The developers of the Manjaro Linux distribution, based on Arch Linux and aimed at beginner users, have announced the start of testing a new service called MDD (Manjaro Data Donor), designed to collect system statistics and send them to an external project server. The author of MDD intended to include telemetry submission by default (opt-out), but this decision has not yet been finalized. According to objections from some developers and users, telemetry will likely be offered as an option that requires user consent beforehand (a prompt to enable telemetry is suggested to be added to the welcome interface after the first boot).
The primary motivation for submitting telemetry by default is the desire to improve the count of actual users of the distribution, whose numbers have until now been estimated by analyzing requests to the host ping.manjaro.org sent through NetworkManager. According to the developers, this is insufficient, as counting users in connection to IP address is not accurate and does not allow tracking statistics over time since most users do not have permanent IP addresses or operate through address translators.
In addition to gathering information about the number of users, the MDD service will also analyze details about the hardware in use and the chosen user software environment. MDD is written in Python and calls the inxi utility with the parameters "-Fxxx" to obtain a complete report containing system information. The report includes data such as the hostname, kernel version, versions of desktop components, detailed hardware information, driver information, screen size and resolution, MAC addresses of network devices, disk partition data, information about running processes and installed packages, and versions of core packages like systemd, gcc, bash, and PipeWire.
The submitted data is stored on server the project in a ClickHouse database and visualized using the Grafana platform. User IP addresses are not stored, and a hash of the contents of the file /etc/machine-id is used as the system identifier.
Source: opennet.ru
