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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Now do Visual Studio. Give Visual Studio Code a spin, too, if you have time.

Everything collects analytics these days. However, VS Code let's you opt out of telemetry and I doubt it slows down builds like Xcode is doing.

It's my understanding that it's not possible to opt out of all VS Code telemetry. There are some kinds exposed in the settings page that can be disable.

> I doubt it slows down builds

But we don't really know, do we? Speculation isn't helpful.

Just run VSCodium[0]. Unfortunately there's no Xcode equivalent, of course.

[0]https://vscodium.com/

I wouldn't call VSCodium an equivalent[0].

  Please note that some Visual Studio Code extensions have licenses that restrict their use to the official Visual Studio Code builds and therefore do not work with VSCodium. 
  
  ...

  In some cases, ... [workarounds] won't help because the extension is hard-coded to only work with the official Visual Studio Code product.

Notably absent are all of the remote debugging extensions and Copilot. This would be a deal-breaker for many.

[0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/index....

You can compile from public source code, you can use any extension not using MS proprietary code (notably, other LLMs) AND you can use VSCode without telemetry. Credit where credit is due.. it's miles better than whatever Apple is doing.

I do use Copilot with VSCodium, I just installed the extension with a file

Some extensions from Microsoft go so far as to check whether they are running on "genuine VSCode" and refuse to run if not.

Now do almost any modern video game, particularly those with Denuvo, if you have time.

You mean the ones you launch from Steam?

Now consider how much phoning home Steam is doing…

Steam does its own thing but many games also collect their own analytics as you play.

Or almost any modern software period. Everyone is in love with data gather and analytics.

As long as it is only done with the user's consent, and the analytics can be turned off by the user, I don't see a problem. But if it's forced and/or done without consent, then it's a problem no matter if you're Apple, Microsoft, Steam, Epic, or any other company.

Heh

Can be turned off by the user usually means you must run your own recursive DNS resolver and firewall

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