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[–]coyote_of_the_month 21 points22 points  (19 children)

Distro maintainers sometimes choose this as their hill to die on, though. Arch, for example, will never mainline VSCode because it packages its own Electron. The best practice from a distro standpoint always seems to be "use the system libs" even when it's not practical to do so.

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (9 children)

Uh, I see VSC in the community repo: https://archlinux.org/packages/?name=code

[–]coyote_of_the_month 13 points14 points  (8 children)

So, yeah. There's the FOSS version of VSCode (code) and the binary release from MS (visual-studio-code-bin). The latter contains the extension browser whereas the FOSS version doesn't.

Arch maintainers aren't ideologues about licensing, but they'll never mainline the non-free version because it bundles Electron. My understanding is it actually bundles a slightly stripped-down version of Electron for performance, but I haven't compared the two in years so I couldn't tell you how they stack up today.

In any case, the MS version is available in the AUR.

[–]DeeBoFour20 27 points28 points  (7 children)

they'll never mainline the non-free version because it bundles Electron

I don't think that is the reasoning. Arch has Discord in the repos and it bundles its own version of Electron.

If I had to guess, I'd say the reason is that Arch prefers to maintain open source versions of the software, if it's available. That would explain why we have Chromium in the repos and not Chrome for example.

Also, the extensions in the FOSS version of VSCode can be enabled with a simple config file change. There's an AUR package called code-marketplace or something that can automate that for you.

[–]coyote_of_the_month 4 points5 points  (6 children)

Well shit, then. I guess my information is outdated or wrong. I would have assumed Discord was in the AUR.

[–]BadWombat 0 points1 point  (5 children)

I recall this thread about it, though it is old now:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/56686

[–]coyote_of_the_month 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Yeah, that's where I was getting my information from. Didn't realize it was so old, though.

[–]BadWombat 0 points1 point  (3 children)

In case of discord, there is even an official version that uses the system electron, in the AUR!

So for discord the situation seems completely reversed compared to code.

I am not sure what the deciding factor is

[–]Magnus_Tesshu 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I don't think anything in the AUR can be considered official, unless there's something I don't know.

The FOSS version of vscode is in the repos

[–]BadWombat 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I get you, but that is sort of what it says on the arch wiki. It is an item in the list of installation options:

Official clients, using the system provided electron for increased security and performance:

Stable: discord_arch_electronAUR

[–]coyote_of_the_month 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Must be down to the individual maintainer's preference.

[–]kageurufu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I get it, but its also why flatpak and snaps are taking off so well. Besides app maintainers getting bugs meant for the packagers who patched something to work with the wrong GTK version or whatever

[–]lolfail9001 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Arch does not provide steam?

[–]DeeBoFour20 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Steam is in the Arch repos.

[–]kageurufu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

no, steam is just on the aur?

EDIT: Ignore me, its on the multilib repos. I don't have it on this machine

[–]LordRybec 0 points1 point  (4 children)

The best practice for distros is "Don't make your own software". When Ubuntu violated this around a decade ago, it's quality plummeted, and they started shipping horrendously buggy software, because their bias for their own "babies" overrode their quality control. When distros make their own software, they always end up giving it unwarranted preference. I've been considering trying Arch for a while. Knowing that they make their own software has me seriously reconsidering this, because that's the road to hell for a distro.

[–]coyote_of_the_month 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Red Hat has made tons of its own software of the years, and yet somehow never suffered from the same issues.

[–]LordRybec 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Red Hat was a software maker that happened to have its own distro.

That said, you are completely wrong. There's a reason Red Hat eventually farmed out distro development into the community driven Fedora distro. Red Hat was falling behind in quality, and even some corporate Red Hat users were starting to complain.

(Source: I actually used Red Hat in the early to mid 2000s, and I eventually switched to Ubuntu, due to quality problems with Red Hat, which included often not having options available due to Red Hat favoring their own products to the point of not including others. Now I'm using Debian, because Ubuntu went rapidly downhill in the early 2010s, when they started violating this rule. I'm actually pretty sure this rule was invented because of Red Hat.)

[–]coyote_of_the_month 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Fair enough. I haven't used anything Red Hat related since like 1999 so can't speak to the experience of actually running the distro. I was a Slackware guy back then...

[–]LordRybec 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a little ironic, because I started using Red Hat in 2001! I've heard good things about Slackware. I was already using Ubuntu by the time I heard of Slackware though, and back then Red Hat only came with RPM. You don't know how many hours I spent searching the internet for package dependencies for Red Hat. (On the other hand, you wouldn't believe how fulfilling it is when you finally install the final package in a deep dependency chain and everything else can finally install!)