I don't think there is a straightforward way to install and configure extensions in the VS Code Desktop before launching it. We may need to support this within the coder.coder-remote extension after we make the connection.
@code-asher may have more ideas here.

Yeah we could add it as a dependency of our extension to make it auto-install.

Yeah we could add it as a dependency of our extension to make it auto-install.

Yeah but should be configurable and only if launched through this module.

That does seem tricky, I am not sure we can do optional/conditional dependencies.

Maybe we will need a second plugin that we call instead, that has Liveshare and our first plugin as a dependency, and then that second plugin calls our first plugin.