I like flatpaks much better than snaps. I wish they would implement an equivalent to snap's classic confinement so that apps like vscode could interact easily with the default system shell, libraries, executables etc. That feels like a big hole in flatpaks.
I had this exact issue with at&t. They weren't honoring a promotion that we signed up for. I talked to the support people and they verbally told me that they agreed with my assessment of the situation. It took taking at&t to small claims court to reach someone with any ability to help me. The situation was quickly resolved after they received the summons to court.
I think flatpaks are awesome. Especially for commercial software. I do think they are missing an important feature that snap has what snap referes to as classic confinement. For example vscode as a flatpak can't really interact with your normal system libraries/exectuables/etc. That being said I do hope that Flatpaks succeed and becomes the easy go-to option for commercial software to support linux distributions.
I've migrated to vscode from sublime. Vscode integrated debugger, lsp, etc are way ahead of sublime. That said, typing in sublime just feels good compared to vscode. I keep sublime around for quick edits.
Debian is another option that I also use for my personal workstation. Debian is nice in that there won't be any crazy profit driven decisions. It is super stable. I think it is a much saner option than Ubuntu.
I think there are a lot of performance pitfalls with Julia. In my experience you have to pay close attention https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/performance-tips/. Otherwise you can easily get lack luster performance. However, there are times when the speed of Julia really shines and it just feels magical compared to R, python, etc.
I think tipping should be outlawed. The price should be the price. Workers should not be subject to inconsistent pay for the same amount of work. In addition it gets rid of any bias in wages (more attractive people or people of different ethnicities might get higher tips for the same work).
The big simplicity is that you install octave and you have a gui development environment ready to go. Julia and vscode are great, but setting up a project with all dependencies is a little more work for university students with no programing experience .
It has some add-ons (tool-boxes) that aren't as complete or don't exist in the open source world and would be a big lift to reimplements. If you are just writing all your own code there isn't any advantage over python, Julia, etc.
The monthly cost is kind of a nonstarter for me. The sublime text model seems like a good alternative. ~$100 for ~3 years of updates with perpetual ownership of the latest version at the end of your subscription.
Between the adds infiltrating every part of the os and the arbitrary decision to not allow my computer to run windows 11 (no TPM, though it is plenty fast) I have had enough. I've daily driving Linux for 7-8 years with only occasional windows use. There are certainly some rough edges with Linux, but it is perfectly workable.