GNOME on Linux Mint 21
Recently, Red Hat developers released through an announcement the availability of the tool "gnome-info-collect", which is intended to collect telemetry about systems running the GNOME environment.
It is mentioned that as such "gnome-info-collect" is a new tool that “collects anonymous data” about how GNOME systems are configured and then sends that information to the GNOME servers, where it can be analyzed.
The purpose of this tool is help improve GNOME, by providing data that can inform design decisions, influence where resources are spent, and generally help GNOME better understand its users.
The information provided will allow us to analyze the preferences of GNOME users and take them into account when making decisions related to improving the usability and development of the shell. With the help of the obtained data, developers will be able to better understand the needs of users and highlight the areas of activity that should be prioritized.
About gnome-info-collect
Gnome-info-collect is a simple client/server application that collects data from the system and passes it to the GNOME server. The data is processed anonymously, without storing information about specific users and hosts, but to avoid duplicates, a salted hash is attached to the data, created based on the machine ID (/etc/machine-id) and username.
Before sending, the prepared data is displayed to the user for transmission to confirm the operation. Data that can be used to identify the system, such as the IP address and the exact time on the user's side, is filtered out and not recorded on the server.
The data collected is completely anonymous and will be used solely for the purpose of improving the usability and user experience of GNOME. No personal information, such as usernames or email addresses, is recorded. Any potentially identifiable information, such as the IP address of the sender and the precise time the data was received, is discarded on the server side. To prevent the same client from sending data multiple times, a skip hash of the machine ID and username is used.
All this ensures that the data collected is confidential and untraceable.
Information collected includes: distribution used, hardware configuration (including manufacturer and model), list of installed applications, list of favorite applications (displayed in the panel), flatpak support and access to Flathub in GNOME software, types of accounts used in GNOME online, shared services enabled (DAV, VNC, RDP, SSH), virtual desktop settings, number of users per system, web browser used, GNOME extensions enabled.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details In the following link.
Download and get gnome-info-collect
For those who are interested in supporting the project and willing to participate in data collection, they can install the tool quite easily. I should mention that ready-made packages are offered for Ubuntu, openSUSE, Arch Linux, and Fedora.
For those who are users of Ubuntu or any derivative of it, you can install the tool by opening a terminal and typing the following command in it:
sudo snap install --classic gnome-info-collect
As for Fedora users, you can install by opening a terminal and typing into it:
sudo dnf copr enable vstanek/gnome-info-collect sudo dnf install gnome-info-collect
While for those who are users of Arch Linux, Manjaro and any other derivatives, they can perform the installation by typing:
sudo pacman -S gnome-info-collect
In the case of those who are openSUSE users, the installation can be done by typing these commands in your terminal:
zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:Next/openSUSE_Factory/GNOME:Next.repo zypper refresh zypper install gnome-info-collect
Finally, they should also know that the source code is offered so that those interested can compile the tool on their own. The code, as well as the instructions and more information about the tool, can be obtained this link.