[bionoid]

> I'm not installing a stupid app so Microsoft can collect data on me.

This is going far off topic, but I am currently consulting with a client that requested using Visual Studio Community Edition [2019] for the project. I was a month into development, when all of a sudden one morning, it was no longer possible to start Visual Studio. Why? Because I had not connected it to my Microsoft account, of course... I wonder how people put up with this..

[otterlicious]

You can pay for Visual Studio with money if you don't want to pay for it with your data. That's more than you can say for a lot of things...

[MuffinFlavored]

> I wonder how people put up with this..

The same way hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) use GitHub Desktop connected to their GitHub accounts?

[bionoid]

Well in that case you are using a cloud-based service, it makes sense that you have to authenticate. But I was writing and building C++ code just fine locally, and I could have continued doing that if it wasn't for the dark pattern.