Based on this thread, it seems like the initial idea was 'just enable it by default and let people disable it' but that quickly changed after the first objections came in. Whatever step the proposal is in right now seems to be focused on making a system to gather telemetry first, I can't see any definitive decision on opt-in vs opt-out (though opt-in through the installer/welcome screen seems to be the best solution I've seen).<p>This is not unlike Debian's telemetry collection, which also asks nicely if you'd like to share your information with the project.
I will never, ever understand how Manjaro has the audience it has, including SBC manufacturers, etc. They don't work with the community particularly well, have a horrible, awful track record of distro stewardship.<p>And now this.
It does seem like this collects a lot of unnecessary information. I know it may be useful to know some of the statistics and I don't think there is a problem with the general statistics persay (i.e. kernel version, cpu, gpu - things that are common enough that they won't easily identify a user). However, it looks like it also records a bunch of information on installed packages which, given how uniquely people set up their systems, could easily be an identifying value point.<p>I think this might've been an easier sell if they kept it to general data and used it for the purpose they stated they wanted to originally - counting the number of users of manjaro - as the depth of information they send is unnecessary for that
This is so user-hostile. I do not want a spyware in an OS. All telemetry should be opt-in and voluntary.<p>Also, what would be the use of the telemetry? Find a reason to close a bug report with WONTFIX?
The less I know about users of the software I write, the better.<p>> 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.<p>Charitably, this implies they want to plan around things like infrastructure scaling. Why can't they just look at present demands on their infrastructure? (i.e. why bother with a proxy metric when you have the real metrics right there?)
They and can should count users only by updates.<p>Make a package that is required and only changed upon each release (containing for instance /etc/os-release) and count how many distinct IP addresses download it.
Manjaro has been a trash arch fork for some time. <a href="https://endeavouros.com" rel="nofollow">https://endeavouros.com</a> would be a better choice these days.
If they just want to count unique installs, then the comment on that thread I believe partially works:<p><pre><code> set -x
stat / | grep -i "birth:" | awk '{print $2}'
</code></pre>
Then use the output piped to md5sum to make a user-id.<p>And then finally use an opt-in on demand ephemeral instantiation of Tor to submit the results so they can not get the real IP if they wanted to. In my opinion all telemetry should be opt-in and provide a text/plain preview of what is going to be submitted ahead of time. This gives the system owner a chance to back out of posting the telemetry should they see something sensitive. <i>set -x to show an audit trail for what commands were executed in plain text.</i>
If you want easy Arch, there's EndevourOS. It's rolling instead of "stable" but in my experience Manjaro's actual stability is overrated, an update straight up trashed the bootloader once.
I don't think the project will be able to survive the decision to turn on telemetry by default.<p>There are many different distro's just like Manjaro.
Every shitty move, no matter how bad for all involved - is blindly copied by open source. If Google decided to distribute heroin and spoons to all developers, cause thats "what sherlock did" - one day later all of open source would chase the pink dragon.
> Until now what has been done, was counting systems via ping.manjaro.org 11. These pings are sent from Manjaro systems via the NetworkManager.<p>I really hope that's not the default out of the box behaviour.