It is true that VS Code has some non-optional telemetry, and if VS Codium works for people, that is great. However, the telemetry of VSCode is non-personal metrics, and some of the most popular extensions are only available with VSCode, not with Codium.
There's a whitelist identifier that you can add bundle IDs to, to get access to the more sensitive APIs. Then you can download the extension file and install it manually. I don't have the exact process right now but just Google it :)
> However, the telemetry of VSCode is non-personal metrics
I don't care, I don't want my text editor to send _any_ telemetry, _especially_ without my explicit consent.
> some of the most popular extensions are only available with VSCode
This has never been an issue for me, fortunately. The only issue is Microsoft's proprietary extensions, which I have no interest in using either. If I wanted a proprietary editor I'd use something better.
Making the remote editing extension closed is particularly frustrating, as you have little visibility into what it's doing and it is impossible to debug obscure errors
The way I read it, the message you replied to was a complaint about parts of VSCode being proprietary. Do you mean to say Jetbrains is pretty ok on the "not being proprietary" front?
Yeah, 100%. I'm not a hardcore FOSS only person, but for my core workflow, when a FOSS tool exists and works well, I am not likely to use a proprietary alternative if I can avoid it at all.
So yeah, I'll use Excel to interoperate with fancy spreadsheets, but if LibreOffice will do the job, I'll use it instead. I tried out several of the fancy proprietary editors at various times (SublimeText, VSCode, even Jetbrains), but IMO they were not better _enough_ to justify switching away from something like vim, which is both ubiquitously available and FOSS.
But I don't want it. I want my software to work for me, not against me.
>and some of the most popular extensions are only available with VSCode, not with Codium.
I'll manage without them. What's especially annoying is that this restriction is completely artificial.
Having said that, MS did a great job with VsCode and I applaud them for that. I guess nothing is perfect, and I bet these decisions were made by suits against engineer wishes.
> But I don't want it. I want my software to work for me, not against me.
How is said software working "against" you by collecint non-personal telemetry while purpose of that telemetry usually is making the software better for most users?
You just need to swap out some nouns and the offense will become more obvious.
"How is that chair working 'against' you by collecting 'non-personal' sitting patterns tagged with timestamps and information about the chair and house that it's in while the purpose of that data collection 'usually' is making the chair better for other people?"
When I use a product, I'm not implicitly inviting the makers of that product to perpetually monitor my usage of the product so that they can make more money based on my data. In any other part of life other than software, this would be an obscene assumption for a product maker to make. But in software, people give it a pass.
No.
This type of data collection is obscene when informed consent is not clearly and authoritatively acquired in advance.
>usually is making the software better for most users?
that usually hasn't been the case since at least a decade. it's truly bewildering that someone especially on hackernews would voluntarily give big tech there finger and not expect to get bitten.
> extensions may be collecting their own usage data and are not controlled by the telemetry.telemetryLevel setting. Consult the specific extension's documentation to learn about its telemetry reporting and whether it can be disabled.
That's new. Previously there was a setting, but they removed it, and it would even throw a warning in settings.json that the property no longer existed.
They must have reintroduced the telemetry setting. I can't remember if I deleted the old one, but my setting on that new value was set to "all" by default.
Not allowing end-users to disable telemetry is actually awful. The gold standard is that IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information.
