Showed up in the Pop! Shop today too. 👍

Fair point.

Same here, actually. I switched to Evolution a year or so ago from T-bird and I’m curious if v115 will leapfrog Evolution. I’m optimistic that it will.

When a proposal is made by a person, a political party, a company, or an entity of any type we automatically (consciously or not) run their proposal through our personal filters to create a judgment about said proposal. So, when Fedora proposed telemetry I had to be aware of what my personal filters were and there were a few biases I had developed that make me uncomfortable with Fedora and their future use of telemetry: a) IBM b) Large companies have a dubious record of using user data ethically - they exist to make money and so if they have opportunities to do so, they will and that means the user data will get sold, aggregated, indexed for personal info, etc… if not immediately, IT WILL happen eventually.

Having been in leadership in large corporations for decades myself, the introduction of telemetry is presented as responsible and harmless enough so the pill is easy to swallow. The future of how that data is used and expands is the major concern for me; it’s the exact situation of boiling a frog.

The individuals hoping to collect this telemetry may be great and ethical people wishing to do a net-good, however, these people are involved in a large organization with much larger powers and motives and so the original intent of doing only good with it will get lost. It can be no other way. I liked Fedora quite a lot but I recently switched upon hearing about their proposal - be it Opt-In or Opt Out was a moot point for me because I don’t trust they would even honor my selection anyway. My two cents, which is worth about half that…

I was thinking I was going to wait until Fedora 40 was closer to launch before I migrated all my personal VM’s over to Debian but I ended up doing it today to cut myself loose entirely of IBM’s shenanigans. It’s a shame about IBM leadership, but being in corporate leadership myself I’m certainly not surprised by any of their recent behavior. Where you have any large incentives (power, money, fame), you will see the uglier side of human nature.

I just finished watching Jay’s opinion on this very topic before I read your post. He makes some compelling points: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=fqfyM7zE6KM

Having worked for many very large corporations in my day, I observe that no “company” can have any more integrity than the leadership in that company and the larger the company, the more leadership there is (boards of directors, shareholders, c-suite execs, etc). The more leadership, the less integrity because there isn’t a single rudder guiding the ship. So, I believe nothing said by any large company because the person saying it is nothing more than the voice for that company at that particular minute and it’s anyone’s guess the machinations going on behind the curtain, which can and will change depending upon profitability and political goals from quarter-to-quarter. It can be no other way in large organizations (including companies, governments, tribes, etc). With smaller companies/projects, the product or service is much more likely to stick with a principal or goal because there’s fewer chefs in the kitchen and the person speaking for the team is more likely to exercise integrity because they can. When I say integrity, my definition in this context is “aligning actions with words.” So my take is there is a risk with hitching your wagon to any distro because larger orgs have more resources but are less likely to exercise transparency but smaller projects may have the transparency but not the resources.

I’ve been using Pop! for a few years and it’s a small company (System76) with obvious goals to grow, which is certainly something to be cautious of because nearly every company loses their original principals when they begin striving for growth over convictions. I’ve been running Fedora in several VM’s and I’m not planning to change that until IBM decides to pee in that project’s bathwater too.