The Manjaro Linux team are asking for testers for their new data collection tool called "Manjaro Data Donor", which they plan to have as opt-out and not opt-in.
As expected, they are catching some comments from users not particularly happy about their plan to have it hooked up as something you have to opt out of due to privacy concerns. Telemetry is often a bad word to a lot of people, but the reality is that when done correctly it can be truly essential for projects to know where to focus.
Manjaro developer Roman Gilg said in the announcement that currently they use Matomo, which is pinged via the Network Manager but it's unreliable for various reasons. So they created Manjaro Data Donor (MDD) which gives more information and should be more reliable overall, and they actually have full control over it.
Currently they just want Manjaro users to test it and give feedback, but eventually it will be hooked up as a systemd service:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.In the next few days we’ll do some more testing and if results are positive, I plan on installing it on all Manjaro systems and adding a systemd service to submit the data automatically.
As a reminder: Right now you have to install MDD manually and there is no systemd service yet.
With this systemd service later in place, sending the hardware data with MDD will be opt-out because I believe, if you do opt-in, the data you gather will be so heavily skewed you can just leave it be.
Let me know what you think. I know telemetry is a contentious subject, but we need at least some data about how Manjaro is being used by so many people around the world in order to show that the project has a future and also to plan for that future.
BlackBloodRum about 4 hours ago
Quoting: Mountain ManIn fairness, it is rock solid stable now. At least, more stable than ArchQuoting: BlackBloodRumI 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!Quoting: Mountain ManWith all this doom and gloom talk about the end of Manjaro, I have to ask, what's the best alternative?Gentoo.
(Of course every Linux distro seems to be surrounded by pronouncements of its impending demise, but it rarely comes to pass.)
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 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.
Viesta2015 about 3 hours ago
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me