The problem is the following: For every daily active user in our forums we have according to our current counting methodology over 1,000 users of our distribution who don’t interact with us in any way.
And that’s their good right. I have brought family members and friends to Linux who I’m certain won’t ever contribute in any way to open source or even understand what this is all about. It’s great to have you guys here in the forum be engaged and help the project, but MDD is not about people like you or us.
It’s about the hundred of thousands of other Manjaro users. They will build the statistical pool of significance for MDD as they are much more than us here in the forum.
Now asking these users to opt-in could be done through some technical means, but as I tried to just describe this population, imagine somebody different than us, somebody who doesn’t know much about software, maybe even not know that he or she uses Manjaro.
Now suddenly out of nowhere a random popup is grabbing the attention asking for something the user might not understand but definitely something he did not ask for right now. How should he react? Does he really want to read a long explanation why he should click “yes” here? If he only ever uses Manjaro to get his computing needs done without much other involvement?
I think such a popup is user hostile - at least for the users who are not involved with Linux more than they need to, and these are, according to the numbers we have until now, the absolute majority.
Or put it another way: of our many thousand current users my assumption is less than 1% mind if this impersonal data is being shared with us and put into some nice diagrams. Why should >99% of users have to interact with some popup and consider an action instead of the <1% who are actually interested in it and then act accordingly?
The other option is to put this opt-in button somewhere in the settings and ask through our social media channels or other means to activate it. The result will be that we again only can statistically cover the people who are already engaged with us.
When I think of me as a user of other software: what I want from this software is not getting annoying popups asking me to do stuff or decide things. I want my stuff get done. But what I also don’t want is for the software to spy on me, collect personal information and cross-share this with other companies. We do nothing at all like this here. Not in the slightest. And that’s why I’m also on a personal level fine with making this opt-out.