You're missing the part that you won't be maintaining your whole system yourself. You'll instead be relying on other people to do in the form of distros and pac

You're missing the part that you won't be maintaining your whole system yourself. You'll instead be relying on other people to do in the form of distros and packages. The trouble comes from a slippage in expectations and the increased incentives to do bad things. Once some (e.g.) spyware in some software is expected and acceptable, suddenly more spyware in even more apps could potentially be acceptable. Now it becomes a constant effort to keeping track of a known good application set which expends a lot of energy. And any one of those apps in the good set could spoil at any time. And of course, the increased commercial incentives of a lot of non-technical people using the platform immensely increase the likelihood of this occuring. So it's not hipsterism, it's just something that's been observed to happen many, many times.