It's an approximation, but if you don't do that, someone creating and updating a container in a loop (or intentionally running wget in a loop) will skew the sta

It's an approximation, but if you don't do that, someone creating and updating a container in a loop (or intentionally running wget in a loop) will skew the statistics arbitrarily. I don't think there is a more precise way to do it without compromising privacy. Obviously if you are willing to compromise privacy you can send information such as whether the distribution is running in a container or VM and the NIC MAC address and a persistent identifier, but that would be unacceptable since it is not in the interests of users to send that.