This is the kind of thing which makes me roll my eyes when people try to argue that the "New Microsoft(tm)" is actually benevolent and developer friendly, and I should be happy about things like them acquiring Github.
I just installed Windows again for the first time in 20 years (certain games still won’t run on anything else) and after all the talk of how much things have improved, I was shocked at just had bad it is.
It’s almost dystopian how tracked and marketed I feel. I think I finally have all the switches flipped that I need to stop things popping up in my face, but goodness.
I'm right there with you. I work on macOS and I'm 90% Linux at home, and the odd time I have to boot into Windows for something I'm amazed people put up with it.
I will never call a corporation benevolent, but they certainly are developer friendly right now. Opening the source of many of their frameworks and tools have aided us in debugging many times. It's also possible to get in contact with their developers directly through github.
I don't really feel one way or another regarding their Github purchase. If not Microsoft, then someone else. Right now Microsoft seems like a less bad owner, but time will tell.
I just think there can be a lot of perverse interests at play when a major software vendor also owns the place where all the code lives.
For instance, VSCodium is not available as a native download for M1 processors because GitHub Actions don’t support M1 yet.
Would Microsoft potentially delay supporting CI/CD for M1 because it’s not in their strategic best interest to support Mac as a development platform? It’s not out of the question to imagine this kind of thing could enter their prioritization process
To be fair, unless Apple collaborated with Microsoft before the launch, it's not trivial to add that as a target to the pipeline in a production ready environment. I'm not even sure Apple allows any virtualized instance which poses a major impediment to implementing this. One can always use a self hosted runner to make it work.
I'm not saying this is what happened, I'm just saying this is the type of situation where an MS-owned github could have interests un-aligned with developers, where it might not be the case with an independent github
