In case anyone else has difficulty extracting the actual answer in this thread, Maxgerhardt posted one, but let me condense the process to try to add more signal in this thread.
Windsurf uses an incompatible extension store, probably for licensing. The super-dense version is to find the extensions you see directly in the web interface of the store, select the variation you need (e.g., MacOS/Intel or MacOS/ARM), select ‘Download’ in the right-hand panel, then in Extensions (shfit-cmd-X), choose the overflow menu (the ellipsis to the right of search) in the title pane of the extensions listview, select Install from VSix, and pick the file you just downloaded.
- You need to do this with he MS-Vscode extension.
- You need to do this with the Platformio extension.
- You may need to do this with the Espressif ESP-IDF extension; I’m uncertain. I did.
In using those extensions, you’ve surely just accepted the terms of use associated with them.
A restart is required because this is still, at heart, a Microsoft product, and that crowd thinks that’s OK.
With that in place, it appears to be able to cross-compile and generate linked objects described by the platformio build system and ‘understand’ the generated build tree so that it can answer based on the original sources and not the 43 duplicates that Platformio can create.
Even if you do not use Flatpak, you may find this worked example to install PlatformIO in VSCodeium helpful. VSCodeium is also a branch of r VSCode and shares the fundamental issue of installing from a different extension market, so the solution appears very similar.