They have certainly made lots of money with that model. You could almost argue this stuff does not really matter because people are effectively forced to use it, as is.1 There is no alternative choice.
1. If you manage to "beat the system", and bend the web to your will, those invested in it will label you an outlier or accuse you of being like Richard Stallman.
The Suicide Linux idea, and in fact, all "rm -rf /" jokes, are still perplexing to me because I always made systems where one could accidentally rm -rf / (still have not done personally that after 20+ years) and would not lose anything of importance, because / is an overlay and any long-term user data is stored on external media, separate from executables, which I unmount after a periodic save completes. I guess I could describe it as a minimal system booted from USB and running in RAM, overlayed with a more complete system (downloaded from the network then extracted), also running in RAM, with a workspace consisting of 100% RAM. The only way to destroy the system is to mount the USB stick read-write, chattr -i on everything and then try to rm -rf /. Impossible to do that by mistake.
1. If you manage to "beat the system", and bend the web to your will, those invested in it will label you an outlier or accuse you of being like Richard Stallman.
The Suicide Linux idea, and in fact, all "rm -rf /" jokes, are still perplexing to me because I always made systems where one could accidentally rm -rf / (still have not done personally that after 20+ years) and would not lose anything of importance, because / is an overlay and any long-term user data is stored on external media, separate from executables, which I unmount after a periodic save completes. I guess I could describe it as a minimal system booted from USB and running in RAM, overlayed with a more complete system (downloaded from the network then extracted), also running in RAM, with a workspace consisting of 100% RAM. The only way to destroy the system is to mount the USB stick read-write, chattr -i on everything and then try to rm -rf /. Impossible to do that by mistake.