One big issue with FPGAs is how annoying it is to learn how to use them. I did a course on embedded systems a few years ago and nobody could truly get to enjoy it because we spent most of our time downloading and installing huge toolchains, waiting for synthesis and PnR to complete and debugging weird IDE issues. We need to open up the space to allow people to develop better solutions than what these companies are forcing down our throats.

There already exist fantastic open source tools such as Yosys, Nextpnr, iverilog, OpenFPGALoader, ... that together implement most features that a typical hardware dev would want to use. But chip support is unfortunately limited, so fewer people are using these tools.

We decided to build a VSCode extension that wraps these open source tools (https://edacation.github.io for the interested) to combat this problem. Students are already using it during the course and are generally very positive about the experience. It's by no means a full IDE, but if you're just getting started with HDL it's great to get familiar with it. Instead of a mess of a toolchain that nobody truly knows how to use, you now get a few buttons to visualize and (soon) program onto an FPGA.

There's also Lushay Code for the slightly more advanced users. But we need more of these initiatives to really get the ball rolling and make an impact, so I'd highly recommend people to check out and contribute to projects like this.