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A comment on Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID by givinguflac on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @06:23AM (#48815838)
Is this specific to Debian?
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Re:Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID by nickjj on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @07:52AM (#48816448)
Nope, but Debian does use systemd by default so it's there.

I'm running Arch Linux and /etc/machine-id is present.

There's also an optional /etc/machine-info file that could exist. It's not a part of systemd and won't be created by default. It's more of an informal way to have details about the system in 1 spot. It was more popular when provisioning bare metal servers but still has value in the cloud. You can have key / value pairs on who to contact, where it's located, what type of machine it is, etc..

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Re:Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID by tremon on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @06:36AM (#48815924)
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/mach...

https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-uuidgen.1.html

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Re:Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID by cryo32 on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @06:36AM (#48815934)
FreeBSD has it as well.
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