Tuesday, February 16, 2021

A little controversial

The Raspberry Pi foundation recently added a Microsoft repository to Raspberry Pi OS which some may find controversial. Jeff Geerling made a short video where he goes into the details:

Is Microsoft spying on your Raspberry Pi 

I understand the foundation might want to make it easier to install some Microsoft apps but my Pi's are headless number crunchers. The apps are for a desktop installation not a headless machine. There is no reason for me to be checking their repo every time I do an update. Its just a waste of the Pi's time and my internet bandwidth. I feel it should have been something people opt-into rather than rolling it out to the masses or at least skip those Pi without a desktop. Jeff gives instructions on how to remove it, which are:

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list

sudo rm /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.gpg

sudo apt update


Update: 10 March 2021

The foundation pushed through an update today that changes the vscode.list to a comment and removes the microsoft.gpg. You don't need to disable it any more.

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