The developers of the Manjaro Linux distribution, built on the basis of Arch Linux and aimed at beginners, announced the beginning of testing a new service MDD (Manjaro Data Donor), designed to collect statistics about the system and send it to the external server of the project. The author of the MDD intended to enable telemetry by default (opt-out), but the decision has not yet been approved and, judging by the objections of some developers and users, it is likely that telemetry will be offered as an option requiring prior consent of the user (a request to enable telemetry is proposed to be added to the greeting interface after the first download).
The report includes data such as host name, kernel version, desktop component versions, detailed information about hardware and drivers involved, screen size and resolution information, network device MAC addresses, disk serial numbers, disk partition data, information about the number of running processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as systemd, gcc, bash and PipeWire.
The sent data is stored on the project server in the ClickHouse database and visualized using the Grafana platform. The IP addresses of users are not stored, and the hash from the /etc/machine-id file is used as the system identifier.
Аccording to the code https://github.com/manjaro/mdd/blob/master/mdd.py#L40 sends everything.
Let me put the question back to you. How do think the uniquely identifiable information will help them improve Manjaro?
No.
As I basically said, if you bothered to read my comment.
Disk serial numbers and such can help during bug reports and tracking faults. As an example, there were barracuda drives in the past with a 30% failure rate. And they’re likely just sending everything. It’s hard to tell what’s useful. But, if it’s common, you can add a warning as an example
Also, different serial numbers and such might be different hardware revisions which have bugs.
There are also products out there which are known to have duplicate Mac addresses and such
We develop middleware for a lot of hardware, and I’ve actually been considering adding telemetry (but would need a huge discussion about it in-house) because I believe there are a lot of features we’re adding to our products which are entirely unused (or only used by 1 person) as an example.
Telemetry is good for development efficiency. And, it might be hashed, opt in or might not reference your name (which means they can’t identify you personally).
Provided it’s opt in, it’s actually not a bad thing (yes I’ll get downvoted for that, but not too fussed). Mandatory is a different story, but remember, anyone can contribute to these projects.
And this is actually the 3rd major open source project I’ve seen the lemmy community try to gang up on this year. And it is discouraging developers
I’d go as far as to say that lemmy is basically anti Linux, and the community needs to start contributing and thanking developers, not just complaining every time they disagree with anything