• atzanteolEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    That will definitely be part of it. It’s going to be some cross-section of “people who know about it” and “people who are motivated to have their data recorded” which is going to skew the data in ways we can’t reliably understand. Maybe “newbies” are more likely to report than grizzled neckbeards? Maybe desktops are over-represented vs. servers? Maybe one distro lets its users know about it and so its defaults are over-represented? We can’t know.

    • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      people who are motivated to have their data recorded

      I mean, it’s not like it’s sensitive information.
      hw-probe excludes such information.

      newbies

      Definitely not, most newbies don’t even know about it. It’s really useful for gathering general hardware system info for bug reports, and I often end up having to tell newbies about it.

      Maybe desktops are over-represented

      Absolutely true, if you look at the database it’s vast majority desktop and laptop systems.

      Maybe one distro lets its users know about it

      I know of no such distro, I’ve hopped between many popular and unpopular distros over the years, haven’t found a single one that does it.
      Maybe an abscure distro, but it’s impact would be questionable.

      Also, there’s a point to be made in the other direction. The command you need to run is :
      sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload
      Without -E the environment isn’t preserved and it’ll think you’re on X11, despite being on Wayland.

      • atzanteolEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago
        people who are motivated to have their data recorded

        I mean, it’s not like it’s sensitive information. hw-probe excludes such information.

        I know about the tool. I’ve used it. I don’t report my system data. I’m not “motivated” to have it recorded. I couldn’t care less about their data gathering.

        Since you’re relying on people actively reporting their data they need to be motivated to actually do it. That doesn’t mean they’re afraid of what is being gathered (though have you seen the Linux community?) just that they haven’t, for whatever reason, taken the time to do so.

        For the rest of it - I was just giving sample potential sources of bias. I wasn’t proposing any of those as actual flaws. Just that their polling methodology couldn’t account for any of them or whatever actual biases may exist in their data. It’s just a list of self-report crap.