Rider is now free for non-commercial use

Posted by kretaceous 10/24/2024

Rider is now free for non-commercial use(www.jetbrains.com)

828 points | 422 commentspage 2

textlapse 10/24/2024|

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 serve their customers instead.

Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.

terminalbraid 10/24/2024||

I go pretty heavy on Jetbrains products, but they have stirred up the dev community a few times chasing things seen as investor friendly. In particular when they shoved their AI plugin as a required plugin with carried an obnoxious upsell nag. In general they've also spread themselves out across a ridiculous number of products where I'd prefer if they just focused on making their current stuff work (and not discontinue useful things like AppCode). CLion was practically unusable with the Mac toolchain for refactoring for a long time until they released the Nova backend. Fleet has been in public preview forever as a direct contender to VSCode and they spent a lot of work on it, incomplete, and then just let it sit there with minor stuff like getting themes after three years.

talldayo 10/24/2024|||

They also pulled the plug on free support for their Rust plugin which really upset me. Jetbrains is intent on making you pay before you get IDE functionality; I'd rather use VS Code or Zed these days.

NoboruWataya 10/24/2024|||

RustRover is free for non-commercial use though?

I liked the look of Zed when I first tried it out, but I read that it seems to have a strong cloud/AI focus which I don't want or need. I have started investing a bit of time in getting Vim working with all the bells and whistles and now it's a decent fallback when I can't use a JetBrains IDE for whatever reason.

talldayo 10/24/2024||

I'll just be honest, I don't like Zed at all. I much preferred Atom when it was a thing, and I mostly use Zed begrudgingly because the other graphical editors tend to get sluggish.

My preferred IDE was what Jetbrains had before with IDEA - you could plug in basic support for the languages you want and edit as you go. I don't want to set up a superheavy environment with all the bells and whistles, I want Intellisense and tree-sitter in a relatively zippy interface. That was what Jetbrains offered before, and it's what I can't have anymore.

vunderba 10/24/2024||

It's probably the most ridiculous nitpick in the history of ever, but I really hate the "sign in" button at the top right of Zed, particularly there's no way to hide it even through some configuration file. It's distracting to me and I want zero cloud connectivity associated with my text editor.

conradfr 10/24/2024|||

They have always done that when they make a specific IDE for a language.

evoke4908 10/25/2024|||

The Material redesign makes a lot more sense now. I still think it's a terrible decision and a huge waste of resources though.

Making Rider free to try is the correct strategy for them. Obviously they want to compete directly with VSCode, but they're burning a lot of good will in their existing customer base in the process.

maples37 10/24/2024|||

I'm not too surprised. I hope they stay privately owned! It's a lot easier to focus on "make good product" when you don't have investors/accountants/management/etc badgering you about "stock price needs to go up, make something shiny and get it out this month".

I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.

On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.

throwaway277432 10/24/2024||

> the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors

Ha! Heard that one before. Company was sold. Founder got filthy rich, bean counters came in, you know the rest.

Capricorn2481 10/24/2024|||

I agree that private companies can be good and I use Steam a lot, but Valve sucks in other ways. Their community is awful and developers can have posts openly calling for their death or calling them racial slurs and Valve support will tell them they won't remove the posts. I don't mean they deny the support request, I mean a person will respond and say "Yeah manage your community better." This is despite the fact they give no tools for community management.

But being a public company wouldn't make it any better.

93po 10/24/2024|||

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

Scramblejams 10/24/2024|||

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.

Psychotherapist 10/24/2024||||

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

fkyoureadthedoc 10/24/2024|||

I don't see the problem with that personally, since there's basically no restriction on how you distribute your games on the platform. It's not like iOS where you have 1 option.

People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.

93po 10/24/2024||

my point is that valve/steam takes 30% "because they can". they could charge 5% and im sure still make tons of money. it's still a cut throat business, and while yeah they could be doing shittier things to make more money, i think they also do risk assessments on disturbing the golden goose

ilrwbwrkhv 10/24/2024|||

I would add Wolfram to that list. All three have cracked capitalism.

CraigJPerry 10/24/2024||

As a looooooooong term intellij user, it surprised me that Rider is the more performant IDE (IDEA was the primary product - i expected it to have the best experience). I've used Rider a fair bit over the past 18 months or so (all products licence) and it's still very noticeable every time i spend time in Rider.

LeFantome 10/24/2024|

I think some of Rider is written in C# vs all Java for IDEA. Could that be it?

wiseowise 10/24/2024||

Their Resharper is indeed C#, only GUI is written using Kotlin.

magic_hamster 10/24/2024||

There is a lot of praise here for JetBrains. I love their products, but sadly they joined the devcontainer race way too late and the condition of their products does not allow for serious development with dev containers. Their Gateway application is still in beta, and it doesn't always work, but it's faring much better than their early access devcontainer IDEs which are in a sorry state.

I can't believe that this late in the game my team has no choice but to actually give up on jetbrains for some time. We tried our best to make it work with their products because we enjoy them dearly. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. VSCode has a mature, and most important functioning, devcontainer ecosystem.

Not sure if Rider even has devcontaier support but good for jetbrains for releasing a community edition.

Latty 10/24/2024||

I'd been subscribed for the best part of a decade to their all products pack, liked the products, but they kept doing stuff that really rubbed me the wrong way in a paid product, e.g: shoving the AI offering down my throat and initially having no way to remove it, and then when I paid most recently, they sent me some spammy marketing for some third party product as a "thank you", and I cancelled my subscription there and then.

I don't mind paying for a good product, but I want the experience to be less irksome than the free offerings out there, I get enough annoying advertising from free stuff I use, if I'm paying good money, I don't want that.

Habgdnv 10/24/2024||

I was a paying customer for a long time, and their spam campaigns were the reason for my cancellation last year. Now I am a happy Microsoft Visual Studio Pro subscriber again. (happy in quotes btw)

Latty 10/24/2024||

It's a shame, I like the tools generally, but so much stuff is just about bombarding you with ads now, paying for a good tool is, to me, meant to be the way to avoid that, that really soured me on it all.

rahkiin 10/24/2024||

What is the problem you have with the AI? You can disable it, and otherwise it is run locally only. It does nice line-completion

Latty 10/24/2024||

At launch it'd pop open the UI every time you opened any of the tools, and you couldn't uninstall the plugin. I understand you can now disable it, but it was annoying at the time, and demonstrated the issue I had with feeling like I was being advertised to in invasive ways despite being a paying customer.

ChrisArchitect 10/24/2024||

[dupe] More on official post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41935128

Karolis_K 10/25/2024||

I like Rider very much, but personally moved to VSCode because of many little annoying bugs that aren't being fixed. E.g. typescript refactoring problems, .NET native code debugging from C#, TFS support etc. And maybe it's changing but I felt that the progress for new features and IDE maintenance stalled (for obvious reasons).

kwanbix 10/25/2024||

I have a very good perception of Jetbrains as a brand, even though I have only used YouTrack for some days. What I don't understand is, why do they have so many IDEs instead of a single one? Is it really necesary? Are language writting/editing needs so different? Honest question here.

LtdJorge 10/25/2024|

For tighter integration. For example, pip in Python is very different from Cargo in Rust o $whatever in C and C++. They are purpose built and integrate better with the language and tooling.

kwanbix 10/25/2024||

I get that, but do you think it is so different that they can not have different modules in the same IDE? I mean, visualstudio, for example, supports all languages from the same IDE.

joseda-hg 10/25/2024||

That's more or less the offering with Fleet although it is in Preview, it's just less stuff preconfigured

schmorptron 10/24/2024||

This is great! I found myself preferring the rider student license I had at home to Visual Studio we had at work when I was actively writing a lot of c# and some f# recently. It didn't feel fast outright, but at least faster than VS, and the memory profiler was much more immediately grokkable to me.

DidYaWipe 10/25/2024||

What makes it tailored for .Net and games? Does that mean it's less appropriate for other types of development?

For example, I'm using VS Code to work on a back-end based on Deno, which has a plug-in for VS Code. Would I find Rider a less-hospitable development environment?

evoke4908 10/25/2024|

It has plugins that integrate with Godot and unity. Otherwise it's just a regular IDE. It also includes a WISYWIG editor for WPF apps if you care about that.

Like VS, Rider will also do C++. In fact, CLion (their purpose built C++ IDE) is now running on Rider's backend. I'm sure that makes Rider very powerful for C++, but I haven't really tried.

Rider is bar none the best IDE I've used and I've been subscribed for six or seven years now.

DidYaWipe 10/25/2024||

Thanks! I'm just wondering what else it's integrated with. If it doesn't have JavaScript auto-completion and whatever else the Deno VS Code plug-in provides, it wouldn't be as useful to me for my current project.

As far as C++ goes, I wonder (based on the info you've provided) what CLion offers that Rider doesn't.

renewiltord 10/24/2024|

I really like their loyalty bonuses. The price for the whole thing drops down really low over time.

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