GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

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.

Having gotten tired of subjecting windows users to a phishing campaign to trick them to use edge under the auspices of it being chrome, they're now moving on to obsoleting all windows machines without a TPM so they can cryptographically secure their right to use their users' need to authenticate as an opportunity to sell data about that user to the third party.

They have no respect for the agency of their users. We're no different than cattle to them, an asset to be squeezed until no more money comes out of it.

and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.

That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers.

They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.

Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Microsoft itself doesn't seem to know how to do native code anymore, as they invented Win32 and Windows.

> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.

That's not a cool guy thing

No, IE has not been dead and buried for ages. Not everyone's a US corporation.

A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.

And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP" : "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."

https://indiandefencereview.com/these-people-never-moved-on-...

> IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.

Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.

Businesses don't and shouldn't operate as charities, but Microsoft is the only big tech company that manages to be a negative in every way. The only thing they've ever innovated on is lock-in. Now exploring the frontier of how bad Windows can be without people leaving.

The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.

> 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/extens...

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

You are defending Microsoft.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...

Skepticism that is informed by history isn’t being hateful

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..)

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.

Nadella has worked in senior leadership positions at MS for 33 years. His era began in 1992 not when he became CEO.

> but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era

Why does this matter? How does that invalidate anything? Are global companies only accountable for their actions so long as they maintain the same CEO?

>but don't be hateful!

Won't someone please think of the poor global technology conglomerate!

> - Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.

Which feels sluggish compared to how it used to be. They keep tacking on too much cruft to it. I used to call it a lightweight IDE, but now its just a bloated editor.

Sorry, but even with typescript, the frontend web community a shit-storm.

Anything Microsoft + web is a nightmare. Their login system is a redirect and re-auth hell and I loath anytime I need to log into anything Microsoft related.

I'll disagree loudly with my IBM keyboards (my old model M as well as the thinkpads I've used).

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.

they were better than the $20 crap you could buy in staples

but definitely not the best ones around

> This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now

Well, yes, that's called generational change. A lot of people have never experienced the bad old Microsoft, only the pretty cool guy Microsoft.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> > 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.

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.

> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality

It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.

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"

Apple does plenty of harm every day when they force Safari as the only web browser engine allowed on iOS.

I dunno, I haven’t been to Europe. What do they favor, Linux? Sounds like paradise.

The joke was supposed to be that the “coolness peak” was incredibly lame. Haha.

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.

Yeah, I laughed audibly when I read that sentence...

I would not be surprised if Steam came to Xbox

which begs the question is it just good old EEE?

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

I love Codeberg, but they're struggling with growth/scaling -- if folks want to see Codeberg succeed, they need to open their wallets.

Big limitation on private repos there.

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.

And gitea (originally a Forgejo fork).

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.

Re: GUI library situation, are you implying that they finally came up with something that's cross platform? What is it?

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.

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.

It was the best model according to almost every benchmark until recently. It’s definitely SOTA.

There are problems with every model, none of them are perfect. I've found Gemini to be very good but occasionally gets stuck in loops: it does, however, seem to detect the loop and stop. It's more cost effective than the Claude models, and Gemini has regular preview releases. I would rate it between sonnet and opus except it's cheaper and faster than both.

For whatever reason there are tasks that work better on one model compared to another, which can be quite perplexing.

No amount of big context window can stop the model from context poisoning. So in a sense, it's a gimmick when you start having the feel of how bad the output is.

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.

My guess would be local AI. Apple Silicon is uniquely suitable with its shared memory.

Embrace the vibe, man

> I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle.

Depends if you agree with somenameforme's theory that tech companies start off amazing, get big, then become awful.

You may have noticed, in recent decades, we haven't bothered with enforcing anti-trust law. If Facebook wants to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, they can. If Microsoft wants to buy Github and Activision they can. If Google wants to buy Youtube, Doubleclick and Nest they can.

If we accept the premise that FAANG is where innovation goes to die, going 25 years without any antitrust enforcement might not have been the smartest move.

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.

> The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.

My hunch tells me this is a temporary stopgap until Apple figures out their "private cloud compute" or whatever where they can run their own model, after that it'll be seamless. Try to do as much on device as possible, and if that fails/is not possible, offload to the model running on Apple's servers rather than a 3rd party service.

Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind), but I appreciate their approach to try and do as much on device as possible. They are the only ones around that aren't just defaulting to "harvest as much data as possible and ship it to our servers."

I can be patient - Siri works fine for what I want it for anyway - it can set reminders, timers, alarms, dictate messages, and create notes. That's about all I use it for and would use it for. Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.

[dead]

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.

At this point you are fighting, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft." There are viable alternatives on the market, but GitHub is the known quantity for which conversations are required to use something different.

I remember that every action you could do there needed somehow be approved in Azure Active Directory

It's actually not rhetorical - I really wanna know what leads to this to-me-obvious contradiction.

One answer is obvious - every organization's primary goal is its own survival. So a democratic state will indoctrinate ("educate") children into believing democracy is the right way. But no school teaches about corporate power structures and cooperatives are so rare that they have little influence on the curriculum.

What I absolutely hated was for example when Microsoft opened an extra curricular program for students to teach them some tech skills and some soft skills and (in exchange?) they were allowed to hang posters promoting their products at school. Linux does not have the money or organizational capacity to do this kind of thing so the entrenched players have a massive advantage.

> The VC era

As a gamedev, this reminds me of how the metagame shifts as the collective playerbase learns the rules of a game - what works and what doesn't. Step 1) IRL you need to build something valuable and you get paid according to how much value you produced. 2) Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work. 3) And now people realized when you have enough money you can just buy those power structures from step 2 wholesale. Oh and you can buy up housing and take a third of someone's salary too.

A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce. This would completely invert those power structures. Need marketing? You as a positive-sum worker hire those zero-sum workers.

But we're heading in the opposite direction instead. All intellectual work has now been stolen and it being resold to people who produced it in the first place.

And then you straight up have people who wanna replace even physical workers with robots. And they sell it to people by claiming they will no longer need to work, which sounds great. Until you realize that up until that point the rich zero-summers at least still needed positive-sum workers. Even governments needed humans to oppress other humans...

> tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs

Yep. "We" (technically long before I entered the workforce) had all the power and slowly gave it away because we were interested in the cool tech we were making and not the power struggle that the people who only extract value from us are so good at.

> building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value

I'd like to see a graph of the percentage of people whose work is positive-, zero- and negative-sum over time. Because I suspect the latter two are growing rapidly.

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.

Contrary to HN folks, I habe no issues with Oracle, it is my favourite database engine.

Also it was the only company that cared to buy Sun.

People love to hate it, everyone praises Sun, yet in the end no one felt it was worth rescuing, not even Google, that could have taken advantage to finally control Java.

I guess most would rather have seen Java die in version 6, and Maxime VM ideas never becoming mainstream, or the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging for taming C never coming out.

And since I am not a fan boy I am also quite aware that what doesn't produce profit, is immediately killed by Oracle, and they are quite found of enforcing their licenses, hence why people have to actually read those licenses.

Man this reminds me of the early days of Edge where MS actually made a good browser for a few months and then stuffed it full of bloatware, ads, a crypto wallet (!) and now AI (not even GOOD AI features).

Do you really miss stuff in VS Code's core editor? I mean, coming to think about it, VS Code feels "feature complete", I haven't found in other editors features that I thought "wish I had this in VS Code". Not to justify the whole changelog being about Copilot (isn't it supposed to be a separate extension anyway?), but I guess it's either that or going for a while without updates, or really small changes you'd probably not notice

There is still Emacs, Sublime Text, Brief (oldie but still around), Notepad++,...

The problem are the extensions, I bash Electron all the time, yet I use VSCode almost daily because of certain extensions.

Just switched to Zed because every vscode release breaks more than fixes.

When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions.

I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.

Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.

Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem

Zed also turned into ai slob already

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...

It means that Microsoft used to be a software company and it is now supposed to become a software factory company, meaning that it produces factories (=agents) that produce software. That seems like a good goal to have for them.

No. Jay is an idiot.

Someone who expect to make a lot of money selling said Agents.

It sounds like the kind of plan which would come from the Xbox division.

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.

Auditors?

Oh sure for an organization with lots of ci/cd its a big deal. But for individuals who mostly just use github as a code repository for personal projects and dont have a ton of deployments, its real easy

How do you mean? I dont hold it against a company just for having an AI offering. The thing with github/Microsoft is theyre really forcing it down your throat. Github copilot is now a default UI element in Visual Studio and every time I open it up they say "use github copilot, its free!". Every update to visual studio is all about their AI crap now and legit IDE features are always listed at the end

Plus github has also been trying to be a social media sites for a while, too, which I never really apprecisted. The only reason I ever used github in the first place, as a personal user, was because its what everyone else uses on their resume. But I no longer put personal projects on my resume so I dont see the point in using github anymore. We use gitlab at work and it works great.

Though the other providers look good, too. Im not trying to denigrate them. Codeberg, however, looks like it requires a subscription fee, and im just not using enough features of my git provider to justify paying for it

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For Git? Maybe not. For GitHub? IPv6 support would sure be nice: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539

How does it compare to huggingface's Xet?

> You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free.

Interested! Some detail on how you achieve this for free would be great.

> Gitea support actions like GitHub's

Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"

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.

Thank you for the recommendation.

Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.

OIDC = OpenID Connect, an open authentication protocol

Sorry but the GitLab UI was bad, is bad, the whole software feels clunky and slow to use and everything is nested where in comparison Gitea is simple, intuitive and straightforward, just like the old Github days. I also don't know if it's a good sign that there are a lot of UX issues?

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

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".

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.

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