I’m interested in programming and development, however I have observed that many privacy focused alternatives are not as good as their mainstream counterparts. For web development one might say that firefox’s developer tools are great and no doubt but in my day to day dev work I find chromium and specifically Microsoft Edge to bundle with more devtools than chrome and firefox combined which makes it my favourite for web development.
Similarly, for analytics I would prefer google analytics over matomo, I tried but nah, it isn’t great enough. VSCode is a great example.
Point is most development tools comes with telemetry and using many of these tools to build and ship software also puts the user’s privacy at risk as well. For eg, if I use firebase for authentication, then great it works and yes I can collect analytics but at the same time google collect’s information about my user’s as well.
So I would like to know what advice would you give to a person who’s interested in development to enhance their privacy as well as their user’s, given that currently open source is not to the level of many mainstream competitors except very few exceptions.
While it is true that most of the privacy-friendly alternatives are not on the same level as mainstream solutions, they are not that big of a downgrade either. As per your examples, I am perfectly happy using Neovim to edit code, Firefox as my main browser (though I also test on Chromium), and have used both Plausible and Umami for analytics. You just have to look around and try to find the balance between fitting your use case and preserving user privacy. And as a developer, if something lacks certain features, you may also consider contributing to the project.
When you say “I feel like something’s off with these products,” what exactly do you mean? Is there a particular aspect you are concerned about, or are you basing your assessment strictly on vibes?
M$ blocks VSCodium from accessing extensions in their marketplace. Embrace extend and extinguish. They want you to use VSCode and pay for the CoPilot license.
However, VSCodium is the privacy respecting alternative.