First, if you read what I said carefully I'm not just talking about operating systems but mainly "high quality commercial applications." But to your point abou

First, if you read what I said carefully I'm not just talking about operating systems but mainly "high quality commercial applications." But to your point about Windows, why does it need to take an "experienced" Windows user to turn off ads at the OS level? In the U.S. at least all of our privacy laws center around a "reasonable expectation of privacy."[1] A private company adding telemetry and ads to an operating system erodes that expectation. If people accept that Microsoft can do it then it becomes easier to justify it state actors (for instance) do it. The same goes for what happens in software apps. Upgrade costs: I'm talking about software here, not operating systems. Abandonware: Cool for Microsoft. Lack of older hardware support: Cool good for Windows. I still game on an even older laptop running Linux. Configurability vs stability. You can have both, as I think you know. Owning your own software: You've never run Adobe's Creative Cloud then. The SaaS model here isn't just a philosophical difference, it's a trap for anybody who can't afford spending > $120/year[2] Yeah Linux distros (and their software) can definitely be self-serving, and that's awesome because anybody who doesn't like the direction of an open source project can fork it and go their own way. Yeah it leads to fragmentation, but with 7 billion people in the world there's plenty of room for that. FUD: FUD implies disinformation. What did I say that isn't true? And yeah I agree that everything has its own drawbacks. I'm just saying that there's plenty of high quality software in the non-commercial world, from operating systems all the way down to text editors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy_(United... [2] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html