XPost: alt.os.linux.mint   
   From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Mon, 2/23/2026 8:15 PM, Jonathan N. Little wrote:   
   > Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
   >> On Sun, 22 Feb 2026 03:43:04 -0800, El Kabong wrote:   
   >>   
   >>> The guy who runs Canonical put telemetry in Linux.   
   >>   
   >> Where?   
   >>   
   >   
   > Maybe he means the installer prompt to send system specs ONE TIME after   
   > the install to Canonical, or the crash reports you are also prompted to   
   > send to help in debugging. Note that in each I said *prompt*, you are   
   > given the option each time, and you can inspect the report each time.   
   > Hardly "telemetry" as one gets with other OS's.   
   >   
      
   I have a simpler definition for this.   
      
      "Any form of excessive busywork in the background"   
      
   There is tracker and tracker-miner, there can on some distros be   
   "usage statistics", where as a user I have never noticed the user   
   community frequent use of certain utilities, *ever* causing those   
   utilities to be installed by default.   
      
   When I booted up Zorin LiveDVD, there was a burst of network activity   
   (and not the burble of DHCP either). Someone was receiving a good-morning-gram.   
   And that is an example of busywork. And as busywork, should I be interested   
   in what is shooting up there ? That represents "a load on my mind", just   
   one more thing to remember. It doesn't matter what's in there, it's   
   an irritant. If you want to send good-morning-grams, print on the   
   graphics screen in the form of a notation, what was sent, then fade it out.   
      
   Thunderbird has this too, attempts to track how many installs have   
   been done and so on. One of the prices you pay for this, is an   
   excessively complex "profiles.ini".   
      
   The reason for my definition, is I don't want to get bogged down   
   into discussions of "well, what could they do with this information?".   
   That's a waste of the users time, installing walls and fences,   
   digging trenches, covering holes in the back garden with nylon   
   outdoor carpet. We shouldn't have to clean up this crap or   
   intervene. I shouldn't need to be install PI-Holes.   
      
   If you install the Diagnostic Data Viewer in Windows, the detail   
   goes down to the level of whether you copied and pasted in Notepad,   
   and whether you edited in markup mode (so it is tracking attach rate on   
   a new feature). At one time, the DDV was entirely useless, just   
   a shit-storm of numbers. Today, there is a good degree of plaintext,   
   but as "studies" go, it's still over the top. I would have preferred   
   to see "logs of crashes and install failures" shooting up to Vortex,   
   but anything like that is relatively skeletal as "Telemetry". They   
   do shoot up a snapshot collecting environment details on a major   
   failure, and on my slow ADSL2 upload, that can take as long as   
   a hour to complete. If you scroll the DDV, you'll be dizzy in no-time :-)   
   But to give them credit, it's marginally more transparent, whether it is   
   complete or not.   
      
      Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)