221–230 of 424 posts
People hating telemetry just because it is telemetry are tiring as hell. Blame telemetry for collection of unreasonable stuff, not for collecting data that is valuable for software improvement and doesnt violate privacy.
Based on the state of Microsoft software these days, I don’t think telemetry is as useful as developers think it is.
You can count on the tech industry to provide you with a daily dose of outrage. This is very corrosive. Not only does it poison the well people want to use towards positive goals, but with tech being effectively unavoidable by anybody but extreme hermits, it creates a sense of complete and irreversible moral decay that permeates all of society.
> it creates a sense of complete and irreversible moral decay or, it is just another reflection of the "complete and irreversible moral decay that permeates all of society". the decay of any civilization is predictable and irreversible, and not a pretty sight...
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The worst thing about linux is that it is made an maintained by people who like linux. I would love more than anything to see a paid fork of linux whose goal was to make a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI. People will come out of woodwork here to suggest whatever shitty half-assed CLI wrapper enviroment. No. No. No. They suck. I have been using them on and off for 20 years. Including righ…
There is a FreeBSD fork that does exactly that, but to use it you need to buy a $3000 hardware dongle.... That's the path a lot of Mac Users are on, though we also have a telemetry problem; the only advantage is that it stays "in house".
Windows and its ecosystem have already become a telemetry monster; if you're fine with everything else, you ought to be fine with this. The linked Intel support page shows the simple instructions for opting out of the telemetry. Having said that, 2022 was already the year of the Linux desktop. Everything works. KDE gets better every week. Be the owner of your technology. Join us!
Switching to linux is a good option but the ideal solution is one where coporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default. Microsoft has normalized default optout telemetry in the OS, IDE & developer tooling and now others are also following suit even in areas where telemetry doesn't make sense. I wish there is an easy solution to the pervasive telemetry problem for those who can't switch for any…
Technical solutions (firewalls, switching to Linux, etc.) aren't necessarily practical for many people.
> the ideal solution is one where corporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default
This is probably the only effective solution, but I don't see it happening without enforceable legislation.
What is the Mac OS side of telemetry looking like? It feels like Apple having commercials about how their computers don’t record everything you do would be a great knock against chrome os and windows, but I honestly don’t know if that’s true.
The vast majority of third party applications are also sending everything they can access and then some, often far exceeding in scope and nowhere even close to meeting the privacy and security standards as is claimed in the relevant policies.
Telemetry endpoints are increasingly being CNAME masked or called through anynymous proxies. Betraying the customer/user trust this way is absolutely despicable. Shipping normal release channel apps with a Sentry SDK configured to run in debug mode seems to be the new meta for some reason (nothing good, probably).
And then there's Mozilla... Not only are many of their recommended extensions secretly sending telemetry and doing all sorts of other things that violate their extension policies multiple times over (strict verification and thorough code auditing process my arse), but Firefox itself includes UTM and other tracking parameters in its outgoing links to third parties (including all preinstalled search providers) even when "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data" is unmistakably set not to allow it.
Things would be different if this software were to have actually improved over time, but in most cases the opposite is true. Thinking about it, the more telemetry an app collects, the faster it seems to deteriorate across the board. An example of two opposites on this spectrum would be VIM vs Spotify.
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Native Instruments is dying anyway.
How does that matter if you already invested 1000+ USD? Go to Plugin Alliance [0] and select any plugin and when you scroll down you'll see that they are Windows and Mac only. Same for Plugin Boutique [1]. [0] https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/amek_eq_250.html [1] https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth...
We need a new rule for tech, that says "Any major tech conglomerate grows until their main source of revenue is tracking and telemetry." Why the fuck does Intel need to know "the category of websites I visit, but not the URL themselves"? Who defines the categories? We all know that metadata is at this point as important as data. Stallman was right.
And yes, Stallman was and is right about a great many things. He will be remembered with respect in the underground general-purpose computing scene of the not-too-distant future.
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Linux is great! And, thanks to Steam, a lot of games wirk as well. Not all, but most. Ubuntu, I haven't tried anything else so far, is a charm on Lenovo hardware. Update wise, it is were Windows was a couple of years ago. Meaning there are random updates that just kill and break certain functions. Happened last week, everything was running fine, including steam, as it always did. Until an update managed to delete the…
It is unfortunate that people recommended Ubuntu as a starting distro for so long. It does too much. It will update things for you, or give you a pop-up to tell you to update. Updates happen all at once, rather than a little at a time, so you get these big dramatic updates with combinatorial bug explosions. Maybe the repos will be gone if you don’t update in time. Maybe your favorite packages have moved from apt to s…
Admittedly I'm reasonably comfortable in CLI, but I don't know a whole lot about bash, just cd, mv, cp, ls -a, etc.
Is xubuntu better than ubuntu just because it removes a lot of cruft?
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Bootable snapshots are a thing, also known as boot environments. You need to use ZFS or btrfs, or possibly bcachefs or LVM offer them. And they never have seemed to have a great implementation on Linux compared FreeBSD, but they do exist.
> but they do exist. And here's the crux of it, isn't it? Unless it's accessible and enabled by default, it might as well not exist from the PoV of the end user. Windows' restore points happen automatically before updates or driver updates. Then you're prompted automatically to restore if Windows fails to boot after an update. As usual Linux has all the pieces but no desire to create UX to go with it. Which is a sham…
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It would be great if Linux had some automatic checkpoints so you can revert to a working system after an update. So many times updates leave a broken system and re-install Ubuntu from scratch is quicker than fixing the problem.
To be pedantic It's impossible for "Linux" to have this as this exists way higher than the kernel or even the filesystem layer. Linux mint has timeshift. The now defunct Project Trident installer set up a zfs root with zfsbootmenu and an update script that automatically sets up a boot environment you can revert and boot from with the built in feature of zfsbootmenu. Both let you achieve your goal. You can set up eith…