There are arguably ethical reasons for piracy, like not wanting to contribute to the racist genocide being carried out by a dick skinning death cult, but this article isn't to promote piracy (which does harm the industry).

Piracy harms individuals in a point-to-point way. A creator simply loses a sale, a studio loses revenue, an indie dev loses runway, or a musician loses royalties (not that they don't lose to the RIAA as well). It's localized, transactional, and non‑viral. It doesn't reshape ecosystems. It doesn't impose ideology, and it doesn't force anyone else to behave differently.

-Piracy is bad, but it's contained.

GPL harms entire ecosystems, and its harm isn't moral; it's structural. It creates ecosystem‑level distortions that piracy simply cannot. GPL destroys business models at scale, and not by theft, but by making monetization impossible. You can't build proprietary extensions (not the same as how Google uses the Linux kernel for free maintenance and development). You can't differentiate your product or protect your IP. (Why we call it 'commie').

It wipes out entire categories of commercial software, not just individual creators (RSS/Atom Feed Readers for example).

Piracy hurts one dev. GPL hurts the entire market segment.

GPL's viral clause forces derivative works to convert, companies to restructure their codebases, developers to adopt a license they didn't choose, and ecosystems to avoid GPL entirely to stay safe. -It creates fear, avoidance, and fragmentation.

Piracy doesn't force anyone to change their license, workflow, or architecture.

GPL incentivizes corporate capture. GPL's "freedom" enables Google to build Android, Red Hat to build RHEL, and Meta to build massive GPL-adjacent infrastructure.

-Thanks, Loonixtards for helping Google and Meta out (which are far worse than anything you can say about Microsoft).

Corporations benefit. Independent developers do not. Piracy never enables trillion‑dollar surveillance empires.

GPL creates underfunded critical infrastructure. Because GPL software cannot be monetized effectively; maintainers burn out - Foss Devs Quit and Sellout on Userbase, security patches lag, supply-chain attacks slip through, and critical components rely on volunteers.

Piracy doesn't create systemic fragility. -GPL does!

Piracy steals from creators. GPL prevents creators from existing.

TLDR: Linux’s reported desktop share has climbed into the 4–6% range depending on methodology, but once you correct for multi‑device users, survey bias, VM usage, and the shrinking denominator of “people who still use PCs at all,” the effective share looks meaningfully lower; and its future trajectory looks weirdly upward for reasons that have nothing to do with Linux winning converts.

📈These are the headline numbers from large‑scale measurement sources:

• StatCounter global desktop share ~4.7% in 2025 Linux Commands
• U.S. Linux desktop share ~5% in mid‑2025 Linux Commands
• Steam Hardware Survey ~3% Linux gamers in late 2025 Linux Commands
• Lansweeper scan of 15M consumer PCs: just over 6% Linux ZDNET

These are not measuring the same thing, and each has distortions that tend to inflate Linux’s apparent share.

Multi‑device users distort the numbers

Most Linux desktop users are enthusiasts who own multiple machines; old laptops, ThinkPads, NUCs, homelab boxes, etc. Meanwhile, the average Windows or macOS user has one primary PC or shared family PC.

This equates to a single Linux user might generate 3 - 6 “unique devices” in datasets that count devices rather than people. A typical Windows user generates 1 device.

If Linux users average even a mere 2.5 devices per person, then a measured 5% device share becomes closer to 2% actual user share.

Survey manipulation and self‑selection bias

Linux communities have a long history of:

• Coordinated “Linux month” pushes to inflate StatCounter
• Users spoofing user‑agents
• VM users showing up as “Linux desktops”
• Enthusiasts disproportionately installing Linux on old hardware that rarely appears in enterprise datasets

This is why consumer‑focused datasets (StatCounter, Steam) show higher Linux share than enterprise datasets (Lansweeper’s AD‑managed systems show only 1.9% Linux vs 6% consumer) ZDNET.

The more enthusiast‑heavy the dataset, the higher Linux appears.

Virtual machines and WSL muddy the waters

VMs and WSL instances often register as distinct “Linux devices”, Separate “Linux browsers”, Additional “Linux Steam clients” (for people testing Proton or running niche games). One Windows host, two Linux VMs and one WSL instance can appear as four Linux desktops in some datasets.

The shrinking PC user base paradoxically boosts Linux’s percentage

This is the most under‑discussed factor by others, but I've brought up a few times in this subreddit: As normies abandon PCs for phones and tablets, the remaining Linux PC‑using population increases in share. Linux adoption isn’t rising because Linux is winning the mainstream. It’s rising because the mainstream is leaving the denominator entirely.

If 20% of casual Windows users disappear into iPads and Chromebooks, Linux’s percentage rises even if the absolute number of Linux users stays flat.

A realistic adjusted estimate

Let’s correct the inflated numbers!

• Start with 4.7–6% measured device share
• Subtract multi‑device inflation (factor ~2–3×) -> 1.5–3% actual user share
• Subtract VM/WSL inflation -> 1–2.5%
• Adjust for survey manipulation and enthusiast bias -> ~1–2% true global user share

So, how do you explain all the rallying cries for Linux in the tech spaces?

Linux users aren't just a loud vocal minority. They also are made up of conspiracy theorists, and communists. -The kind of people that like to buck the system. (Hence the 'mom's basement dweller' stereotype. Imagine the free time a normie has to spend on a tech site vs someone who doesn't work for a living. Remove the limitations of the operating system and there's not much else to do in those basements but to spread their toxic propaganda everywhere they can.

Feed readers aren't dying because RSS is obsolete; they're dying because the economics around "free, ad‑free, and maintained forever" were never real.

RSSGuard becomes the case study: A feed reader that was actively maintained, but updates break user data. -And many people have had these moments with FOSS apps.

The FOSS licensing model is supposed to protect users, but in practice it often confuses them and doesn't guarantee stability. Feedreaders are practically dead now because people expect them to be free (also free of ads) so almost none of them are getting maintained.

RSS readers have no monetization path, no network effect, no viral growth, no corporate sponsor, and no "killer feature" that attracts devs. -And they're used by a tiny niche of power users. -And this power user is frustrated with how very different each one can be. Trying to pick a new one is like sifting through a dumpster full of pig shit for a pearl. -And it doesn't help that some up and comer wannabe dev is making a new feed reader practically every week.

RSS didn't die; the business model did.

With GPL garbage, you get a single developer, fragile codebase, a migration system that breaks, a UX that feels bolted together, a project that tries to do everything (local feeds, online services, sync, scripting, plugins), and and ends up doing none of it reliably.

This is a part of what makes Linux horrible. -It's free, people expect free for anything alternative to Windows or Mac. - And nothing free can actually compete with them. Linux will always be shitty for desktop unless a government intervenes enough. -And that harms competition and innovation (like communism).

RSS isn't dead because it's outdated. It's dead because nobody wants to maintain a free tool for people who refuse to pay and complain when it breaks.

-And they routinely sabotage both through culture‑driven habits that are objectively insecure.

Linux's security reputation is mostly cultural mythology, not technical reality. The same culture that repeats the myth also encourages behaviors that directly undermine security and privacy.

They put blind trust in package maintainers while declaring "Windows has malware because people download random EXEs." They proceed to install random PPAs, Pipe curl scripts into bash, trust maintainers they never met, and treat distro repos as holy. -It takes a special person to trust (actually have faith) in 'free stuff'.

Linux users think "sudo is safe because it asks for a password." -They become desensitized to it and enter sudo for everything. They'll run installers with sudo because the README said so, use chmod 777 as a debugging technique, and disable AppArmor/SELinux because it "gets in the way". It's simply not conducive to what a desktop computing experience should be.

They say, "I care about privacy.", then use Discord, Steam, Chrome, VS Code, proprietary drivers, and sync everything to GitHub. They'll use VPNs run by unknown companies (found in some YouTuber ad), post screenshots of their desktops with username visible, and run random GitHub scripts that exfiltrate critical system info.

"No one targets Linux." - Attackers target servers, not desktops. Supply chain attacks don't care about your OS, browser exploits don't care, phishing works on everyone, and misconfigurations are universal. Linux users behave like they're immune to physics.

"Linux is secure because it's niche" (obscure distros with unpatched kernels.) AUR packages are maintained by ghosts. They'll run outdated software because "rolling release broke something", and disable auto‑updates because "I want control"

They assume open source is safe, but no one audits most code, maintainers burn out, projects get abandoned, malicious commits slip through all the time, and dependencies chain in the distance. Transparent doesn't mean secure. -I think this 'all eyes on code' myth, they're finally starting to drop.

You escape one walled garden only to find another waiting for you at the gate, wearing a Proton badge and pretending it's open‑source.

The storefront lock‑in problem is worse on Linux, not better. On Windows, you can at least run DRM‑heavy titles, kernel‑level anti‑cheat, proprietary launchers, weird middleware, ancient DirectX versions and games with bizarre installers.

On Linux, you're almost forced into Steam (and their 30% tax) and other storefronts through Heroic. You don't escape the storefront; you depend more on it. Steam becomes your compatibility layer, your runtime, your update manager, your sandbox, your controller mapper, your shader compiler, your translation layer, your save sync, your everything.

If Valve ever changes direction, gets acquired, loses interest, pivots to cloud gaming, or stops maintaining Proton; Linux gaming collapses overnight. -You're bound by corporate infrastructure on Linux.

Steam quietly absorbs Linux‑related refunds while not compensating users for marketplace scams, fraudulent digital goods, or shady third‑party sellers!

Valve willingly eats the cost of Linux refunds (including the hidden transaction overhead), but they do not eat the cost of Steam marketplace scams, and users are left holding the bag. Meanwhile, Linux users unintentionally generate extra overhead for Valve by "trying" games under Proton and refunding them when compatibility fails.

Valve doesn't verify sellers or items. The marketplace is basically a peer‑to‑peer flea market with a 15% fee slapped on top. Digital goods are irreversible: Once a scammer transfers a fake item or a manipulated listing, Valve can't "undo" it without rewriting ownership history. Valve's stance is: "We don't intervene in trades." Their support pages explicitly say they won’t reverse trades or reimburse lost items.

It's the perfect environment for fake listings, manipulated float values, counterfeit "rare" skins, phishing‑adjacent trades, bot‑driven price manipulation, laundering through item transfers, and arbitrage scams using mispriced listings.

Valve's response is: "Sorry, we can’t help."

Meanwhile Valve allows Linux users to buy a Windows‑only game, attempt to run it under Proton, discover it doesn’t work, and refund it within 2 hours of playtime.

Valve absorbs (out of their own pocket which transfers to consumers and developers) credit card transaction fees, payment processor overhead, chargeback‑risk mitigation costs, and refund processing labor.

LiGNUts aren't making the devs pay for 'not supporting Linux'; they're making Valve (and thereby everyone else using their shitty service) to pay.

Steam scams cost users money. Linux refunds cost Valve money. Valve's 2 hours of play limitation also doesn't allow a refund if ProtonDB labels a game platinum, but the game is unbeatable because of a problem in the middle of the game.

Every LiGNUt refund triggers a payment processor fee (non‑refundable), a transaction reversal fee, a fraud‑risk adjustment fee, a regional VAT recalculation, and a currency conversion overhead (if applicable). Valve effectively makes every user of Steam pay for Linux testing.

The assumption is insane!

To meaningfully recommend a distro, someone would need:

• Long‑term, real‑world experience with multiple distros
• On multiple hardware configurations
• Across multiple workflows (gaming, dev, media, office, servers)
• With multiple desktop environments
• Under multiple update cycles
• Across multiple years of breakage patterns

Nobody has that. Not even distro maintainers. Not even YouTubers. Not even the loudest evangelists.

What they have is:

• One distro they used for a while
• One or two they tried for a weekend
• A handful they've only seen in screenshots
• A bunch they only know through memes, hearsay, or tribal lore

But online, everyone talks like they've run a 20‑year longitudinal study on every distro ever released.

It’s not "this is the best distro for your needs." It's "this is the distro that fits the story I tell about myself."

Distro advice assumes a shared reality that doesn't exist. Hardware differences alone make most advice meaningless. Their "rock solid" distro could very well be a nightmare on your GPU, broken on your Wi‑Fi chipset, laggy on your DE, or unusable with your monitor setup.

Steam quietly absorbs Linux‑related refunds while not compensating users for marketplace scams, fraudulent digital goods, or shady third‑party sellers!

Valve willingly eats the cost of Linux refunds (including the hidden transaction overhead), but they do not eat the cost of Steam marketplace scams, and users are left holding the bag. Meanwhile, Linux users unintentionally generate extra overhead for Valve by "trying" games under Proton and refunding them when compatibility fails.

Valve doesn't verify sellers or items. The marketplace is basically a peer‑to‑peer flea market with a 15% fee slapped on top. Digital goods are irreversible: Once a scammer transfers a fake item or a manipulated listing, Valve can't "undo" it without rewriting ownership history. Valve's stance is: "We don't intervene in trades." Their support pages explicitly say they won’t reverse trades or reimburse lost items.

It's the perfect environment for fake listings, manipulated float values, counterfeit "rare" skins, phishing‑adjacent trades, bot‑driven price manipulation, laundering through item transfers, and arbitrage scams using mispriced listings.

Valve's response is: "Sorry, we can’t help."

Meanwhile Valve allows Linux users to buy a Windows‑only game, attempt to run it under Proton, discover it doesn’t work, and refund it within 2 hours of playtime.

Valve absorbs (out of their own pocket which transfers to consumers and developers) credit card transaction fees, payment processor overhead, chargeback‑risk mitigation costs, and refund processing labor.

LiGNUts aren't making the devs pay for 'not supporting Linux'; they're making Valve (and thereby everyone else using their shitty service) to pay.

Steam scams cost users money. Linux refunds cost Valve money. Valve's 2 hours of play limitation also doesn't allow a refund if ProtonDB labels a game platinum, but the game is unbeatable because of a problem in the middle of the game.

Every LiGNUt refund triggers a payment processor fee (non‑refundable), a transaction reversal fee, a fraud‑risk adjustment fee, a regional VAT recalculation, and a currency conversion overhead (if applicable). Valve effectively makes every user of Steam pay for Linux testing.

It's one of the most predictable Linux‑ecosystem traps: anything that starts out mediocre gets defended with "you just need to configure it", which is how people end up spending three evenings tweaking espeak-ng flags like they’re tuning a race car that was never meant to leave the driveway.

The pattern: The default experience is objectively bad. Users ask why it's bad. Someone replies with a 14‑step guide involving PulseAudio modules, obscure environment variables, and a GitHub repo last updated in 2019 (that they have no experience with but just searched it for you). The user tries it, gets marginal improvement, and is told "well you didn't configure this part." Hours vanish, and the result still sounds like a Speak & Spell.

Linux TTS specifically sucks because it has No unified audio stack. Every TTS engine interacts differently, so "fixes" are never universal. Most engines are research prototypes Festival, espeak, flite; they were built for academia, not consumer polish. The "better" options require GPU inference Coqui, Piper, VITS, etc. -They can sound good, but only after you configure models, sample rates, vocoders, device backends, and sometimes build from source... And no one agrees on defaults: Windows and macOS ship with curated voices.

Linux advocates love saying: "It's bad by default, but you can make it amazing!" -And that "amazing" is hidden behind compiling, editing config files, manually installing voices, tweaking latency, adjusting phoneme tables, and debugging audio routing. -And it's still worse than the default voice on a $40 Android phone!

Linux culture treats time as an infinite resource. If something wastes your time, the community reframes it as a "learning opportunity."

It's not that Path is complicated to understand, it's more of just a big annoyance when you just want to install something. -And this annoyance crops up every time you want to install something outside of the repo. It's not beginner friend, it's not even intermediate friendly: It's a Unix internals concept that no end-user should have to know!

The problem is minimized in distros like Mint, because of their huge repos, but Mint's repos are also full of abandoned (danger Will Robinson) apps!

The problem exists because Linux lacks unified packaging, and consistent install locations (instructions are different per distro!)

Stability & Release‑Model Terms LiGNUts misuse

• Bleeding edge: used to mean “latest packages”. Actual meaning: Something too new and untested to be reliable. Arch is cutting edge**, not bleeding edge.**
• Rolling release: used to mean “always up to date”. Actual meaning: continuous integration of upstream changes, not a guarantee of freshness or stability.
• Stable: used to mean “reliable”. Actual meaning: frozen, long‑term‑supported, regression‑tested (Debian Stable, RHEL).
• LTS: used to mean “safer". Actual meaning: supported longer, not necessarily more stable (Ubuntu LTS point releases often ship new kernels).
• Minimal: used to mean “lightweight". Actual meaning: few packages installed, not necessarily low resource usage.

Security language gets abused to win arguments.

• Sandboxed: used to mean “runs in a container/flatpak”. Actual meaning: strictly confined with enforced boundaries; many Flatpaks aren’t.
• Hardened: used to mean “compiled with a few flags”. Actual meaning: system‑wide mitigations, MAC policies, kernel hardening, attack‑surface reduction.
• Secure: used to mean “not Windows". Actual meaning: threat‑model appropriate protections, not “I don’t get viruses”.
• Telemetry: used to mean “any network request I don’t like”. Actual meaning: instrumentation data sent for diagnostics, not update checks, CDN hits, or API calls.

Licensing & Ideology Terms LiGNUts misuse

• Proprietary: used to mean “closed source”. Actual meaning: owned under exclusive rights, which can include open‑source licenses with restrictions.
• Bloat: used to mean “anything I personally don’t use”. Actual meaning: unnecessary resource consumption, not “has a GUI”.

Software‑Engineering Terms LiGNUts misuse

(These are the funniest because they reveal who has never worked on a large codebase.)

• Patch: used to mean “workaround”. Actual meaning: a diff applied to source code, not a config tweak.
• Dependency hell: used to mean “I don’t like this dependency”. Actual meaning: conflicting or unsatisfiable dependency graphs.
• Lightweight: used to mean “looks simple”. Actual meaning: low CPU/memory footprint, not “has a minimal UI”.
• Optimized: used to mean “fast on my machine”. Actual meaning: measured performance improvements, not vibes.

Community & Culture Terms LiGNUts misuse

• Works fine: used to mean “I haven’t hit the bug yet”. Actual meaning: verified functional behavior across contexts.
• Bug: used to mean “I don’t like this behavior”. Actual meaning: incorrect or unintended behavior according to spec.

The same pro Linux outlets where you can find bogus complaints about being 'locked out of their Microsoft account' you'll find GDID scaremongering.

Microsoft's likely motivations for GDID:

• Licensing enforcement
• Telemetry correlation
• Fraud detection
• Device identity for cloud services
• Delivery Optimization peer tracking
• Cross-device sync consistency

GDID is a single source of truth for "this Windows installation."

Did they look to see if other operating systems have anything like this (they do have similar)? Apple has device identifiers, though they are sandboxed and not cross-service for example.

It is a system-level fingerprint that:

• Users cannot disable
• Was not publicly documented
• Can correlate activity across VPNs
• Was used in a criminal investigation to track a device across countries

-They love to harp on Bill Gates being in the 'Epstein Files', but what is he actually guilty of? The conspiracy theorists act like everyone in them is guilty of pedophilia (they're not; guilt by association is silly). Meanwhile they don't want anything that could be used as a tool to actually convict real criminals.

Linux has Machine ID, D-Bus ID, Systemd identifiers, and hardware fingerprints (MAC, serials, etc.) -Catching on that it's not such a strange thing yet?

GDID is mostly used by Microsoft services, not third-party apps, and they help make the Windows experience smoother.

CVE-2026-64600 lets local users overwrite root-owned files on reflink-enabled XFS systems, preserving metadata and persistent root access after reboot

"I started Linux as a desktop operating system… and it's the only area where Linux hasn't completely taken over. That just annoys the hell out of me."

"One of the things none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging… making binaries for Linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass."

"The main reason there are no raw devices [in Linux] is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea."

"Even if the Hurd didn't depend on Linux code… I think they have their design heads firmly up their asses anyway with that whole microkernel thing."

"Linux is not one of those anti‑AI projects… if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open‑source thing and fork it. Or just walk away."

"I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using [LLM tools]."

"AI is a tool… and it's clearly a useful one. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it."

"Anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror… natural intelligence isn’t always all that great either."

"The Linux philosophy is 'Do it yourself.'"

"Note that nobody reads every post in linux‑kernel… except Alan Cox, but he’s actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in underground caves."

The core issue: Mint's "stability" is built on unsupported upstream software. No upstream bug fixes: If upstream fixes a crash, Mint doesn't get it. No upstream security patches: If upstream fixes a vulnerability, Mint doesn't get it.

Backporting is inconsistent: Mint sometimes backports security patches, but not all, and not quickly (this is an issue for all "distro of a distro's". Even Ubuntu LTS itself doesn't patch everything:

• "Canonical does not promise any security updates" for ~94% of its repo. Mint inherits that problem and adds its own delays.

Mint’s tiny team cannot maintain abandoned upstream versions: Red Hat can maintain old software because they pay engineers to do it while Mint can't.

Mint is essentially shipping software that nobody is maintaining; not upstream, not Canonical, and not Mint.

Examples of the real-life effect: Mint shipped a NetworkManager version with a WPA Enterprise authentication bug that upstream had already fixed. Mint never backported the fix. Result: users couldn't connect to enterprise Wi‑Fi. Mint ships a 2+ year old GNOME Calendar with known vulnerabilities and no security updates.

LiGNUts think "stable" means reliable, secure, well-tested, and enterprise-grade. But in Linux distro terminology, "stable" means unchanging, frozen, old.