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Rider is now free for non-commercial use

jetbrains.com

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Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#221

Genuine question with an open mind: why would I use this and not vscode? I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any. So with that in mind what does rider give that vscode cannot?

It's difficult to quantify, but to me (large C# & TS projects) the difference between working in Rider vs VSCode is the difference between Notepad and VSCode.

The difference is big.

Also, often I think to myself "I wish feature X was available", only to find that it is and has been for a while in Jetbrains products.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot I wish Godot's syntax for .NET wasn't horrible though. Its so nasty looking that it just makes me want to use their native language instead.

That's what I've opted for as well, and I have to say I prefer it. gdscript is a nice language for high level game scripting, and on the couple occasions I needed to bring in some high-performance code I found it super easy to build a gdextension in Rust.

I started a Godot project with C# support since I'm coming from Unity.

I now have at least 50 GDScript files and not a single C# file, the language is good (with types).

My only issue is that I can't get Copilot in their integrated IDE and that Rider's GDScript plugin doesn't support anonymous functions right now

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#223
post #175

There are a few privately owned companies that amaze me: JetBrains, Valve among the top. Somehow they have a much better value/user and make reasonable decisions: counter intuitive to investors/shareholders but insanely intuitive to their users. I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to s…

valve is nice but they're still taking a huge cut of revenue for doing extremely little work

They do offer many features for game developers, though. Multiplayer, Remote Play and the Workshop just for example. Those cost money to run and offer an amazing benefit basically "for free" (included in the cut) to game devs.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#224
post #146

JetBrains licenses are one of the few software licenses that I pay for. Their IDEs have the features I need while keeping the UI from getting in the way.

I really, really wanted to like and use their IDEs (esp their Ruby 'intellisense' or w/e), but the lack of popular theme support kind of killed it for me. I wanted my IDE to look like my VSCode editor, but, at least a few years ago, that wasn't really possible since iirc there were only a handful of theme options.

You can theme it yourself without too much hassle. I like my dark mode to be black rather than grey, and just made it do that, and it just works. It took an hour or three to understand the process because I'm not a Java person and am not familiar with any of the tooling, but then it was super easy.

This was a few ago, so they may have improved that part by now, I've just carried my theme over the updates.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#225
post #175

There are a few privately owned companies that amaze me: JetBrains, Valve among the top. Somehow they have a much better value/user and make reasonable decisions: counter intuitive to investors/shareholders but insanely intuitive to their users. I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to s…

valve is nice but they're still taking a huge cut of revenue for doing extremely little work

To each their own but I'm happy for them to pull a premium.

As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.

As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#226

Genuine question with an open mind: why would I use this and not vscode? I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any. So with that in mind what does rider give that vscode cannot?

I've ditched PhpStorm licence quite a while ago after I stopped working with PHP. Tried using VS Code for personal JS projects, but I had to install a few plugins to make it more efficient and still having a strange issue on Linux, when Terminal panel is open, whole code editor feels sluggish. I don't really like how IntelliSense works on VS Code, but that's on me, as there's a plugin or some setting somewhere to fix it. Also VS Code creates several strange directories in my $HOME directory, even when running in portable mode. From application size perspective - VS Code is marginally smaller, and starts a bit faster than IntelliJ IDE. But SublimeText is even smaller and runs circles around big IDEs, not to mention how good it is at handling large text files. At this day and age it comes to personal preference. It is great that new developers have a wide choice of IDEs freely available.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route. I use VS Code daily for .NET development. It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is, but it works well and I don't need to run a VM for it (if I need some of the in-depth tracing and profiling stuff, I can still fire up the gold standard). VS on Mac was maybe 30%

> VS for Mac was junk. Better off trashing it and pushing people the VS Code route. Sure but VS Code for C# is trash as well. All those years, both Microsoft products, and this the experience is subpar, especially in comparison to the real Visual Studio.

> both Microsoft products

With 200K+ employees, at this point it is better to think of Microsoft as a city and different teams in it as independent companies in that city with employees that sometimes go out for coffee together :-P

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#228
post #45
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.

Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.

It's not about having the means, it's about most companies having policies and processes structured around common software used by all employees in a similar position to allow for collaboration, and to ensure compliance with whatever governance and licenses apply. You don't see orgs where some devs can choose GitHub, others GitLab. IDEs are more interchangeable, of course, but each developer having to set up their own config from scratch (correct plugins, build config, testing framework, etc.) would be a colossal waste of time for no reason.

Some bigger orgs allow flexibility (devs can pick Mac or Linux-based laptops, VS Code or JetBrains as the IDE, etc.), but not bring your own with your own license.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#229

Rider has a lot going for it, but I really can't stand the structure of JetBrains subscription. Why can't they just have a single monthly or annual price, rather than this absurd structure where the price gets cheaper over time, encouraging lock-in?

They're rewarding recurring customers, this is not a vendor lock-in.

That’s of course the way they would try to frame it positively… but imagine it any of your other subscriptions did the same? Once you’ve been subscribed, it puts a much higher cost on unsubscribing, especially if you aren’t using it but think you might need it again at some point in the future.

Re: Rider is now free for non-commercial use

#230

Regarding free non-commercial use in Jetbrains you need to accept that you'll get checked (not specified how, but I guess they will scrape your HDD? Or what? It’s also important to note that if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. This is similar to our Early Access Program (where statistics is opt-out) and in compliance with our Privacy Policy

It's the dreaded T-word: telemetry. The same sort of thing people get up in arms about in Windows but JetBrains will get a pass here.
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