Which is an artificial restriction from MS that's really easily bypassed.
Personally I don't care whether the telemetry is identifiable. I just don't want it.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
Point in case: Software actually got worse.
Second point in case: Great software and editors have been built without telemetry for decades.
> 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.
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.
We know from the body of work in deobfuscation that there's no such thing as "strictly anonymous metrics".