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They don't host all of the mirrors themselves so they'd be missing out on most of the data that way.

They can host all the default mirrors themselves, either by serving the actual data (with a CDN) or by redirecting requests to a 3rd party mirror by GeoIP.

Which would be an insanely expensive way to collect very little usable information. Mirrors are run for free by volunteers, a worldwide CDN to replace free mirrors would be prohibitively costly for a relatively small distro like Manjaro.

Wouldn't the cost of the service scale basically linearly with the user base? So a small distro would have smaller costs?

I agree with the core point that tracking users via package updates is a bad idea, but I don't think this specific argument is very great.

Presumably they can use Cloudflare or similar for free or relatively cheap, or perhaps find someone willing to gift CDN service to a Linux distribution.

Redirecting the requests to the closest existing mirror also obviously drastically reduces bandwidth requirements and should presumably be doable with a few (for redundancy) colocated dedicated servers running efficient server software.

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