It's a pig of an app especially on Mac (haven't tried Linux enough to verify) but it runs.

On my Mac it takes a minute to start (fast M1 system), randomly crashes or hangs and often uses more than half my memory. But it is supported :)

I feel a lot of responses here are missing the point. Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to. Linux is a bad tool for my required workflow (a workflow that isn't all that uncommon), so I keep Windows around because it's a more suitable tool for that.

I'll repeat what I said: Linux is a great tool when you're a junior individual contributor, but it sucks when you're responsible for external communications with MS Office organizations.

> Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to.

Is an entirely deliberate outcome that Microsoft has pushed hard for over decades (as you'd expect, since losing that monopoly is an existential threat to them).

I have no idea why you would say this. VS Code is an incredibly popular and well-liked product.

For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.

For example, instead of making improvements to the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE), Microsoft marked it as deprecated and "forced" everyone over to Visual Studio Code, whether they like it or not. E.g.: it's the only Microsoft IDE with PowerShell Core (pwsh) support.

Despite being the only supported Microsoft PowerShell IDE, VS Code does not play nice with PowerShell. For example, if I open Code, it opens three(3!) PowerShell terminals for unfathomable reasons. One of those starts with errors, the other works, but the third one is the default and crashes if you look at it sideways. Tab-complete just... stops. Even when tab-complete "works", it'll often start mid way through the list, hiding all of the relevant items and showing your random garbage like "quick start snippets" that make zero sense in the given tab-complete context.

I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.

Then there's always the smart-ass that explains patiently that this is all my fault for not "customising" my VS Code experience with JSON configuration settings that are seven levels deep and documented only in some blog article from three years ago. Meanwhile, I've never had to customise anything in Visual Studio. It "just works" the way you'd expect a Windows application to work. Not some Linux-Windows hybrid intended to be the "embrace" part of the unholy "embrace-extend-extinguish" trio.

I guess though if you're coming from raw notepad then that is a step up.

And with anything "browser based" like VS Code you're going to always spawn a ton of processes to do even the simplest things.

Sure, if your entire usage is the stuff that VS does well (which is a very narrow range compared to Code), and you are used to VS, it's probably an annoyance.

> I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.

Almost none of the things I do with Code I would have done with Notepad before. There are lots of non-IDE programmers editors that existed before Code. It may not be as good as VS or some IntelliJ variants for the use cases those IDEs are best for, but it's better for almost everything else than almost anything, and even for the things those major commercial IDEs specialize in, it's good enough for lots of specific use cases that when you need to do that plus other things, the context switch of using the commercial IDE for some tasks isn't worth it.

I've spent most of my career in Visual Studio, I have a great deal of respect for how it just works, nobody's forcing me to leave it and yet... I'm mostly done with it. I'd rather use VS Code for C# development these days; it nails a lot of speed+UX things that Visual Studio doesn't.

Similar "well liked" very often really means "the only product I've used" or "the only product I know well" :(

Win32?

Now I admit it is a bit more complex than calling C functions, but only if one insists in calling COM from C.

Win32 was the one and only GUI framework. If you wrote your app for Windows, it would look like Windows. This was true for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and XP.

Then Office got the Ribbon UI but they decided not to let anyone else use it. Then Vista got the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was a lot like HTML, but used XML and had a more powerful styling+templating system. At one point they even tried to make JavaScript Windows applications a thing over a decade before it unfortunately did become a thing (Electron).

The problem is that WPF, like HTML, allowed nearly "anything". You could style any control any way that you wanted. So WPF apps looked somewhat... random.

Worse, it turned out that WPF was just too slow for applications, to the point that Microsoft themselves almost never used it. Instead, they used incompatible bits and pieces of it with C++ so that they could have something reasonably fast. But this wasn't WPF, and didn't look the same as user apps, and wasn't even internally consistent!

Now there are something like 10+ UI frameworks from Microsoft alone, not including third-party ones that can run on Windows.

This is why the Windows 11 interface is such a mess.

Hot reloading with C++ outside Visual Studio? Good luck with that if not willing to shell out some bucks for Live++.

Other frameworks are still relearning the ways of WPF and Blend tooling.

Many things make me angry how Microsoft management is dealing with them, yet the alternatives are even worse.

Only the Java ecosystem is a sound alternative to MS tooling, regardless of their current misdirection.