https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg
Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.
Personally, my only wish for Bazzite is a Cosmic version 👼 I tried it out recently and it seems fairly impressive
How do you know how many active users?
fedora distros have a thing called countme that pings their servers so they can measure general trends in how many people are using the OS and the various spins, which can be helpful for determining what to focus on. some amount of the userbase opt out of it
And this is on by default?
It is on by default, but can be disabled in your repo config: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf_ref.html
The feature works by adding a flag to one random http request to a fedora repo every week. Fedora then aggregates the http logs that have been flagged to derive their metrics. You can opt out of sending the flag, but if you’re querying fedora repos then you still end up in their http log.
It appears as though it is…
But saying it pings their servers isn’t quite a fair statement as it’s not some background service that opens a network connection, it sounds to me at least like it’s data that is sent to the Fedora repos once a week when you update your system?
Would be glad to be corrected on this though as I am a long time Fedora user now and I’m not overly fond of my data being collected by big corpo; it’s why I left Windows in the first place 🙄
I mean fedora is pretty famous for data gathering in the Linux space. It’s kinda what they do. They have ended up in rather sizeable kerfuffles over it.
Fedora is after all one of the two /corpo/ option of the Linux world right next to Ubuntu.
I feel like people lately go a bit overboard when it’s about protecting their “data”.
As far as I see all it does is just send one single number that shows that there is someone using this specific operation system and it does not include any personal or unique to the user information.
In my opinion this does not even qualify as “my data”
That’s cool. I don’t really have a problem with that, just curious.