OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

I noticed this the other day when I installed VSCodium on my new Windows box. I had a functional setup for one day, then the next day I couldn't install a language extension I direly needed.

It's left a very sour taste in my mouth. I've used Emacs for ages and despite being a much more niche editor, it's never been so hard-dependent on centralized repositories, and the centralized repositories it does have (ELPA/MELPA) are apparently a lot more reliable than OpenVSX. Installing Emacs packages manually from source is a breeze, doing so with VSC is masochistic.

VSC is not really "open source" in any meaningful sense. It is just plainly unusable if you don't do things the way Microsoft wants you to. I do respect the VSCodium devs for trying to make VSC more properly open, but it does feel like a futile effort.

Open Source projects used to all be hosted on hundreds of random mirrors. The hosting of which was free and donated, because it was just an HTTP/FTP/RSYNC directory on a file server in a closet in some corporation or university. Didn't even need to be reliable, as there were hundreds of mirrors. Linux distributions, and some very old projects, are still maintained this way.

Nowadays you must have a flashy website. You must host everything on a single managed VCS provider, or a programming package ecosystem hoster. You must depend on corporations to give you free things, in exchange for you giving them everything about you (otherwise you must pay out of pocket for everything). You must do what everyone else does.

Maybe it's impossible to go back to a simpler time. But it's not impossible to change the state of things today.

I'm sure some (many?) will disagree with me but:

VSCode is Android. Or rather, VSCode's source is AOSP and the marketplace, plugins, etc are Google Play Services.

I say that with maximum derision.

There is not much to see on a server that is down, so let me share some free advice instead.

Visit Eclipse Theia in the mean time when you are serious about de-risking from VSCode. I think VSCodium is doing an uphill battle here, while Microsoft can't help them self being a sales company first. In Theia, everything is open and free of spyware. MS is under no obligation to provide an OSS editor, but playing tricks after luring people in is not nice.

EDIT:

1. Eclipse Theia is a different platform than Eclipse the Java IDE.

2. link: https://theia-ide.org/#theiaidedownload

Remember vs code is designed to fracture and the forks are an integral part of that. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

This right on the heels of the GitLab 17.11 release announcement [0] which mentioned that they added OpenVSX support to their Web IDE. One of the biggest blockers for my team to use the Web IDE/GitLab's equivalent of "Codespaces" was the lack of extensions support.

As developers, we're spoiled for widespread (e.g.) vim keybindings support in just about any IDE via extensions. When unable to use it in something like Web IDE, it is very frustrating and makes it less useful as a product.

[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2025/04/17/gitlab-17-11-re...

Lots of vim/emacs mentions so I feel obliged to mention Helix (https://helix-editor.com/). Used neovim for _years_, tried Helix for a few weeks and never looked back

Now it's as good a time as ever to try out Lazy Vim. Came to it from Lunar Vim and it just works.

Working with anything is a breeze.

I'm just not too familiar with refactoring tooling and how to configure it, but there's rarely any reason for me to use something more complicated than sed, and in those occasions I can just use ast-grep.

https://github.com/lapce/lapce is an interesting contender in this space

I happened to be poking around in their issues to see if there were mirrors and observed that in addition to the linked status page on this thread, the underlying Eclipse Foundation has their own (multiple) status tracking channels

most relevant: https://www.eclipsestatus.io/incident/549796?mp=true

their helpdesk ticket: https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/helpdesk/-/issues/5924...

the issue in their GitHub issue tracking for the site: https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/issues/3805

the tl;dr seems to be a massive storage failure affecting a bunch of Eclipse services, and just like any storage problem putting all the bytes back is some "please wait"

What are good, open source, alternatives to VS Code? That are modern IDEs with decent support for frontend, backend, data science, and embedded (possibly via extensions)? That mostly work out of the box, without having to set up and configure NN things.

Surely you can download the extension from a mirror and install it manually(ie the "old fashioned way")?

Yeah, the problem with centralized hosting is that the host can go down. Something like IPFS/IPNS could act as a decentralized backup plan.

This is why I've been learning neovim for the past couple weeks - the vscode reliance on Remote SSH extension felt like lock in

Worth noting that you can configure VSCodium to use Microsoft's extension repo, and you can even trick extensions into thinking VSCodium is VSCode. It just can't be distributed that way out of the box for legal reasons.

Basically we've seen this movie before -look at the trajectory OSX took. As far as I know, it's not really possible to build a useable pure darwin installable OS. Puredarwin itself is stuck in whatever was released in 2018 or earlier.

Like Darwin, there may be an 'open' skeleton that vscode hangs upon, but all of the things that make it useful and attractive are being increasingly pulled behind paywalls.

I'm pretty sure most of us saw this coming a mile away. I've played a little with VS Code here and there but never put a lot of time into it because I'd rather invest my time in things I know will be here in 2035 -like vim/neovim.

I'm partial to running Code - OSS and patching it with the aur/code-features and aur/code-marketplace.

Use Torrent, not HTTP.

Looking forward to the post-mortem of this outage.

#hugops