I feel the same way. I've been riding the Linux daily driver train for over a decade now. Back when I first made the switch, Proton wasn't a thing. I could dual boot to play the games that wouldn't run on Wine but I instead made the decision to only buy new games that were Linux native and if existing games didn't run on Wine then it was tough bikkies.

But the issue is that most people sadly don't give a shit. They don't give any thought at all about sending money to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. despite the fact that those companies are playing a part in actively degrading the user experience (amongst other things). They don't think about how they're screwing over themselves in the long run as well as the younger generations. Most people don't think much beyond what the advertising tells them to buy, convenience and ease of use.

I wish people made more ethical consumer choices but they just don't. And that habit won't change while big business has collectively billion dollar advertising budgets, gets away with monopolising and centralising and has government and regulators in their back pockets.

That's ok if you look at it that way. But at the end of the day, it's just a tool like any other. Personally I find it really silly to put any moral questions into it because I don't believe it's worth my time to think about it, lose time on silly things and/or sacrifice the quality of my work. I'm not trying to imply anything about Linux, btw, it's the same for the other ways around. It just feels stupid because it ends up like a political discussion, when it really shouldn't be. You have the option to use basically anything and choosing to limit yourself over that is just plain stupid imo. You could make the arguments for how they process data, which is a whole other discussion, but then again, there are plenty of workarounds to all of those problems (which is exactly what some people are doing with virtualization, different machines entirely, OS tweaks, etc., which is fine, because they're benefiting from it). Nothing against FOSS or otherwise, btw, I do agree about the need to support, but there are so many other ways to do it. Just using it isn't enough, sadly. As the point of this OP is - it's also market adoption, marketing itself, etc. None of this changes the fact that using certain tool(s) (e.g. gdb) is best done on a certain OS (e.g. a Linux distro) at a given time.

Exactly. That's what matters. That's why SteamOS is on Steam Deck, or Linux distros on POS machines, or Windows on ATMs (which is kinda depressing ngl), etc.

It's a tool, nothing more, nothing less. An OS is just a gateway to other apps at the end of the day.