[jijijijij]

Privacy minded Linux users probably also know, spoofing your user agent is likely to increase fingerprint entropy and actually decreases privacy. It may have been true in the past, but I don't think anyone even recommends it anymore.

[bregma]

There's still plenty of web sites that check the OS and if it's not Mac OS, Windows, or Andoid it's no service for you. Faking your UA is not always about privacy, it's about defeating stupidity.

[dns_snek]

You should only do this on websites that actually require it otherwise you're almost certainly going to cause more problems than you'll solve.

Messing with the UA header is going to get you flagged by every bot detection tool because when you change your header from "Firefox on Linux" to "Chrome on Windows" your fingerprints don't add up anymore and you look exactly like a poorly written bot. You're likely going to see more captchas, you might get blocked or rate limited more often, and get placed under increased scrutiny, orders held for verification, silently filtered or shadow banned, etc.

[jijijijij]

Browser yes, but OS? Rarely, I have issues with Firefox, but never had Chromium not working, too.

It any case, it would be silly to assume services measuring OS popularity would put up such limitations. And more likely than not, people are changing their UA as a work-around on a case-by-case basis than make it a default, since that's gonna cause trouble.

In the last decade, the only time, I actually had to touch the UA is when breaking ToS with curl :D

[kube-system]

The only websites that really do this anymore are ones that are delivering native code for those platforms or those that require DRM that only work on those platforms.

[marcosdumay]

Even when that is the case (what is a minority of the time), just because I'm using Linux, it doesn't mean that I don't want to download some Windows software.

But well, I haven't had to spoof my browser's UA for a few years. If some site refuses it, I'll just move on. (Including some that started doing it after I brought thousands of dollars worth of stuff from them.)

[vidarh]

I'm sure there are some, but having used Linux for 32 years, it's been at least 20 years since I needed to do that.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

Actually that sounds like exactly the sort of nuanced reality that “privacy-conscious Linux users” aren’t that likely to know at all.

[jijijijij]

The EFF's "Panopticlick" paper was published in 2010 [1], together with Firefox/Tor research that knowledge became mainstream. Therefore privacy guides don't recommend it. The Arch wiki linked above has this warning in bright red:

> "Changing the user agent without changing to a corresponding platform will make your browser nearly unique."

Sorry, I am not sure, if arguing about nuanced reality is the battleground, where I see you thriving.

[1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ (browser test since 2014)