VSCode "not" flatpackes?

[OtterKring]

Visual Studio Code is not really a no-brainer when coming as a flatpack package (as it does from the Software Manager). If this is in your hands (maintaining the AnduinOS repositories?), it would be great to get it as a regular apt-get install. I will file this for the VSCode team, too.

[Anduin2017]

There is an important licensing distinction here.

The source code in microsoft/vscode (Code - OSS) is licensed under the MIT License, but the official Microsoft Visual Studio Code distribution is not. The official .deb packages contain Microsoft-specific branding and components and are distributed under the Microsoft Software License Terms.

That license allows users to install and use VS Code, but it does not give third-party Linux distributions the same broad redistribution rights that the MIT License provides. Therefore, I don't think it would be appropriate for AnduinOS to download Microsoft's .deb packages and redistribute them from the AnduinOS/APKG servers without explicit permission from Microsoft.

This is also why Debian does not simply distribute Microsoft's VS Code package from its own repositories. Microsoft's supported native installation method is to use their own APT repository at packages.microsoft.com.

Interestingly, the Flathub package handles this distinction as well: it is marked as proprietary, and its manifest uses Flatpak extra-data to download the official .deb directly from Microsoft's servers during installation rather than redistributing that binary as ordinary open-source package content.

So I don't plan to mirror or repackage the official VS Code .deb in the AnduinOS repository.

[OtterKring]

Understood.
I found this script which did the job perfectly:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y software-properties-common apt-transport-https wget gpg

wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > packages.microsoft.gpg

sudo install -o root -g root -m 644 packages.microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/packages.microsoft.gpg] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list'

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y code

I will see how the app updates itself. But the result is definitely better than the flatpack version (for me at least).