Manjaro Linux want your system info with their new data collection tool

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Yeap. Here in the UK organ donation was swapped to opt-out for the same good reason Manjaro should use opt-out for their telemetry. Lots of people who aren't bothered either way, will never opt-in, but those who care will always opt-out


Last edited by spymastermatt on 5 November 2024 at 5:56 pm UTC

With all this doom and gloom talk about the end of Manjaro, I have to ask, what's the best alternative?

(Of course every Linux distro seems to be surrounded by pronouncements of its impending demise, but it rarely comes to pass.)

Gentoo.

I know that feels like a meme, but it's really not. This thing is rock solid stable like a mountain, and man switching to it was the best choice I ever made. I don't even get all those little "odd bugs" you normally get on other distros.

You compile all the packages yourself which means you can patch out forced telemetry yourself or disable it at compile time (I do this for KDE). Binary packages are available now, but you lose some customizability.

Anything done in a way you don't like can basically be changed, no questions asked.

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Yeap. Here in the UK organ donation was swapped to opt-in for the same good reason Manjaro should use opt-in for their telemetry. Lots of people who aren't bothered either way, will never opt-in, but those who care will always opt-out

Say what now? I'm from the UK and was last told it was opt-out. I wasn't informed it changed to opt-in. When did this change, and how do I opt out? (My organs are buggered from drinking too much to be useful. Heck, my organs probably couldn't keep a human alive for more than a day.)

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Yeap. Here in the UK organ donation was swapped to opt-in for the same good reason Manjaro should use opt-in for their telemetry. Lots of people who aren't bothered either way, will never opt-in, but those who care will always opt-out

I feel like you swapped one or two "out" and "in" somewhere in there.

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Yeap. Here in the UK organ donation was swapped to opt-in for the same good reason Manjaro should use opt-in for their telemetry. Lots of people who aren't bothered either way, will never opt-in, but those who care will always opt-out

I feel like you swapped one or two "out" and "in" somewhere in there.

Yeap sorry, corrected

how about asking for data on their own forum?
i do not want this to be installed on my PC at all


Last edited by mylka on 5 November 2024 at 10:21 pm UTC

With all this doom and gloom talk about the end of Manjaro, I have to ask, what's the best alternative?

(Of course every Linux distro seems to be surrounded by pronouncements of its impending demise, but it rarely comes to pass.)

Gentoo.

I know that feels like a meme, but it's really not. This thing is rock solid stable like a mountain, and man switching to it was the best choice I ever made. I don't even get all those little "odd bugs" you normally get on other distros.

You compile all the packages yourself which means you can patch out forced telemetry yourself or disable it at compile time (I do this for KDE). Binary packages are available now, but you lose some customizability.

Anything done in a way you don't like can basically be changed, no questions asked.

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Yeap. Here in the UK organ donation was swapped to opt-in for the same good reason Manjaro should use opt-in for their telemetry. Lots of people who aren't bothered either way, will never opt-in, but those who care will always opt-out

Say what now? I'm from the UK and was last told it was opt-out. I wasn't informed it changed to opt-in. When did this change, and how do I opt out? (My organs are buggered from drinking too much to be useful. Heck, my organs probably couldn't keep a human alive for more than a day.)

May 2020.
You opt-out here.

Ohh no really.

I have just re installed Manjaro yesterday thanks to PDX and CO with the CS2 mods virus and now this.

I welcome any recommendations for a similar alternative distro.

Pure Arch might just be beyond my reach but I am willing to give a go if its not too much hassle to install.

I have a message for the Manjaro team if anyone sees it here. I left windows for a reason and for me opt out clauses crosses the line so im done with Manjaro it looks like. Shame as it was getting pretty darn good.

With all this doom and gloom talk about the end of Manjaro, I have to ask, what's the best alternative?

(Of course every Linux distro seems to be surrounded by pronouncements of its impending demise, but it rarely comes to pass.)

Gentoo.

I know that feels like a meme, but it's really not. This thing is rock solid stable like a mountain, and man switching to it was the best choice I ever made. I don't even get all those little "odd bugs" you normally get on other distros.

You compile all the packages yourself which means you can patch out forced telemetry yourself or disable it at compile time (I do this for KDE). Binary packages are available now, but you lose some customizability.

Anything done in a way you don't like can basically be changed, no questions asked.

I ran Gentoo many years ago and found it to be rather labor intensive and too easy to break even with a routine update. I imagine things have changed in the past 15 years, but I also have no compelling reason to abandon Manjaro at the moment since it has always just worked for me. I suppose that's boring to people who like to constantly tweak and tinker, but these days, I really don't mind boring!

With all this doom and gloom talk about the end of Manjaro, I have to ask, what's the best alternative?

(Of course every Linux distro seems to be surrounded by pronouncements of its impending demise, but it rarely comes to pass.)

Gentoo.

I know that feels like a meme, but it's really not. This thing is rock solid stable like a mountain, and man switching to it was the best choice I ever made. I don't even get all those little "odd bugs" you normally get on other distros.

You compile all the packages yourself which means you can patch out forced telemetry yourself or disable it at compile time (I do this for KDE). Binary packages are available now, but you lose some customizability.

Anything done in a way you don't like can basically be changed, no questions asked.

I ran Gentoo many years ago and found it to be rather labor intensive and too easy to break even with a routine update. I imagine things have changed in the past 15 years, but I also have no compelling reason to abandon Manjaro at the moment since it has always just worked for me. I suppose that's boring to people who like to constantly tweak and tinker, but these days, I really don't mind boring!

Same, but I suppose I've ended up drifting even further to the other extreme.

Gentoo was great fun for a couple of years though, back when a full stage 1 install took a whole weekend on my Athlon Thunderbird 750, with a stack of printed A4 sheets for an installation manual. It was a good learning experience for a relative Linux newbie such as myself in the very early 2000s. Still miss portage and ebuilds. But not quite enough to go back.

To be fair, I've read that Gentoo provides binary packages these days and stage 1 and 2 installs haven't been a thing for a good 15 years. The distro must have changed quite a bit since those halcyon days of yore.

those halcyon days of yore.

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With all this doom and gloom talk about the end of Manjaro, I have to ask, what's the best alternative?

(Of course every Linux distro seems to be surrounded by pronouncements of its impending demise, but it rarely comes to pass.)

Gentoo.

I know that feels like a meme, but it's really not. This thing is rock solid stable like a mountain, and man switching to it was the best choice I ever made. I don't even get all those little "odd bugs" you normally get on other distros.

You compile all the packages yourself which means you can patch out forced telemetry yourself or disable it at compile time (I do this for KDE). Binary packages are available now, but you lose some customizability.

Anything done in a way you don't like can basically be changed, no questions asked.

I ran Gentoo many years ago and found it to be rather labor intensive and too easy to break even with a routine update. I imagine things have changed in the past 15 years, but I also have no compelling reason to abandon Manjaro at the moment since it has always just worked for me. I suppose that's boring to people who like to constantly tweak and tinker, but these days, I really don't mind boring!

In fairness, it is rock solid stable now. At least, more stable than Arch (In my own experience).

You don't *have* to compile anymore though. (Though I customize too much to be able to avoid it.)

There are things like btrfs snapshots which you could use for quick rollbacks though if updates break it.

Personally, I've come to love the feel of being able to change absolutely anything, it's something no other distribution can provide.

It takes a bit more time to setup and slightly more time to maintain, but it's not terrible. It's maybe an hour or two a week of my time to update it and make changes I like.

good thing i never plan to use manjaro

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Which country is that? Sounds like human rights violation to me.

In the Netherlands this is the case as well. Why would it be a human rights violation? You're not alive anymore when they do it. You can also always opt-out and this is widely known. The problem is that most people forgot or didn't bother to opt-in, which was costing lives.

As for the telemetry, it doesn't have to be all bad. Telemetry is important for devs to improve a project and like someone earlier in the thread has said, most people that don't care won't opt-in and the ones that do will opt-out. If they make it a clear toggle which is on by default and the data is non-personal, I don't see the issue. We're talking about PC specs here, not address info.


Last edited by Adutchman on 6 November 2024 at 6:52 am UTC

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Which country is that? Sounds like human rights violation to me.

In the Netherlands this is the case as well. Why would it be a human rights violation? You're not alive anymore when they do it. You can also always opt-out and this is widely known. The problem is that most people forgot or didn't bother to opt-in, which was costing lives.

As for the telemetry, it doesn't have to be all bad. Telemetry is important for devs to improve a project and like someone earlier in the thread has said, most people that don't care won't opt-in and the ones that do will opt-out. If they make it a clear toggle which is on by default and the data is non-personal, I don't see the issue. We're talking about PC specs here, not address info.

On your first point I agree.
On the second I disagree.
A. pc specs can be more personal than you think. HWID's are unique and personally identifying, BIOS release date is a good indicator of when you bought the device and with that of when you had a personal shift requiring more fancy hardware, IP is enough to determine at least your nation, accesibility settings inform about someone's medical condition, Mac adresses inform whose hardware you bought, your device name is often your name, etc.
B. One of the primary selling points of Linux distros is their lack of spying. Lots of people use it, so their data doesn't get send to other parties. These people already made their choice and "opt-ed out" and now they have to do it another time.
C. For debugging it's mostly useless feature request and crash reports help much better there, because it clearly communicates customer demand and what's missing.
It's mostly useful for UI development and prioritization.
Prioritization currently happens on: "how easy is it to find volunteers and/or funds for it" and I don't think devs would like to let that power slip.
It's really useful for UI development, but a better fix for that is to sucker users into doing their own development by providing a forum and desktop setting sharing tools.
Also I don't actually believe they've the data analysis talent available to interpret this data.
It's not really something Os developers are known for.


Edit:
For me the base requirement for any telemetry to be considered acceptable it needs to be opt-in and employ differential privacy.


Last edited by LoudTechie on 6 November 2024 at 8:16 am UTC

Truth is telemetry is really useful for developers and without it's way too easy to make the wrong assumptions.

And it is even easier to make wrong assumptions due to telemetry. Calling it a double-edged sword even with consent is putting it mildly.

I agree. That is true for all statistics though.

Truth is telemetry is really useful for developers and without it's way too easy to make the wrong assumptions.

And it is even easier to make wrong assumptions due to telemetry. Calling it a double-edged sword even with consent is putting it mildly.

I agree. That is true for all statistics though.

Most open source projects don't use statistics(, because they've no data).
They use reproducible and peer reviewable anecdotes(issues and pull requests) and expert review.
What you present here is a false dilemma.
What you two are comparing is the advantages and disadvantages of using telemetry yes/no, but in this case that doesn't mean they would use different statistics, so although it's true for all statistics it's not "true for all statistics though."

Edit: to put it in the mortal words of Ronald Munroe that's a false dichthomy.


Last edited by LoudTechie on 6 November 2024 at 8:41 am UTC

Been a Manjaro user for the last 2 years on my gaming PC, I'm going to be finding another distro if this isn't opt-in by the time it makes it to users. This kind of stuff is why I ditched Windows.

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Which country is that? Sounds like human rights violation to me.

> In the EU, most countries use an opt-out system (also known as "presumed consent") for organ donation, meaning that individuals are considered potential donors unless they have explicitly stated otherwise. Approximately 20 of the 27 EU countries operate under some form of opt-out system. This means around 74% of EU countries have opt-out laws for organ donation.

Get with the program!

I'm not really following the argument that they need that data for their project's future.
But I also don't really care if they gather extremely basic system information.

In big projects, you need user telemetry to not develop features and make fixes in a vacuum, based on guesses and/or some vocal minority.
That's just a reality of software development.

Still, they should at least be up-front about it and force a choice to opt in or out on the user, so that nobody can claim to not having known.

In my country real organ donorship is opt-out and that's right approach as well

Which country is that? Sounds like human rights violation to me.

> In the EU, most countries use an opt-out system (also known as "presumed consent") for organ donation, meaning that individuals are considered potential donors unless they have explicitly stated otherwise. Approximately 20 of the 27 EU countries operate under some form of opt-out system. This means around 74% of EU countries have opt-out laws for organ donation.

Get with the program!

You seem very agitated about this for some reason. Might want to take some distance from this.

Organ donations after someone's demise are different from telemetry taken from a system used for years and years almost 24/7 for some people.
All that data gets around on the internet via sales, hacks, etc. It could be used for targeted advertising, attack vectors for social engineering, etc.
This has consequences on a person while they are still alive, and it is in no way comparable to organ donations after they are no longer alive.

Opt-in is the only user-friendly system for telemetry gathering.