KingKRool
It is not legal for employees alleging sexual assault or harassment. Because Congress passed a law making that illegal. Also, it is not legal for baggage handlers, because the Supreme Court said there’s an exemption for working in interstate commerce. IIRC Congress tried to ban it across the board last year, but it died in the Senate and then the House flipped so there won’t be another chance for a few years at least.
KDE was the first one I used after getting more comfortable with Linux and leaving Unity behind. KDE was very customizable and extensible, but when you actually started customizing it quickly became unreliable. I stuck with it for a few years then I tried Elementary next and it was pretty polished but it was limited to a specific distribution. After that I went to GNOME and I’ve been using it for 7 years now. It does need a few extensions, but otherwise I’ve found that it works quite well. I think I’ve also changed, I’m not as interested in things like wobbly windows anymore. I just want the desktop environment to stay out of my way, but I also don’t want it to be too bare bones.
I think it’s fine. Actually, I think it’s even a good idea. As long as they are upfront with users and get consent and let them opt-out at any time.
I have been the person to implement telemetry in an app, and when done correctly it can really be useful for making the experience better for everyone. It doesn’t always have to be about monetization and ads and tracking you across the web. Without data, you’re flying blind, you rely on users to self-report data to you and that selects for the more technical, knowledgeable users, who may not be having an experience that is representative of your average user.
Some real examples: I added monitoring for the type of exceptions thrown and how often they occur. When we push updates, we have alerts that fire and stop the update if the client error rate increases with the new version. Another is the browser or OS type and version, not the full user agent either, a redacted version to avoid fingerprinting. This helps us determine if it’s safe to start using a new API or standard. Other things we monitored were performance related, like measuring the time from app open to when it has actually loaded data and become responsive. That helped us catch some regressions or determine if improvements we made actually made a difference in the real world. None of this was ever used for ads or for tracking users, it was all for making our app better.
To me, it looks like this is what Fedora has in mind, not something malicious. With the client side code open source, we can trust but verify.
Better support for larger screens, such as for tablets. We’ve heard this story before, so I don’t have much hope, but I want to believe. I’m a long suffering Android tablet user.
Also, the ability to limit which photos and videos an app can access instead of granting all or nothing access.
Yeah, it’s not easy to do it the right way, and the word telemetry gets a bad connotation from the way it’s used by Microsoft and others. I understand why it makes people nervous. But it can absolutely be done and doing it in the open is the right way instead of using some proprietary solution. Shooting down the idea without even seeing their implementation is not productive.
I can see the concerns about having the box checked by default, but I see the flip side as well, as otherwise that leads to the same issue with selecting for a certain type of user and not getting a representative selection of data. It’s why it’s important to design it so that even if someone inadvertently leaves it on, they aren’t horrified if they see the data collected. That’s going to mean sacrifices to the amount and type of data in order to preserve privacy. Maybe they can have it unchecked by default but put a speed bump showing an example of what is collected and imploring users to enable it if they skip past that screen too quickly. These are the kinds of conversations we should be having about this.
Unfortunately people are a bit too conspiracy minded, many comments bring up the Red Had source controversy which is just ridiculous and completely unproductive (and also not controversial IMO but that’s a rant for another thread).
I don’t think that was confirmed yet. I suspect the biggest issue with this is how to surface it to non-technical users in a friendly and consistent manner, not the actual cloning. My guess is that if it does make it, there will be an option hidden in the developer settings and it won’t get much fanfare.
