yes, its exactly like that. why help the competition?

ahem.

Visual Studio Code. Web Core Fonts.

"ever" is a strong word.

Come on, don't give me that. Fonts were literally ripped from the MS download site, they were never packaged or promoted to the Linux world, they couldn't even be redistributed. And VS Code is a tool for developers, mostly aimed at the Mac crowd, released in 2015, almost 20 years after KDE and more than 15 since GNOME started. VSC has nothing to do with the Linux desktop.

Microsoft fought the Linux desktop at every step and they are still fighting it, conscious that Office exclusivity is a key tool in keeping the enterprise and public-sector markets as their main cash cows. They opened to Linux-running developers just enough to promote their cloud strategy, but they will never do anything that could potentially endanger their desktop monopoly.

The fonts were not 'literally ripped'. The license could have stipulated "you must not ever use this on anything other than Microsoft Windows", but they didn't. They did not make it easy to put in linux distributions, but they did make it possible.

VSCode is indeed part of their cloud strategy. I do not for a moment claim that they did anything benevolent for linux desktop experience -- nor do I expect them to do anything especially for Linux (on the contrary, I expect them to try to kill it).

And still, all I objected was to your use of the word "ever", since VSCode is actually packaged for the linux desktop, and is, IMHO, at the moment the best IDE on linux for quite a few languages.