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

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:

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.