenAI features
| that make it more interesting.
|
| Like it or not this makes sense as a business move. Microsoft is
| positioning itself for the next phase of the current AI hype
| cycle where standalone AI products will struggle and the "it's a
| feature not a product" phase will take hold.
| bionhoward wrote:
| Can't GitHub just stick to its core business instead of rushing
| into AI slop? The growth of vibe coding absolutely already
| benefits GitHub if they maintain the core business.
|
| If they fuck up the core business rushing into AI, then aren't
| they likely to get replaced by something else that does the
| core thing better?
|
| Not to mention all the earnest worries about them reading
| private codebases to train AI nobody asked for.
|
| You'd think being a trusted source of truth for many critical
| codebases would be "enough"
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I do not think of Github as primarily an AI product or service.
| That Microsoft does is certainly alarming.
|
| I still feel that there's no competitor I like as much. But that
| may not matter.
| davepeck wrote:
| Am I the only one who found Dohmke's communication style to be...
| buzzword forward? For a company whose roots were in pragmatic
| engineering, I always felt that there was a too-heavy component
| of hype, particularly around AI, in pretty much every recent
| public announcement. Yet, despite all the rhetoric and GitHub's
| superior position in the industry, they failed to capture the
| current AI editor market.
|
| Structurally, it seems to make sense for GitHub to be part of
| Microsoft proper.
|
| Perhaps this is a change for the better.
|
| (PS: despite their "failure" to win hearts and minds, I do
| recommend giving Copilot in VSCode another look these days. Its
| agentic mode is very good and rapidly improving; I find it
| comparable to Claude Code at this point, particularly when paired
| with a strong model. Related to structure: I never quite
| understood the line between what parts of this GitHub made, and
| what parts of this the vscode and related Microsoft teams made.)
| jatins wrote:
| Not disregarding all the success MS has had under Nadella but
| his comms style is also extremely buzzword forward, so there
| was probably a _synergy_ there
| justonceokay wrote:
| CEOs of large companies are incapable of talking frankly. It is
| their purpose not to and how they reached their position.
| ath3nd wrote:
| Wait, isn't that the guy that two weeks ago said that we should
| be embracing AI or existing the industry?
|
| - 2-nd of Aug 2025 Github CEO delivers stark message to
| developers: "Embrace AI or get out of the industry"
| https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
|
| - 11-th of Aug 2025 Github CEO resigns
| https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
|
| You can't make this stuff up :) Maybe _he_ didn 't embrace AI
| hard enough, and that's why he is exiting the industry?
| OldGreenYodaGPT wrote:
| two years ago, I opened a PR asking for an LLM commit feature,
| and they flat-out said they weren't doing it. Meanwhile, Cursor
| was eating their lunch and lapping them twice. I couldn't believe
| how complacent and out-of-touch they were--it was pure laziness
| dressed up as "product focus." And let's not forget the ancient
| bugs rotting in their backlog that they refuse to fix. It's like
| they actively don't care about their users.
| rickette wrote:
| Lots of comments here remind me of the time GitHub was purchased
| by Microsoft. It would be the dead of GitHub. While in fact it
| got better: GitHub Actions (pretty neat CI system) happend under
| Microsoft. Free private repos happend under Microsoft.
|
| Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that
| bad imho.
| benterix wrote:
| Gitlab had their CI/CD a few years earlier, Github had no other
| option. As to which one feels more productive, that's up to
| personal tastes, for me Gitlab's option seems far more
| polished.
| tikhonj wrote:
| The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay
| solvent, etc, etc.
| nicce wrote:
| Has there been any reports whether GitHub actually makes any
| money?
| mcrk wrote:
| I feel like it doesn't matter at this point as long as MS
| valuation goes up it's all worth the costs. We're living in
| the VC economy :D
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Github is the trainingmaterial for AI. It's a resource, not a
| product to make money with.
| nicce wrote:
| Is there evidence that GitHub has successfully prevented
| other AI companies from cloning open-source projects?
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't disclose much but there were headlines in
| 2022 saying they were now at $1B annual recurring revenue.
|
| Now with copilot I'd be surprised if they weren't profitable
| zzo38computer wrote:
| It did not entirely get better; some things may have improved
| and some things may have been made worse.
|
| Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the
| files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to
| someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).
|
| I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,
|
| I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some
| functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory
| 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the
| API to get around both issues, for now.)
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Github Actions was announced in OCT 2018, the acquisition deal
| close was announced a few days later.
| maelito wrote:
| Migrated to Codeberg a few months ago. Everything's good.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] more discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929
| 827a wrote:
| My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets
| written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that
| these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-
| first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to
| their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that
| they're AI first and unable to be out-competed.
|
| It is deeply concerning because all things point to reality
| shaking out with irony. None of these big tech companies have
| leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a
| product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it.
| Apple has nothing, Microsoft wants to put spyware on every
| Windows computer and builds the worst coding agent on the market
| despite having privileged access to every line of source code
| ever written, Meta put a chatbot in Whatsapp then decided paying
| researchers ten mil would solve their problems, Google has world-
| class research teams that have produced unbelievable models,
| without any plan at all on how those make it into their products
| beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
|
| Their fear is going to lose them everything. Its a fascinating
| inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were
| unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Everyone learned that
| lesson and decided "we'll never be unwilling to innovate ever
| again"; but now their core product stable undergoes constant
| churn that is pissing off customers and driving competition to
| eat their lunch.
|
| There is long-term, durable beauty in investing majority effort
| into making Github the single best place to host and organize
| code. That need is never going away. There is also necessity in
| ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, no one doubts
| that, but its a matter of proportion and humility.
| Microsoft/Github will never build AI products that lead the
| market. Its not a technology problem; its an organizational and
| political one. But that's ok, because they could dominate the
| market with the world's best code hosting platform, an average AI
| strategy, and a library of integrations with the rest of the
| frontier world.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| > None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build
| anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its
| truly astounding how bad they are at it.
|
| Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed
| bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to
| transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what
| the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and
| workflows blah blah."
|
| Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state
| machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify
| the choices.
|
| Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but
| we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't
| even needed.
|
| I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I
| still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core
| business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be
| done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful
| until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
| coliveira wrote:
| It's very funny that for pretty much any use case of LLMs,
| they're either too expensive or too incapable or both! There
| may be a few uses that make sense, but it seems to be
| incredibly hard to find the balance.
| bbor wrote:
| It blows my mind how many computing professionals truly
| think this is the case. It doesn't take a tech blogger to
| draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5
| years and see where we're headed. The fact that grifters
| abound on the edges of the industry is a sign of the
| radical importance of this unexpected breakthrough, not an
| indication that it's _all_ a grift.
|
| To engage in some armchair psychology, I think this is in
| large part due to a natural human tendency for stability
| (which is all the stronger for those in relatively powerful
| positions like us SWEs). Knowing that believing A would
| imply that your mortgage is in jeopardy, your retirement
| plan up-ended, and your entire career completely obscured
| beyond a figurative singularity point makes believing ~A a
| very appealing option...
| gtirloni wrote:
| Where's your evidence though? Extraordinary claims
| require extraordinary evidence.
| moi2388 wrote:
| The difference is that I can't sell elasticsearch in my
| company, but I can sell an LLM.
|
| Yeah, don't ask..
| 827a wrote:
| I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable)
| AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be
| built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry
| has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable"
| capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering,
| better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first
| thinking, etc.
|
| My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the
| surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while
| yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be
| disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".
|
| It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much
| so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units
| in these companies will look in five more years.
| pornel wrote:
| There's a lot of "promising" and "interesting" stuff, but
| I'm not seeing anything yet that actually works reliably.
|
| Sooner or later (mostly sooner) it becomes apparent that
| it's all just a chatbot hastily slapped on top of an
| existing API, and the integration barely works.
|
| A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole
| web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab
| characters in a row completely breaks it.
| somenameforme wrote:
| What you're describing would seem to be a borderline
| miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech
| companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and
| in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which
| they never return
|
| But in modern times the particularly level level of big,
| scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a
| government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number
| go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation
| where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they
| probably otherwise would.
|
| If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move
| the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have
| been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
| 827a wrote:
| I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a
| significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a
| monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because
| they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources.
| Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of
| entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely
| resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is
| just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money.
|
| I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These
| companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by
| business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still
| exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful
| of units that still generate profit.
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, I find it greatly satisfying that these mega companies are
| turning away their most important asset: super qualified people
| capable of creating new products. They're basically betting on
| their own extinction.
| mzajc wrote:
| intel.com's <title> says "Simplify Your AI Journey - Intel".
| Their description meta tag says "Deliver AI at scale across
| cloud, data center, edge, and client with comprehensive
| hardware and software solutions." Their frontpage mentions "AI"
| 9 times, but has only 3 mentions of "processor" and zero of
| "CPU".
|
| I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem
| that way.
| siva7 wrote:
| They realized they can't compete on processors, so they're
| moving on to greener pastures. Like kodak back then.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Intel has traditionally been behind in software quality and
| discrete GPUs, I wonder if they are making this move out of
| desperation because nobody thinks "yay, Intel!" when both
| topics are mentioned.
| theptip wrote:
| > Google has world-class research teams that have produced
| unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make
| it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google
| Drive.
|
| NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.
|
| YouTube gaining an "ask a question about this video" button,
| this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing
| product.
|
| Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini
| to Docs is another example.
|
| I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but
| they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a
| BigTech org can manage it eventually.
|
| Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in
| particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique
| offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious
| strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
| alecco wrote:
| The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only
| good things it has are the huge context and the low API
| price. But I had to stop using it because it kept
| contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My
| paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I
| tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work
| with prompt engineering, no luck).
|
| Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping
| like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting
| with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams
| to India.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-
| core...
| mindwok wrote:
| It was the best model according to almost every benchmark
| until recently. It's definitely SOTA.
| qnleigh wrote:
| > when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious
| strategic play that they are naturally positioned for
|
| What's that? It's not obvious to me, anyway.
| GLdRH wrote:
| Embrace the vibe, man
| newswasboring wrote:
| My guess would be local AI. Apple Silicon is uniquely
| suitable with its shared memory.
| theptip wrote:
| Yeah exactly. The MacBook Pro is by far the most capable
| consumer device for local LLM.
|
| A beefed up NPU could provide a big edge here.
|
| More speculatively, Apple is also one of the few
| companies positioned to market an ASIC for a specific
| transformer architecture which they could use for their
| Siri replacement.
|
| (Google has on-device inference too but their business
| model depends on them not being privacy-focused and their
| GTM with Android precludes the tight coordination between
| OS and hardware that would be required to push SOTA
| models into hardware. )
| mrbombastic wrote:
| They are well positioned but have a history of screwing
| up their AI plays, I hope they can get it right.
| mattnewton wrote:
| inference hardware, especially starting with on device ai
| for the mac. I think they should go as far as making a
| server chip, but that's less obvious today.
| 827a wrote:
| Yeah to be clear, I think Google is the strongest in AI
| product development of the FAANG companies. I included them
| in the list because the most _complaints_ I see about AI
| product integration among FANNG comes from Google products;
| the incessant bundling of Gemini chatboxes in every Workspace
| product.
| lowsong wrote:
| > YouTube gaining an "ask a question about this video"
| button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an
| existing product.
|
| > Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of
| Gemini to Docs is another example.
|
| These are great examples of insulting and invasive
| introductions of LLMs into already functional workflows.
| These are anti-features.
| theptip wrote:
| I guess I'm using the product wrong if I find them useful?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > YouTube gaining an "ask a question about this video"
| button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an
| existing product.
|
| I remember when I was trying to find a YouTube video, I
| remembered the contents but not the name. I tried google
| search and existing LLMs including Gemini, and none could
| find it.
|
| It would also be useful for security: give the AI a recording
| and ask when the suspicious person shows up, the item is
| stolen, the event happens, etc. But unfortunately also useful
| for tyranny...
| krior wrote:
| The biggest counterexample would be that dead-ai-
| autotranslate-voice sucking every gram of joy out of watching
| your favourite creators, with no ability to turn it off.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I mean Microsoft hosts key AI models in their AI Foundry, I
| don't think they're hurting.
|
| https://ai.azure.com/catalog
| zemo wrote:
| > Apple has nothing
|
| I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I
| think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers
| probably consider that the level of AI they care about using.
| "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich"
| question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.
|
| It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost
| enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using.
| Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces
| with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a
| nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of
| money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that
| Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent.
| It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest.
|
| I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action.
| Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks
| where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my
| phones LCD screen.
|
| The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get
| prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a
| distraction.
|
| I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate
| between:
|
| - an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a
| contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to
| offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where
| you don't need vast datastores of training.
|
| - and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing
| in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany?
| What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are
| less confidential and don't require handing control of your
| phone to a 3rd party.
|
| And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their
| local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was
| identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it
| should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time
| after I've opted in.
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're in a country that has already received
| some upgrade, but over here in Europe Siri is seen as a funny
| tamagochi that sometimes misunderstands and thinks its needed
| and is then quickly told to shut up.
|
| I think the last time I talked to anyone about siri we were
| wondering why it was still so bad, now that we have LLMs.
| siva7 wrote:
| I've never seen people in europe regularly using siri
| except to bash how bad it is. I would be really interested
| taking a look at the secret usage stats of siri in europe
| compared to other regions.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build
| anything remotely interesting from a product perspective
|
| The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.
| 827a wrote:
| I explicitly said "big tech companies"; that's FAANG, which
| does not include OpenAI, Anthropic, Anysphere, or their kin.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| with a $500B valuation, I'd say that OpenAI is now
| "BigTech"
| 827a wrote:
| Not by any traditionally-recognized definition, but I'll
| certainly admit them into the club once they go public.
| wvenable wrote:
| > Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem,
| where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-
| competed.
|
| Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor
| is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003,
| Office.NET, etc.
|
| I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another
| hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely
| comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just
| imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the
| same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some
| kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build
| anything remotely interesting from a product perspective.
|
| Not true. Ironically, the first exception I can think of is
| Github Copilot.
|
| It _is_ true these companies haven't recouped anywhere near the
| $trillion they've invested in AI.
| 827a wrote:
| Only a sentence later do I explicitly reference Github
| Copilot; yet they belong on the list because despite having
| every advantage a company could have, the resources of a
| megacorporation, all the source code in the world, the semi-
| independence of a smaller team; they still managed to produce
| a mediocre and uninteresting product.
|
| But, again: I think _that_ state for Copilot is totally fine
| for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin,
| and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market
| to service.
| hbn wrote:
| Do I have any fellow Duolingo users here?
|
| I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you
| fluent, etc etc
|
| But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good
| starting point and something to keep you consistent every day.
| As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've
| found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish.
|
| That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled
| their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best
| and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple,
| it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with
| native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with
| mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll
| pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices
| consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces
| all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they
| actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it
| overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual
| subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling.
|
| It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I
| use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be
| fired.
| camel_Snake wrote:
| going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out
| about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the
| gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.
|
| Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they
| use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI
| grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any
| idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language
| compared to your native one.
|
| Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just
| get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until
| christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime
| license.
| Guthur wrote:
| Sorry, is anyone even remotely surprised? This has and will
| always be Microsoft's modus operandi.
|
| The bit most of us seem to completely misunderstand is that the
| name of the capitalist game is not competition it's monopoly
| rent. All major corporations time and again look to capture a
| monopoly, it's the winning play.
| iamdamian wrote:
| Forgejo is a really great self-hosted alternative to GitHub.
|
| If you've wondered about hosting your own version of GitHub but
| have worried it's too hard to set up, I'd encourage you to spend
| even a few minutes spinning an instance up with Docker Compose
| and poking around.
|
| https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/installation/docker/
| pm90 wrote:
| Unsurprising but its a terrible move.
|
| Github at its core is a software lifecycle management product. To
| keep it running requires skillsets that are much much different
| from that of Gen AI/ML/whatever. Its hard for me to see this as
| anything other than an intra corporate political play and not
| something thats in the best interests of the users or the
| community. I expect to see a lot of the "legacy Github" folks
| slowly leave and be replaced by MS/Azure folks (gross). In the
| short to medium term this is probably gonna affect the stability
| of the system (its already pretty bad with several outages every
| month, including silent outages).
| jennyholzer wrote:
| > Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra
| corporate political play and not something thats in the best
| interests of the users or the community.
|
| It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something
| other than an intra-corporate political play.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| lol GitHub was in no shape way or form "independent" prior to
| this.
|
| The lack of tech literacy among tech bloggers is incredibly
| disappointing. I wish I could say it was shocking, but that's not
| true.
| jeffwask wrote:
| So Github has entered Phase 3 of the Microsoft Acquisition
| lifecycle
| 6thbit wrote:
| > Correction, August 11th: GitHub was already part of CoreAI, but
| its leadership will no longer be under a single CEO.
|
| So there is no real org change, just the CEO left and they didn't
| immediately replace him with a new one.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| Let the skypification begin! I can't wait to see how they
| integrate internet explorer, or require a microsoft account.
| cft wrote:
| Maybe time to buy GTLB?
|
| https://robinhood.com/stocks/GTLB
| leoc wrote:
| I've seen enough: as the recognised authority and designated
| responsible person ;)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525256 I'm officially
| recognising this as the final end of 2010s Cool Microsoft.
|
| > 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context |
| favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler
|
| > Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play
| for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen
| on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and
| proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a
| new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about
| openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love
| Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but
| before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on
| the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor,
| and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love
| Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course
| used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally
| get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the
| questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually
| goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived
| through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts
| (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into
| irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad
| old ways).
|
| Historical debate may now begin.
| joduplessis wrote:
| I'm starting to really detest the AI-everywhere thing. You're
| starting to feel it absolutely everywhere - good products turning
| shit just to capitalize on the hype.
| Animats wrote:
| We'll know it's over when Github requires a Microsoft login.
| codingdave wrote:
| I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for
| independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent
| organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the
| remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent
| company.
|
| The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were
| different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down
| to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the
| customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the
| larger business goals of the parent organization.
|
| They all turned into political battles at the leadership level,
| low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the
| engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were
| told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years
| before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose
| whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who
| could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger.
|
| So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the
| hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we
| truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate
| to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd
| start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any
| Github features, and always have a migration plan at least
| conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we
| are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what
| Microsoft does in the next couple years.
| bsimpson wrote:
| From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's
| been working well-enough with the current feature set for over
| a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its
| stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights
| on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most
| people until something completely changes how software is made.
| qntmfred wrote:
| Dear GitHub wasn't all that long ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904671
| cnst wrote:
| The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume
| when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so,
| they're actually making GitHub worse now:
|
| _Why is GitHub UI getting slower?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 - Aug 2025 (113
| comments)
| karel-3d wrote:
| Yeah, this is sensible.
|
| I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE
| Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate
| merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has
| their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have
| seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
| drysart wrote:
| Azure DevOps is.... _okay_. It 's functional, and it's not
| really anything unique or innovative; but it never really
| strived to be anything like that. It started out as the
| online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and
| was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github,
| but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular
| strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired
| the actual Github.
|
| Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the
| acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new
| features since 2018.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which
| is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself
| is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF _Server_ ). It isn't
| really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is
| intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than
| GitHub.
| martin-t wrote:
| I've heard this story so many times.
|
| 1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven
| by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics,
| etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper,
| decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3)
| The company either a) drives away all the people who actually
| enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a
| large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.
|
| How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only
| just system of governance at the nation state level but are
| perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
|
| Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any
| time people get together to work towards a common goal.
| rjbwork wrote:
| >How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only
| just system of governance at the nation state level but are
| perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
|
| Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically
| glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we
| were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do
| not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told
| how to think and act.
| martin-t wrote:
| When I encounter this, it's usually a belief that a strong
| and implicitly good leader is needed so that he can somehow
| remove/punish all the bad people.
|
| What the people don't get is that:
|
| - Truly good people are incredibly rare. - Those who are
| prone to abusing power will only show their true colors
| when actually given power. - Power corrupts, everyone has
| head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in
| the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend
| to be good to get that power. - What about succession? Even
| if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he
| fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only
| good children, each generation the amount of his "good
| genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest).
|
| ---
|
| IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless
| in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and
| violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against)
| but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't
| conceive of a better solution than giving even more of
| their power away.
| p1mrx wrote:
| > Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now
| had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals
| of the parent organization.
|
| GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for
| years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0
| in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.
|
| [0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1]
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...
| pronik wrote:
| Moving stuff to AI teams reminds me of Google stuffing Google+ in
| everything back in the day. Didn't go well.
| sub7 wrote:
| Higher the mcap, higher the pressure for rev growth, higher the
| garbage pushed
|
| All your code are belong to MSCodeLLMTrainer.exe now
| sschueller wrote:
| Time to move to forgio[1]. Sadly I am stuck with gitlab for now
| until forgio ads projects/folders to the URI.
|
| [1] https://forgejo.org/
| apexalpha wrote:
| >Microsoft's CoreAI team is a new engineering group led by former
| Meta executive Jay Parikh. It includes Microsoft's platform and
| tools division and Dev Div teams, with a focus on building an AI
| platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.
|
| This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing
| everything _except_ the core of AI, which is LLMs.
| moderation wrote:
| Interested to see what East River Source Control [0] are going to
| build on jujutsu. Not affiliated in anyway but keen to see a
| GitHub competitor break out to scale, adoption.
|
| 0. https://ersc.io/
| crawsome wrote:
| Sucks they trained on our data and hard work when all we wanted
| was a place to put our code and have others look at it.
|
| Microsoft ruins everything they touch. They will find a way to
| ruin Github shortly.
|
| Anyone posting a step-by-step to do a full migration from Github
| to another provider would get a lot of traffic to their blog in
| short time.
| betteryourweb wrote:
| You really didn't see that coming at the moment they bought
| Github? That was their entire intent, to have full access to
| all of the greatest minds in software... Everyone should have
| bailed immediately after acquisition... If you don't control
| the servers that your code is on, it's no longer your code, at
| the very least, you're sharing with your hosting provider. But,
| everyone needs to hurry up and jump to market, instead of
| taking the time to build their own servers, custom development
| environment, etc. So, because everyone followed the herd, now
| everyone is lead slaughter... This was a collective choice made
| out of laziness, convenience, false sense of necessity, greed,
| etc... We have no to blame but ourselves, because it wouldn't
| have happen if we didn't choose it...
| golddust-gecko wrote:
| Perhaps it's nothing, but:
|
| > "GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as
| part of Microsoft's CoreAI organization, with more details shared
| soon," says Dohmke in a memo to GitHub employees today. "I'll be
| staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and
| am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we've built
| as a remote-first organization spread around the world."
|
| Is interesting to me. There is quite a number of rumors that MSFT
| will be Returning to Office next year. The prominence of 'remote
| first' in this quote may indicate that such concerns are playing
| a role here...
| zzo38computer wrote:
| If you want to make a better version control service, then you
| might consider:
|
| - Free public repositories and free API access.
|
| - Mutual TLS authentication. Use X.509 extensions for partial
| delegation of authorization, so that someone can issue a
| certificate to themself or others with a limited set of
| permissions.
|
| - Mirroring on multiple independent services.
|
| - Allow SHA-1 (for compatibility with a lot of existing
| repositories that use it, and anyone using software that does not
| support other hashing algorithms) but also allow other more
| secure hashing algorithms to be used in case you do not want to
| use SHA-1.
|
| - Make the HTML to work without CSS and JavaScripts (even if they
| can provide enhancements, do not make them required).
|
| - Support some parts of the GitHub API, in order that existing
| software which uses GitHub API will be able to work with it.
|
| - If you are making a new API as well, then it might use DER,
| that can use binary data, non-Unicode text data, etc better.
|
| - Do not require TLS for read-only access to public data (but
| still allow using TLS even in this case).
| Havoc wrote:
| Was it ever "independent"? The github monoculture seemed alarming
| from the get go
| pat_space wrote:
| Wild. He was just on the decoder podcast last week.
| https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/72...
| xyst wrote:
| Maintaining "independence" after selling the company to MSFT has
| always been a facade. Even from the perspective of the users,
| there was this palpable difference between before and after MSFT
| acquisition
| net01 wrote:
| I am part of a rocketry group I wonder if training on sensitive
| data such as ITAR restricted code would make this an issue? any
| ideas?
| betteryourweb wrote:
| Well, that's my stage left... I had already brought my github
| usage to bare minimum... For any of my clients through my
| business, I'm suggesting they host their own gtt repo's and only
| using Github and Gitlab for the visibility, not as an actual
| service to house their shit
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Just more proof that the merger/acquisition should never have
| been allowed in the first place.
| IceHegel wrote:
| Microsoft's software quality is poor. Azure is extremely bloated
| and difficult to use, and I suspect only gained market traction
| due to bundling/anti-competitive tactics. Microsoft inserts
| tabloids news into its operating system.
|
| GitHub is their most trusted "tech" brand by far, and it has
| their only successful AI product, Co-Pilot.
|
| It's almost inevitable that GitHub and all its products will be
| consumed with Microsoft bloat in the next 5 years as more and
| more products coast off the GitHub brand.
|
| Expect tabloid news in GitHub products soon.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| IMO this was predictable and I recall walking a few people in the
| industry through the argument and suggesting they maintain a path
| to migrate off GitHub for when it finally gets re-orged.
|
| Whenever someone makes a promise that a subsidiary or product
| will remain unchanged (typically because that's how
| customers/users prefer it), it's useful to ask whether that
| promise has any legal force that will prevent the company from
| reneging on the promise if organizational or market circumstances
| change.
|
| There is almost never a barrier to having the organization change
| their mind, which means that the promise is at best a soft
| promise that in the near term they don't intend to change too
| much too quickly.
| smsm42 wrote:
| I wonder how long before Microsoft starts pushing people using
| Github into MS ecosystem - MS logins, showing MS AI down user's
| throats, pushing actions towards "works on Azure, don't care
| about the rest", etc. ?
| yencabulator wrote:
| Github logins _are_ MS logins already, and being pushed to use
| all over the place.
|
| Github documentation is already pushing primarily Azure, for
| example https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-
| tos/deploy/deploy-to-... has 8 Azure links up front, then 1
| link for AWS, 1 for Google, and 1 about Apple.
|
| And don't forget that NPM is Microsoft property too,
| https://docs.github.com/en/actions/tutorials/publish-package...
| has no equivalent document for e.g. JSR.
| Razengan wrote:
| Ah so do we enter the Extinguish phase now?
| jrepinc wrote:
| Give Up GitHub https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
| j45 wrote:
| Uh oh
|
| Does this mean source code might get synthesized and anonymized
| so Ai coding agents can train on it?
| bitbasher wrote:
| GitHub has been a growing disappointment for quite a while.
|
| 1. GitHub itself isn't opensource despite being the opensource
| forge.
|
| 2. Microsoft (of all companies) acquired it.
|
| 3. Microsoft pushes VSCode and kills GitHub's Atom.
|
| 4. GitHub employees are quite political (master branch rename,
| ICE protest resignations, etc).
|
| 5. GitHub striking down repositories and user accounts (the
| Russian developer, yt-dlp, etc).
|
| 6. LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or
| opting in.
|
| 7. GitHub forcing AI agents in pull requests and in various pages
| on GitHub.
|
| 8. GitHub's CEO resigning and now in more of Microsoft's AI
| control.
|
| I left back when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. I wondered if
| it was a mistake for me to leave, but.. I haven't regretted it
| yet.
| fuzztester wrote:
| From:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
|
| >GitHub has _operated_ as a _separate company_ ever since
| _Microsoft acquired it._
|
| Yeah, right.
|
| And Santa Claus exists, Virginia.
|
| Oxymoron of the decade ...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=oxymoron+meaning
| egberts1 wrote:
| Embrace, (check) Engulf, (check)
|
| ... Extinguish?
| kittikitti wrote:
| GitHub was getting more and more corrupt as Microsoft matured it.
| The worst were the fake stars and engagement from bots. Then Big
| Tech gatekeepers fast tracked your job application if they saw
| you had hundreds of stars (they didn't care if it was fake).
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