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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

If telemetry really bothers you, I think you'd be better off with a different OS

Which one? An essentially unsupported Linux distribution? Canonical does telemetry as well. Apple has been doing this for years an yet we still don't sweat wrathful spate of headlines over it.

Oh and by the way, the logfiles from most package servers provide an accurate description of what you're doing with your machine and a weak concept of identity. So you'll need to avoid those.

Browsers keep updating and the vast majority of websites collect telemetry as well. So no more internet.

But yeah, the OS app level telemetry seems like a pretty big deal and we should stress out about it.

Windows has a standard logging infrastructure across all apps, ETW, which can also be used for telemetry.

Why is Canonical the only option here? There's plenty of other Linux choices that don't use telemetry.

Also, if you use a browser that respects your privacy, and treats you like an adult, then you can turn that telemetry off.

If only they bothered to support modern laptops as well as Ubuntu does.

Bullshit. I've had a better experience with Ubuntu than with Windows 10. And since Ubuntu 16.04 the telementary thing you were talking about is desabled by default. Or you could use other Ubuntu derivate, like Xubuntu.

I think your definition of "good experience" and mine differ substantially then.

Because if getting 1/2 the battery life if I want CUDA support is pretty shit in my opinion.

> Canonical does telemetry as well.

Apart from their short flirt with Amazon (which is now long gone), what else do they do apart from package updates?

There are also major distributions like Fedora and Debian which never did this.

Please stop spreading your FUD.

Oh and by the way, the logfiles from most package servers provide an accurate description of what you're doing with your machine and a weak concept of identity.

Those "package servers" are distributed mirror networks with no central entity being able to read all the logs.

Yeah, that's what I don't get about posts like this. You can either be indifferent with (legal) telemetry collection in which case you don't need posts like this or you are not comfortable with the idea in which case you shouldn't be using windows to begin with.

You can go through all the hops, run every script out there and Microsoft can push a new update tomorrow that will put you back on square one. So why even bother when you can't ever be really sure you achieved what you wanted and for how long.

Like what? OSX and Ubuntu have this too.

It can be turned off. Not in Windows, only toned down a bit.

Which telemetry on macOS is not opt-in?

Looking at this script there are seems like many more vectors on Windows then macOS and Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution. Slackware is great if you want an OS that literally only does what you tell it to. Ditto OpenBSD if you're even more paranoid about telemetry.

Granted, they aren't for beginners, but that's the sliding scale in action.

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