Comment by XorNot
3 years ago
Ads in Windows. Just...the insane amounts of ads.
There's probably a distro offering for Linux that should be made where is promise is just "I'm not contacting the internet unless you ask me too".
3 years ago
Ads in Windows. Just...the insane amounts of ads.
There's probably a distro offering for Linux that should be made where is promise is just "I'm not contacting the internet unless you ask me too".
> "I'm not contacting the internet unless you ask me to"
I think there kind of is? Like, most Linux distros actually?
Yes, Ubuntu has snaps which try to talk to the internet and autoupdate, and yes this is absolutely terrible. Yes, sometimes a distro might notify you there are updates available. Yes, sometimes a distro talks to a ntp server to sync the time. But, generally, I don't feel internet usage is inflicted on me, I inflict it on myself.
In what ways which bother you does your Linux distro contact the internet without asking?
Ubuntu also has services like fwupd and unattended-upgrades that are configured by default to run periodically without asking the user. I do not know if there are any others.
Fortunately, as long as the user knows about them, they are fairly straightforward to mask with systemctl.
For people like me, who like having complete control and knowledge of everything their machine is doing, Arch GNU/Linux a good choice.
And then you run Firefox and it starts calling home all by itself. That one still bugs me.
I miss when I could put Wireshark on an interface and nothing would show up until I pressed a button somewhere.
This.
How is it that I paid for Windows (begrudgingly) and yet it's constantly undermining my efforts to control it? Microsoft has at least a dozen shitty apps that no matter how many times you disable or uninstall them, always seem to come slinking back into RAM. What the actual fuck?!
Every distro has privacy issues, here are just the ones that we know about in Debian:
https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
Linux from scratch doesn't ;)
KISS, Gentoo, Alpine(not sure if it's desktop-usable?) are probably the most private.
Its unlikely that any of these distros including LFS systematically fix the sort of privacy issues that exist in open source software. For example, loading most HTML documentation in distros is a privacy issue because they often load resources from the internet.