It should all be opt in

Then you introduce self-selection bias and the data is worthless.

Aggregate data can be used to personally identify

You can't identify someone based on how they interact with a service. If you spend 5 minutes on one page and 2 minutes on another that could be anyone. Even if you for some reason personally knew someone's browsing habits it would be nearly impossible to pick them out in a sea of millions of data points.

I see you linked privacyguides.org in the thread as "alternatives", one of the services it recommends is Proton (Mail, Drive, etc.). Look at their privacy policy:

2.1 Visiting proton.me or protonvpn.com website: We employ a local installation of self-developed analytics tools. Analytics are anonymized whenever possible and stored locally (and not on the cloud). IP addresses are not retained and stored for such analytics.

When you use our native applications, we (or the mobile app platform providers) may collect certain information. We may use mobile analytics software (e.g. fabric.io) app statistics and crash reporting, Play Store app statistics, App Store app statistics, or self-hosted Sentry crash reporting to send crash information to our developers in order to rapidly fix bugs.

Or how about addy.io that privacyguides recommends for email forwarding? From their privacy policy:

We use a self-hosted instance of Umami, an open-source, privacy-focused and lightweight option for website analytics. All the site measurement is carried out absolutely anonymously.

ALL online services collect this kind of data. Even the privacy-focused ones. There is nothing nefarious about it.

Like the comment I replied to already explained, this information is necessary to make informed development decisions. If you don't know who is using what feature you might be wasting resources on something barely anyone uses while neglecting something everyone needs.

You also need some of that data for security purposes. You can't implement rate limiting or prevent abuse if you can't log and track how your services are being interacted with.

And this is aggregate data. I can promise you not a single person cares about what any individual user is doing (assuming it's not illegal)

Yeah as someone who has worked in web development for over 20 years everything in here is completely standard. Almost every major website in existence collects this kind of analytical data.

The hardware survey doesn't ask every single user, it just gets a sample. So it probably just happened to hit a few more Windows 7 people this month.

You are forgetting that you have to pay to play online. Your $500 console is an $800 console if you use it for 5 years. You can build a roughly PS5 equivalent PC (RX 6700) for more like $650-700 which is less overall.

Plus it's a computer so you can also use it for normal computer things, and the games themselves are generally much cheaper with a huge backlog and sales all the time.

I have been using the same Arch installation for about 8 years. The initial installation/configuration is the only time consuming part. Actual day-to-day usage is extremely easy.

Maybe this is no longer the case but I previously used Ubuntu and it was actually much more annoying in comparison, especially when upgrading between major revisions or needing to track down sources/PPAs for packages not in the main repos. Or just when you want something more up-to-date than what they're currently shipping.

The rolling release model + the AUR saves so much time and prevents a lot of headaches.

As someone who enjoyed Google Inbox before they killed it, it hurts to read this comment.

Yellow bubbles for all RCS messages.

I'm not actually sure it's particularly effective at stopping bots, considering how easy it is to spin up a docker container that can bypass it. Ironically FlareSolverr wasn't able to solve CAPTCHA so now with them gone it works even better.

This is the year of the Jellyfin desktop

Reminds me of one of my favorite websites: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

To be fair it's the exact same bypass as any other Steam game. Any steam emulator would work.