This comment makes you sound like the 12 year old

Just ban them from Stack Overflow and forums. no nned to gatekeep the software.

Linux aside, would it not benefit the world if people moved away from non-free software? To me, this is a good reason to encourage people to switch, not discourage them.

Moved the gf to linux a few months ago, I came back to it as a semi (now exclusively) daily driver a few months before her to ensure she would have a great experience. Everything we need to do is easily covered, though it is still not "ready" for everyone it is ready for a lot of us. She knows nothing about it, just uses it without being spied upon and data harvested. She is happier now than under windows (that she knew just as much about) and I am still her tech support. I will be checking out CachyOS in the next weeks to see if I can squeeze a bit more out of my new hardware. With more normies will come more streamlined usage.

When I started with linux back in 00ish the install took a lot of time and the setup was long, choosing which packages to install, took hundreds of clicks and a lot of time, now... Kubuntu can be installed with less than 15 clicks and 20 mins of your time. Bring on the normies, eventually linux could replace win/mac as the dominant os choice, more normies means support gets better

I think Linux has a sort of built-in failsafe for that, in that it's so fragmented. I'm sure that if a critical mass of people start using it then enshittification and nonsense will start to creep in in places (as with everything, more people come > corporations follow trying to make a buck > they slowly poison and ruin everything) but there's nothing to stop someone just spinning off a different distro that works only for nerds.