I just want to clearly say that the #Fedora telemetry discussions are not a "Red Hat conspiracy". I know tensions are understandably high right now, but this is legitimately a proposal and unlike most changes in RHEL, there actually is an opportunity for community input, and not just for assent or dissent, but also alternative ideas for improvement.
@vwbusguy
The only reason I'm currently not invested in the discussion is, that it only affects gnome, and I wouldn't touch that dumpster fire with a ten-foot pole anyway. And this brings me to my major criticism of the what of data collection: It does not capture "Fuck that shit, I'm out of here!". The gnome developers don't exactly have a great history of listening to their users and third party developers. No amount of data can change that. And without that any data is meaningless. All it can ever do is for them to spin it in a way where they "do what the users need", according to their interpretation of useless data and their opinionated vision of what a user should want.
And, reading the discussion, it feels like that attitude can be read at least between the lines: Tunnel vision, what they consider non-intrusive metrics is baffling, and they don't (want to) understand "No!".
The moment that shit leaks into the general user land, affecting all spins, I'll drop fedora like a hot potato.
@sarvo That's a very limiting position. I'm not saying it's without any merit (I work in the public sector, myself), but very hard to find software that doesn't "deal with corpos".
#Linux users generally value privacy and they also value good data. Finding a way forward that carefully reflects those values among Fedora users seems like a noble goal, even if the conversation along the way can get heated at times (even as most have kept things very respectful).
Also, collecting data from #Fedora users isn't a new thing. It was always opt-in to my knowledge, and it was useful for figuring out what hardware to support.
Recently, #RedHat dropped internal support for #LibreOffice, which got negative press. If there were data coming from Fedora and/or #RHEL to show how popular the RPM packages for LibreOffice were, they might have made a different call. This is hypothetical. I don't and never have worked for Red Hat. But perhaps this gives an idea of why this could be useful and beneficial to #Fedora.
That said, I and many others, personally think an opt-in solution is imperative. Others disagree, having concerns about less useful data. This has led to some productive conversations, I believe, around how these things are presented and communicated to end users. If you are a #Fedora user and/or contributor and have an opinion on this, please (politely) join the conversation happening.
That said, as someone who disagreed with recent #RHEL changes, I do not believe there's any conspiracy here.
@vwbusguy Telemetry is not a dirty word, opt-out is. That's all most users are against. They want to choose without any default selected. It's a simple situation that's easily rectified for the majority.
@engarneering I'll point out that Fedora is a community distro and Fedora users stepped in with regards to packaging LibreOffice. If your takeaway from this is that Red Hat dictates everything that happens in Fedora, then that's the very opposite of the point I was intending to make. Fedora completely has the power to deny this proposal from the Red Hat desktop team. It also has the opportunity to adapt it into something that may better represent the interests and values of the community.
@engarneering@vwbusguy Personally, for work related endevors, that might be true and I might share some of your concerns, but fedora is still fedora. We've done a few things that flew in the face of what RH wanted over the years, and that might continue. We're still holding elections.
The optics on this don't look great, but I believe that they're looking to better the Fedora community, and not to try to pull some shadowy shenanigans.
@paradoxguitarist@engarneering The fact that Fedora ships btrfs by default when RHEL stripped out btrfs speaks to the power the community has over what seems to be in the best interest of RHEL.
@vwbusguy Moving desktop apps to Flatpaks to reduce the burden of the RH desktop team was the correct call. They get more time to work on Gnome instead of fixing bugs in an office suite.
I’ve run RHEL on the desktop, and it was awful. The moldy office suite was one of the problems.
People conflate the two. The proposed metrics system goes to great lengths to make it impossible to fingerprint or even correlate two data points from any individual user.
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