I don't know what subculture of developers they're targeting, but I'm definitely not part of it. They should have known that a login on startup is completely unacceptable and detestable to an important segment of developers. Not less how they launched without Linux support.

They have signalled to me, loud and clear, that their product is not for people like me, and I will never try it. Doesn't matter that they've removed the requirement, we've all seen what type of product this is.

fair.

there is a large segment of developers who find the command line hard to use or who just want a better, more productive experience using it. to be clear, you may not fall into that bucket, and that's OK.

the point of the login is that we have features that cost us money to provide like AI, and we need some concept of identity to prevent their abuse. i don't think that's detestable (e.g. it's very similar to cursor or copilot), but i get that's a new behavior in the terminal and am sorry it put you off.

And for reference, they acknowledged that this was a problem two years ago but didn't fix it until now. It speaks to either a very lazy development ethic internally, or an outright distrust of their own audience when they speak up. Either way, this is not a product that deserves my telemetry, much less my salary.