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.

I personally can’t stand those neon icon themes, but this looks like a lot of care and work went into it! It’s always fun to see stuff that makes fellow Gnomies happy.

Honestly, this is kind of a weird question. It’s Google. They collect all of it. Every picture, every note, every keystroke. All of it.

The answer to "what information does GOOGLE SERVICE collect is always all of it.

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.

Battle for Wesnoth

This one never gets the love it deserves. It’s a fantastic turn based strategy game with multiple campaigns and storylines, multiplayer, and campaign design tools. It’s an old project (started in 2003, IIRC), but it’s still fantastic

• http://www.wesnoth.org/
• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/599390/Battle_for_Wesnoth/

Hedgewars

Basically, this is Worms but with adorable little hedgehogs instead of, well, worms. Single player is okay, and it has online multiplayer I guess, but the real fun (just like in Worms) is local multiplayer. Also, it has Portal Guns. There’s really no downside to this one.

• https://www.hedgewars.org/
• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2223810/Hedgewars/
• Itch: https://hedgewars.itch.io/hedgewars

Re-volt io and RVGL

This one’s a little iffy. Re-volt was a fantastic R / C racing game with bright graphics, fun tracks, excellent controls, and a killer soundtrack. For good or ill, it was put out by Acclaim, which self destructed in 2004. The Re-volt fan community, however, doesn’t know the meaning of the word “quit.”

Nowadays, you can join a lively community with regular online tournaments of the game. There’s a new cross platform engine called RVGL (that’s Re Volt Game Launcher), and metric tonnes of mods and fan content. You still need the original game’s assets, though, which is where it’s dicey; they’re technically abandonware not open source, unless I’m mistaken.

Anyway, links!

• https://re-volt.io/
• https://rvgl.org/

Unciv

This project’s aim is to be Civilization V, but with more abstract visuals, and, or course, free. In short, it’s FreeCiv, but Civ V instead of II and a UI from the 2020s rather than the 80s. (Not throwing shade here; FreeCiv is an amazing project that is exactly what it wants to be!)

• Github: https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
• Itch: https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv

If that’s not enough to keep ya’ happy, I know a few more, but they’ve mostly been covered by other folks here.

Edit: formatting

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 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…

Oh that is fantastic. I need to use that one.

That is elaborate, vulgar, and 100% delightful. I love hearing stuff like this. Cursing in American English is so boring lol

Heya. I’m an American, and I’ve got to say thank you. I seriously look forward to calling someone a “ball violin” in English, but if fully intend to add klootviool and and klootzak to my day to day swear bank. Those are so satisfying to say!

You don’t seem to know what “lesser of two evils” means.

It doesn’t mean “that guy’s bad, so the less evil guy is good, actually, and totally deserves our support!”

It means “no matter which one of these assholes wins, I’m fucked, but if I’m lucky the one guy will use lube.”

I can’t do a damn thing about the two party system. That ship sailed before I was born, and nothing I do as an individual can change it. In fact, I can’t see a solution short of possibly violent revolution. If that happens before I’m to old and feeble to help, great. Other wise, I’m fucked no matter who I pick, so I’m sure as shit going to pick the one who just wants to fuck me and not fuck me plus kill my trans neighbor.

I’m sick and tired of being called stupid, gullible, or uninformed just because I can actually see how completely fucked we are. Your shit is great for people who still have hope. My shit is just trying to survive without the Gestapo coming for my neighbors.

So come get me for the revolution. In the meantime, stop calling me stupid for being depressed and practical.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to copy and paste this in reply to some other lemming that thinks I’m a gullible moron instead.

I agree with everything but voting. Not because we ever have great options, but because sometimes there are terrifyingly bad ones, and while option A might not be at all good, option B is so much worse.

That’s why it’s called “the lesser of two evils.”

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?