> 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..

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...

> 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?

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.