To be fair, Fedora has opt-in telemetry. It’s 100% anonymized, though, and helps with development. I always say yes when I’m running a beta (like now).

That having been said, you should always check the privacy policies of any given distro. They tend to all be pretty up front about it (kinda hard to lie about it when anyone can check your source code…).

AFAIK, though, neither Mint nor Elementary collect telemetry by default, although they might have opt-in like Fedora. Both are based on Ubuntu LTS, but they also both scrape out so much stuff that they’re devoid of most of the Canonical junk.

TL;DR: Don’t lay this one on me, buddy. You walked in here looking for a fight.

I didn’t much care for the direction you started in. If you wanted an actual discussion, then opening with hostility and claims that could be refuted if you’d bothered with less than a minute of research is the wrong way to go.

If you want a civilized discussion, you have to start with a civilized post. My responses have been no more hostile than your opening salvo.

As it happens, Google’s influence over Mozilla is of massive concern to me. And I agree that the change was not needed. But it’s not obscure, it’s not hard to find out how to do what you wanted to do, and your hostility to responses suggesting DuckDuckGo only confirmed my suspicion that you didn’t want an answer, you wanted a fight.

So I gave you one.

Here’s the deal. If you walk into a place with guns blazing, you don’t get to act all surprised and indignant when someone fires back.

Maybe. But even if that was the case, the way it is now isn’t obfuscated. It’s not difficult. It’s not hard to find out how to do it. You made a big long post to complain about an “obfuscated” feature that I found in under a minute.

Next time, either do a search or ask for help, instead of whinging like a n00b. Or worse, some kind of Google FUD-spreading parasite.

FFS, Jesus Wept. I finally understand those blokes over at FreeBSD telling me to RTFM twenty years ago.

Edit: Apparently, the synonym for complain I used before was offensive. It was not the “B” word, which I only use in reference to female dogs. Just wanted that to be clear.

What are you talking about?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-engine-firefox#w_add-a-search-engine-from-the-address-bar

That took me like two second to find. You can also use addons, like this one for Qwant:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/qwantcom-for-firefox/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search

Which I like. But none of this is hard or “obfuscated”, and it’s literally identical to changing or adding a new search engine on Waterfox.

I have a lot of issues with Mozilla, not least of which is their reliance on Google for income. It’s like hiring a dingo as a babysitter. But c’mon, man.

Oh, I agree it’s a leap. It’s just slightly less of a leap than complaining about the NSA. I’m not saying you’re wrong about the knee-jerk reaction some Americans have to Chinese tech and China in general.

It’s just that the sputtering nonsense makes very slightly more sense after you mentioned the ban in the original post. You opened a crack in the door, is what I’m saying, and if an American Jingoist Asshat can get his head in the crack, he’s gonna get all the way in.

Well, it doesn’t really, except that you mentioned the US trade ban, which brings the reason for the US trade ban into the topic at least tangentially.

I do. I’m with you on that. But it makes marginally more sense that bringing up the NSA would.

Oh, I care about Five (Seven, Nine) Eyes every bit as much as I care about China, I assure you. But in a thread about a Chinese company’s new tech, it would be a bit weird to complain about NSA data mining. Kinda off topic, if you see what I mean.

I hate Gen Z

Dude. I have a group that only talks on Facebook Messenger. It’s 100% Gen X and Millennials. Don’t blame the generation, it just makes you sound like an old man yelling “get off my lawn”.

I mean, yeah! Trump’s facing 91 felony charges at my last count, and been indicted at least 4 times, but sure. Ain’t nobody doin’ nothin’.

I was just thinking of doing a fresh install on my gaming rig. I might give this a try. I’ve been wanting to dig into Universal Blue for a while and this seems like a good place to start!

Gonna go with Manjaro. I can’t, for the life of me, understand why it gets the support it does. It’s not fantastic to begin with, with an apparently incompetent management team. Add in that all the theming is flat and lifeless, and I’m just confused.

I mean, any Arch derived distro with an “easy installer” kinda confuses me. Archinstall is fairly easy to use (although a bit ugly), and most other Arch based distros seem to miss what I see as the main point of Arch: getting to know and personalize your system. So things like Endeavor, Xero, etc. Don’t make a lot of sense to me either. But at least they’re not effectively accidentally DDOSing the AUR…

I recently got into a long, really dumb argument. I used the phrase “lesser of two evils” and what seemed like fifty people (actually two or three) seemed to think that meant I approved of, strenuously endorsed, and would defend the actions of the “lesser evil.”

To me, this seemed like a basic misunderstanding of what the phrase meant, so I defined it. Their response to my definition was to say the same sort of thing they’d already said while claiming to totally know what “lesser of two evils” meant.

I lost my cool, and explained what the phrase meant again. One of the folks explained themselves calmly while the others seemed to think I was a congenital idiot because I kept repeating myself.

I don’t want this to get any longer, so I’ll just say that we were talking past each other. Nobody (well, except fr the one guy who stopped to explain what he meant) was really comprehending what the other person said. So everyone was a dumbass, basically. Story of my life, really.

At least, I think that’s what happened. Watch the asshole who called me a liar and an idiot show up here to not explain how I’m a liar and an idiot again.

I went to DL it and try it out, and… dude, I hate Sourceforge. I know how privileged this sounds, but I’m not spending a half hour DLing something that I can DL in a minute and a half somewhere else.

Anybody got a line on a torrent?

So… is it Snap infected err… Snap based, like Ubuntu? Because otherwise it looks kinda neat.