Distributive developers Manjaro Linux, built on the basis of Arch Linux and oriented users, announced about the start of testing the new service MDD (Manjaro Data Donor), designed to collect statistics on the system and send it to the external project server. The author of MDD intended to include the sending of telemetry by default, but the solution has not yet been approved and, judging by objections of some developers and users, probably telemetry will be offered in the form of an option requiring the prior consent of the user (a request for the inclusion of telemetry is proposed to add greetings to the interface after the first load).
As the main motive for sending telemetry by default, the desire to improve the calculation of real users of the distribution is called, the number of which was still calculated through the analysis of requests to the Ping.manjaro.org host, sent via NetworkManager. According to the developers, this is not enough, since users accounting for the IP address is not accurate and does not allow monitoring statistics by time in time due to the fact that most users do not have constant IP addresses or work through address translators.
In addition to obtaining information about the number of users, the MDD service will also analyze information about the equipment used and the software environment chosen by the user. MDD written in Python and calls the utility inxi with the parameters “-fxxx” to obtain a complete report with information about the system. The report includes data such as the name of the host, the version of the kernel, the version of the desktop components, detailed information about the equipment and the drivers involved, information about the size and resolution of the screen, the MAC address of network devices, the disk breakdown, information about the number of launched processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as Systemd, GCC, Bash, and pipewire.
The data sent are stored on the project server in the DBMS