Zed is very interesting. I know it.

Very recently, I found a fork of Zed that gutted the AI Assistant integration and Telemetry. I forked that, myself, and took it further: gutting automatic updates, paid feature-gating, downloading of executable binaries and runtimes like Node.js (for extensions that don’t compile to WASI), integration with their online services, voice-calling, screen sharing, etc.

My branch ended up down 140 000 lines^[1] of code and up less than 300! It was educational and the outcome was absolutely brilliant, to be fair. In all honesty, forking it and engaging in this experiment took less than 24 hours even though I restarted three times, with different levels of “stringency” in my quest.

This experiment was very realisable. Forking Zed and hacking on it was quite possible – the same cannot be said for just “forking Electron” or “forking VS Code” or even getting up to speed on those projects to the point of being able to fix the underlying issues (like this OP) and submit merge-requests to those projects. They have a degree of inscrutability that I absolutely could overcome but would not, unless I was paid to at my usual rates. (I have two decades of professional development experience.)

I shelved the effort – for the time being – for a few reasons I don’t particularly want to extenuate, today, but I shall continue to follow Zed very closely and I truly, deeply hope that there is a future in which I see hope (and, thus, motivation) in maintaining a ready-to-go, batteries-included, AI-free, telemetry-free, cloud-free fork.

Part of maintaining a fork would include sending merge-requests upstream even though I should hardly expect that my fork would be viewed favourably by the Zed business. But, from what I can tell, Zed seem to act true to the open-source principles – unlike many other corporate owners of open-source projects – and I see no reason (yet) to believe they would play unfairly.

I don’t see it as a “lol” matter.

The Electron project made an extremely stupid decision. Individual people who are left to wrangle with the fall-out and manage the PR have nothing but my utmost sympathy, as do all the down-stream projects (Signal, Discord, VSCodium…) who have to do the same. Even the developers of xdg-desktop-portal are facing unnecessary backlash because of this. Their release schedule and time-line for when org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser v. 4 could be reliably expected to exist in the wild was surely not kept in secret!

This doesn’t only affect Flatpak apps. The xdg-desktop-portal mechanism is used by many things. Even “gtk native” applications like Firefox use it when running on a correctly configured KDE environment and one of the nuances of this issue is that those applications – today – continue to work perfectly. Electron is not part of their stack.

I have flatpak on my desktop just for Steam and even flatpak’d steam still seems to work, correctly.

It’s a good question for the package maintainers.

In their defence: it isn’t a direct dependency, it isn’t advertised, and it is likely that the distro package maintainers just don’t know about it – Electron hardly announce that they chose to depend on something that they know isn’t released, anywhere, yet, and won’t be for months.

To lighten the mood, here’s a screenshot of one of the lowest points I achieved while hacking away, trying to resolve the issue: What even is going on, there?

• pixelated menu
• “Cancel” button at the top left??
• “Open” button at the top right??
• clearly Adwaita but not actually Adwaita as configured – the VSCodium window (behind) shows how Adwaita is actually configured on my system and that’s how all native gtk applications actually draw.

You are empathetic. So am I! ^[1] And, so, I feel your pain and frustration. As one says in South Africa: “Sterkte!” ^[2]

I wonder if my life could have been better if I was born neurotypical.

You were born you. Who was born neuro-typical would not have been you and whether their life was better or worse is irrelevant. I wish I had wise words to write about resisting those thoughts – I do know them well! – but only madness lies down that path. Resist them, you must!