Either we are failing to communicate (because i too have a strong sense you just "want to be right" regardless of the facts), or you're actually engaging in bad faith discussion.

Since you mentioned you have the same feeling I'll try to lay it out a bit more.

Its unfortunate you've had people ego flex on you over supposed morality. But that doesn't mean everyone who mentions linux is like that.

Example, I've seen people who go up to smokers and evangalise about how smoking is "bad", and how they're "hurting society BY hurting themselves with smoking". Well arguments about second hand smoke aside, I don't really think that approach is especially helpful. It's a moral position based on this abstract idea - even if statistically smokers increase our insurance or some shit like that, i doubt many people have the personal experience to say it actually effects them, so it defs comes off as a supposed moral high ground thing, right?

Because some people are going around making that kind of fuss, does mean that EVERYONE who chooses not to smoke is acting out some moral high ground fantasy? Are ALL those who quit smoking "for their health" just morality faking fuckwits? Or are some of them legit worried about their lung health?

For another example, your claim of conflation very much appears to be centred around your misunderstanding of the facts: You've had some people flex on your ego, and thats unfortunate. But I don't think its useful to allow that experience to taint everything else you hear on the topic, and therefore presume you know what someone is saying just because someone else took the same side on the same topic.

The entire premise of traditional digital computing is centred on some key concepts, one of which is defined behaviour. Very clear and strict logical boundaries need to be established for what is defined behaviour. In simple, an operation (eg. adding two numbers), must be deterministic, that is the same two numbers when added must always produce the same resulting number.

Central to another aspect of this is trust. If you cannot trust the outcome of defined behaviour, then the precepts of computing fall apart for a variety of important applications, the behaviour is no longer strictly defined.

I'd hard to overstate how important this is, how much it empowers you as a member of the public, who do not have the resources to hire a team of number crunchers (as companies used to have to do in the old days).

Microsoft have repeatedly shown, they cannot be trusted. They will manipulate and deceive, by design in your computer, with actual code they insert into windows and then knowingly ship.

For these people, this problem matters ALOT, and this isn't some abstract thing, its not some idealist philosophy to smugly throw around at parties, its a cold electronic fact - something they have to deal with, overcome, often at their own expense. The problem being, that when they ask their computer to perform an operation, their computer might intentionally lie to them about the operation itself, the outcome of the operation, or the integrity of the information going in or out of that operation.

The trust problem between microsoft and the code they insert into windows (running at the highest privilege level on YOUR computer hardware), is absolutely intertwined in the real world, in practice, in a variety of ways. Yes, all threat models involving linux deal with trust problems as well. But when you have a known compromised product from a known bad actor it is simply incorrect to suggest the product and the creator can only be considered in isolation from eachother.

And as you can appreciate you don't even need to do anything wrong, for these kind of user-hostile features to be used against you, even in ways not intended by those who put them there - which is a whole other issue.

I could go on & on as this is really just touching the surface, but I hope you can begin to appreciate it's not even remotely close to a conflation, this is not some guilt by association abstract nonsense, this is deeply and painfully practical. i really hope you can at least get a glimpse of it for yourself now.