Quite sad news. As a long time contributor, I was going to bump my monthly donations to 50€ per week, and gradually increase up to 100€ later, as a small help for the community I heavily rely on but can't contribute in other ways.
But now the subscription is canceled, and I have to look for migration options (there will be pain). Maybe Debian is the safest? I don't have much time these days to maintain or install Arch, or even have time to keep an eye on telemetry gathering practices of my OS.
Also the difference is that the word telemetry in a context of user metrics has been burned, the popcon a) already has it in its name and b) is open source and c) has info written about how it will send what packages you install and not random weird stuff.
The installer does ask indeed, but as you say the default is disabled. Stats are published on the web. Technically Debian members have access to the raw reports (without any IP addresses etc), but that access is very rarely used.
Out of curiosity, what time investment is required for maintaining an Arch install?
I've been using Arch for the past decade and other than the turbulence when switching over to systemd, I don't do anything other than `pacman -Syu` and can only recall exactly one time where the system broke and it was because mkinitpcio failed to run after updating a kernel and was fixed by chrooting into my system and rerunning it.
I often had more issues with Debian or other distros because of having to fight the system to install packages that were built within the past year.
My impression comes from the switch-to-systemd era too, but systemd was never my problem. It was that my desktop never ran as smoothly as my colleagues' Manjaro and I finally gave up.
But you make me think... I should give Arch one more try before giving up!
It might be worth giving another try. The `archinstall` script that's a part of the installation media (even though it's not technically "supported") really makes the process of installing a lot more painless if you know what you want to set up
The linked poll has "opt-in" leading at 75% of the vote.
May be premature to start switching systems. Hopefully they won't proceed with opt-out. I can understand telemetry being tempting/useful, but the fact they made the poll signals deference to community feedback.
But now the subscription is canceled, and I have to look for migration options (there will be pain). Maybe Debian is the safest? I don't have much time these days to maintain or install Arch, or even have time to keep an eye on telemetry gathering practices of my OS.