Dran_Arcana

I am also curious

Regular Ubuntu I get; it's specifically the separation in the list between core and the standard 24.04 distro that I don't get. I can't imagine that droves of nerds are installing straight Ubuntu Core unprompted. I'd absolutely buy though that some distro or some handheld is based on one.

Where are all the Ubuntu Core 22 installs coming from? Is there some large device or distro that uses it?

DRM is already the primary purpose of trusted compute if you read shareholder meeting transcripts; security is a marketing side effect.

I don't have a sim or VR, I purely use keyboard/mouse/controller/fight sticks across my various setups

To expand, my main workstation is a $180 eBay used Dell that I slapped a 3050 in. Tower in its entirety cost <$400 and realistically, I only needed the GPU because I have a 4k/240hz main display, and 4 total.

There's no need to go headless on the Linux workstations, I don't, although I do build the system myself from headless to keep the bloat down. X11 and awesomewm/i3 is like, 100-300mb of ram with modern necessities included

I use the Linux workstations with awesomewm for 99.9% of my computing needs, moonlight only comes out to connect to the gaming PC

I sort of run this setup right now @4k/240hz. The only part of this I don't do is flight sticks.

I run Ubuntu on my interface workstation on a 9700T/32gb/30506g and sunshine/moonlight to my rack mounted gaming desktop downstairs running win11 on a 9900X/32gb/5070. I also have an Ubuntu machine upstairs and in the living room that leverage the same streaming setup to put games there. Works great on my phone too with a Bluetooth clamp controller

Windows on the gaming PC is the way. Yeah there's a lot of bullshit there but it literally only streams games. Use the ctt winutil to strip out most of the annoyance and you forget windows even exists

I looked at the examples and I guess I don't get where this might be useful.

Remote assistance is not rdp, it's Microsoft's support hook over the Internet, which requires telemetry to function. It is distinctly separate from, and not a prerequisite for RDP.

The rest of that I'll have to look into, but disabling remote assistance seems sane in that context.

I wonder if other parts of the shutdown dialog or hover context menu have phone home functions that can only be disabled in roundabout ways; it wouldn't be the first time. It would not surprise me to learn that the "which apps are preventing shutdown" dialog would be something that triggers a call to phone that data home.

I must be really old then!

It's almost certainly related to cloud-init, (the canonical tool for handling deployment automation) or Ubuntu pro (extra long support for backporting security packages to older distros, plus some conveniences). They're pre installed as a convenience to paid users of those services, that's the (IMHO, quite reasonable) model they use to fund the distro. I would expect that some or all of that traffic would disappear if you disable/remove those two services.

https://cloud-init.io/

https://ubuntu.com/pro