In the upcoming release of Fedora Workstation 42, scheduled for spring next year, there are proposals to add components for gathering and sending metrics that will allow for the study of users' real preferences and consider them when making decisions related to the distribution's development, prioritizing development efforts, and improving user convenience. The proposal is still under discussion and has not yet been reviewed by the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which is responsible for the technical aspects of Fedora's development.
By default, telemetry collection will be disabled and can only be activated by explicit user action. Separate options will be provided to enable telemetry accumulation on the local system and to send it to Fedora servers. Users will also have the ability to view the collected statistics on their system and to remove components related to telemetry.
To maintain privacy, only general metrics that do not identify individual users are planned to be collected. For example, the metrics will not cover information such as an IP address, email, data on open websites and files. Examples of collected metrics include information about CPU, graphics card, camera and peripheral devices, data on the selected language and input methods, a list of used applications and extensions for GNOME Shell, statistics on application launches, window management, and virtual desktops, frequency of access to the configurator and state of individual settings, information on memory and disk usage, system and application crash counters, details on memory shortage situations, information on connected repositories, data on connection counts through gnome-connections, utilized protocols, the number of bookmarks and tags in the file manager, mounted external file systems, and selected sorting modes.
All components used for collecting and processing metrics on the client and server sides will be completely open and available for auditing. server Each metric will be stored separately in an anonymized form and without links to other metrics. Third parties will not be involved in the service support, which will be supervised by a special group of developers and administrators created within the Fedora project. The telemetry transfer process is planned to be made as transparent as possible for auditing, and the metrics collected will be regulated by a separate set of rules describing what types of data can be collected and which cannot. The community will be given the opportunity to oversee data collection, ensuring there is no abuse, maintaining confidentiality, and compliance with established rules.
To send metrics, the technology of "ethical telemetry" Azafea, developed by the Endless distribution, is planned to be used. Azafea manipulates aggregated data without creating profiles of individual users and without referring to external services, aggregators, or storage solutions. The code components for processing Azafea telemetry are open under the MPL 2.0 license, allowing users to deploy a telemetry collection server on their infrastructure if desired, for example, to accumulate statistics with additional metrics about system performance in local networks.
On the server side, a primary data reception proxy and the Azafea service will be involved in processing incoming metrics. The proxy temporarily stores the metrics received from users in Redis storage, while the Azafea service periodically retrieves and saves them in a PostgreSQL database. User IP addresses are not stored in the database (the country is determined and saved using a local GeoIP database). On the user side, packages such as eos-metrics (a D-Bus interface for recording events from applications and services), eos-event-recorder-daemon (a background process for accumulating and sending telemetry), and eos-metrics-instrumentation (components for collecting individual metrics) will be used for accumulating and sending telemetry.
The tasks that telemetry collection will solve:
- Prioritizing resource allocation — by knowing which equipment, applications, and features most users rely on, focus can be directed towards their development.
- Adding improvements and optimizations based on usage statistics and performance data.
- Choosing optimal default settings based on typical configuration changes.
- Promoting user-centered and data-driven development practices.
Additionally, proposals have been noted to add new flatpak and diskadmin groups in Fedora 42 to provide non-privileged users access to system package management functions in the Flatpak format and external drives. This change will eliminate the need to add users to the wheel group, allowing work with flatpak and external disks without granting access to other administrative tasks. For users in the wheel group, the ability to unlock (LUKS) and mount external drives without prompting for a password is planned.
Source: opennet.ru
