>>312775
I was referring primarily to hardhatted folks down in the mines using Linux/BSD/etc. for actual work who also contribute upstream, not humble pickaxe merchants like Red Hat. But even then
>You'd think if anyone cared about the desktop it would be them since workstation is technically one of their core products
LOL no, not in terms of what their Premier-tier premium paypigs care about. Look at any company using Linux or something like it for all their server infra and embedded firmware, which is most of them, and see what an individual engineer programming/maintaining/operating that actually has on their desk. They're basically all still on Windows, with their only interface to the Linux they're working on being webshit, a crosscompiler toolchain, or maybe SSH. Most of them have never seen a Linux DE session in their lives, many of them probably aren't aware such a thing exists. The situation is even grimmer in younger IT corps like Google, Meta, Amazon, or Netflix, where the majority of workstation sessions aren't mindless Windows sheeple, but fully indoctrinated Macfags. I wish it wasn't true, but literally nobody cares about the Linux desktop for strategic business reasons other than Valve.
>Would be totally ignorable except for most of them are Red Hat employees
Not really, they're white elephant staff/volunteer hotpockets autisming over irrelevant desktop shit, retained solely as a fig leaf for the fiction of a Linux "community" extending into desktop. Everything you mentioned is a worthless toy in the eyes of their actual paying customerbase, except somewhat in the case of
>SystemD
Has actual problems, such as its infamous feature creep (mitigated to some extent by forks like elogind), and typical Pooteringware implementation bugginess. But even on a purely theoretical level much of what grognards complain about are the things that actually make it a good idea, such as binary formats, native software in place of spaghetti scripts, and standardized IPC with D-Bus (something else I'm surprised you didn't list, since it also rankles the autism of grogs) instead of piping around opaque text streams. The anti-SystemD contrarians had numerous chances to fix the legacy crap themselves, such as SMC, Shepherd, & Initng. But instead, the best they've been willing to endorse is stupid shit like runit, OpenRC & Upstart that are just the same borked script soup with a dep resolver slapped on top.
>>312778
I think the universal principle is true or willful information asymmetry. Buy-to-own games have no externalities to hide, whereas libre software, SNS, GaaS, mobileshit/consoleshit walled gardens, etc., have massive hidden externalities behind their profitability like dumping/monopolization, whale milking and datamining. The only solution is probably more legislation to compel the most systemically transparent end-user pricing possible.
>That one always strikes me as badly thought-out
The analogy I usually see is to low quality "ethical" products, such as fruits and vegetables with literal open sores, accepted by customers with compromised quality standards. That's a bit too harsh in my eyes to both open source and other ethical products, but to me it means standards of quality must be upheld by consumers even when seeking higher ethical standards.