I edited my comment on your other reply and by my estimation, calculating every SHA256 of all MACs ever potentially issued takes less than 89 seconds on an RTX 3090.

I also think MACs are (or should be considered) personally identifiable information, since there is potentially a paper trail back to the person who bought it. Plus MACs are not secret information, it’s broadcast on the LAN and for wireless modules over the air in the immediate vicinity (though some systems will randomize wireless MACs for privacy reasons). Privacy-unfriendly software has been known to collect MACs (even from other devices on the network and in the vicinity), so there are already databases connecting MAC addresses with other data.

You don’t need this to count unique users. You could just assign a random number on install or whatever. Or even more simply, just run the thing once per month, should be accurate enough. Do they expect the software to just randomly spam duplicate reports? Don’t write it that way.

Best case they don’t care about collecting minimal data and don’t understand that hashed MACs are easily reversible. So incompetent fools with no sensitivity to privacy.

Maybe this should be Manjaro’s tagline: Not purposely malicious, just grossly negligent and ignorant.

Debian popcon is opt-in, first of all.

https://popcon.debian.org/FAQ

Q) What information is reported by popularity-contest ?

A) popularity-contest reports the system vendor [1], the system architecture you use, the version of popularity-contest you use and the list of packages installed on your system. For each package, popularity-contest looks at the most recently used (based on atime) files, and reports the filename, its last access time (atime) and last change time (ctime). However, some files are not considered, because they have unreliable atime. For privacy reasons, the times are truncated to multiple of twelve hours.

[1] i.e. the dpkg Vendor field, see dpkg-vendor(1).

So no fucking MAC addresses and machine-ids and harddrive serial numbers and stuff.

They only want package statistics, the point being to have statistics about the popularity of packages, mainly so they can be prioritized for the CD/DVD isos. You know, information that actually has a use, not hardware identifiers that can only be used for tracking purposes.

That’s not anonymous, that’s pseudonymous.

What is the point of this? The machine-id already looks to be some unique random number, so you’re calculating another unique random-looking number from that, might as well use the original number.

You can’t glean any useful information from a unique random-looking number that would help with developing Manjaro. You can’t calculate any statistics from that. The only use is tracking.

Edit: And as mentioned in my other comment, reversing the MAC SHA by brute force is trivial, so that one at least (and possibly the other hardware serial numbers they collect) shouldn’t even be considered pseudonymous.

MAC addresses are 48 bit, and half of that is just the manufacturer. So 24 bits really, and those bits aren’t random, I think manufacturers just assign these based on some scheme, like a serial number. Point is you could easily reverse the SHA by brute force.

You can’t calculate any useful statistic from a hash so literally the only use this would have is some sort of tracking.

Edit: I just looked up some data and I found someone using hashcat on an RTX 3090, which looks like it can do almost 10000 million SHA256 hashes per second of salted passwords (which are longer than 48 bit MACs, so MACs should be faster). 2²⁴ is 16.8 million, so it’ll take about 1.7 ms per vendor. I found a database with (all?) 53011 vendor ids:

>>> 2**24 * 53011 / 10000 / 1000 / 1000
88.93769973759998

Yup, 89 seconds. You can calculate the SHA256 of every single MAC ever potentially issued in 89 seconds on a bog-standard 3090.

Shoving everything into the task bar doesn’t strike me as more orderly. Less so really.

I’m not a Gnome user but I stopped minimizing my windows years ago. Don’t need that if you (a) don’t have icons on your desktop and (b) move your windows over to another workspace when stuff gets crowded.

Yeah better discriminate based on nationality /s. But why stop at that? Poor people are too easily bribed can’t have them. I hear the CIA recruits from top US universities, can’t trust those college grads either. Anyone belonging to some homophobic church or religious group? Better not what if they’re closeted gay and get blackmailed? Anyone in a monogamous relationship should be excluded for the same reason, if you think about it. *tips forehead*

Racists and Xenophobes will try to stop global collaboration,

Yes! Go on…

real conflict that matters will always be the smart vs the lowiq.

Uff… That’s some serious brainworms right there. How do you call your worldview? IQ Supremacy?

Maybe he’s trying to avoid conflict with US government, but he clearly is not trying to avoid conflict with that statement.

How does this prevent the Russians from accessing sensitive technology? Oh it doesn’t! It just excludes them from contributing to Linux, not from using it.

Accusing others from “arguing in bad faith” are we?

If you use netinstall you won’t have any CD-ROM sources in sources.list. I think that’s kind of stupid that the full iso installer even adds the CD-ROM line. The vast majority of people wouldn’t want that and it just confuses new users.

I guess the lawyers are working for the Linux Foundation? Linux development does not need and started without a legal structure. They could tell the lawyers and the Linux Foundation to get lost. Is the US government going to prosecute individuals for collaborating with individuals from Russia on free software projects? If that’s so, maybe wait till that actually happens and see what the courts have to say about that, instead of this anticipatory obedience.

And the rest is some rhetoric parlor trick and/or racist brainworms. How is not banning Russian individuals from kernel development “supporting Russian aggression”? And apparently there is no way anybody would argue against that without being a Russian paid actor or a propaganda victim. I’ve been watching these so-called “real news” and they love carrying water for genocide right now. Their terrible propaganda – our “real news”.

Scholz needs to be handed over to the Palestinians to answer for his crimes.

🫡

1: Probably any non-basic text editor has all these features. Except the tabs, which are not available by default on vim and emacs, but I think KDE’s kate (?) and Gnome’s gedit might have tabs by default, maybe. All the cool kids use vim or emacs though.

4: Haven’t tried but arch wiki says XBox One controllers work by default over USB. I will say that I have seen games not recognizing my (not XBox One) controllers sometimes when not running through steam, but in general the controller situation seems good on Linux.

5: mpv is perfect as it is

7: I know you said GUI but that’s a shell one-liner if I’ve ever seen one.

8: Yes there are Windows-key shortcuts (often called “Super” key on Linux) available for window management. The exact shortcuts depend on the window managers / desktop environment and are usually configurable.

9: Yes most anything works on any distro. For best results though, stick to mainstream distros and don’t be fooled by “trendy” distros. Those are not necessarily mainstream, even if you think they are based on what teenagers spam on reddit. If it doesn’t have at least a 10 year track record, it’s probably a fluke and won’t be supported in two years.

Nvidia: Just google whatever your distro + Nvidia, look for the official wiki or whatever, and follow the instructions. It shouldn’t be that hard on any distro. Never install the nvidia driver through nvidia’s website, that won’t work out well. The nvidia driver is system/kernel level software, you cannot install it in a way that isn’t specific to your distro without breaking something.

I personally do not like KDE, but you seem like someone who should go with KDE, which has lots GUI knobs and twists, which should suit your tastes. Windows power users tend to love that shit.

Also, for god’s sake, try to learn some shell commands, I swear it’ll make your switch easier.

Personally, my favoritism distribution is Debian, I would recommend it. RTFM though.

There’s some free dns servers which block certain stuff (pretty sure adguard has them, other products are available) which can be set on the router and/or the device itself. This is not very flexible but it’s easy to set up.

Removed by mod

How is this reasonable, they’re traumatizing the kid why exactly? 10 year olds are out on their own all the time in Germany and aren’t being chased by police.

Pretty sure that’s also from Raymond, who is racists af, see my other comment.