We no longer recommend the Linux Desktop. Here's why.

We came into a heartfelt decision to stop ourselves from participating in the "Switch to Linux Desktop" campaigns, including End of 10 (endof10.org)^[1] and those campaigns promoted by The Free Software Foundation (FSF).^[2] And unfortunately, the reasons are purely political in nature.

We believe that consumers have the general right to use a software without the requirement to obey the political agendas as planned by the developers behind the software. Adding more political agendas into these software is nothing more than a coordinated and targeted supply chain attacks in social, political, business, and technical layers. Yes, it should have been treated as a major cybersecurity concern. And to us, we classify these issues as pay-by-dignity as well.

In the traditional Open Source licensing model, there are no such clauses in the Apache, BSD, Expat/MIT/X11, GPL, or Mozilla licenses that explicitly require political submission, except to honor the original Authors of the licensed Software, the intentions of the license of the software (primarily in the copyleft licenses), and do not misrepresent your modifications to the Software as them (unless if, well, you're the Author). The authors behind these, however, still have the freedom to plan and define the future of the Software, which translates to all those product roadmaps that you may have been excited for.

And here is where the political agenda sets in—they simply gatekeep their community. Write some questionable Code of Conduct and you're done. Keep the arbitration to the group leaders or moderators behind the community forum. Change your software project logos constantly whenever any virtue-signalling campaigns are needed to fight for. Write a blog post on the official project website of yourself throwing flames to people you personally don't like as "Fascist Maggots".

Call your software as either Software.org (as in organization and movement) or GNU/Software, instead of just Software. And call your software's political opponent as MAGA/Software.

And of course, dedicate yourself to a year-long fasting of rewriting your software in Rust. And it has to be Rust.

These are based on real incidents in FLOSS projects, but at this point I am not going to exactly pinpoint which is which.

And what have ourselves become is mostly nothing more than a consumer that receives the freedom of getting free, end-product version of the software development pipeline with constant software updates for our benefits, but not the freedoms to interact or participate with the community to inspect and attest the pipeline and lead the future of the Software. In other words, it's like keep getting free lunch from a cult group before realizing it's a cult and the meals were poisoned.

And sometimes, "forking code for yourself is better" is a lie because people will lose the access to expertise that defined the software in the past, present, and future. We have learnt the hard way with "Enterprise Open Source" software in this case.

Therefore for us, not actively recommending the Linux desktop is currently the best option we have to take even in the age of Microslop and the starving end-users. This doesn't mean we plan to completely remove our support for desktop Linux.

And honestly, we do feel bad as one day the Windows 10/11 exiles would found themselves hostages in the current political movements in the Linux distros. Who knows, "Support our transgender kids to continue receiving your security updates."

We really wish to break the status quo of keeping politically-motivated software in our recommendations, and plan to conduct migration trials to the BSD platforms. However, neither FreeBSD or OpenBSD are currently focused to bring a gold-standard desktop experience as in GNU/Linux. Desktop environments like GNOME and KDE can be configured to work on BSD platforms, but these desktops are still primarily designed for the Linux desktop experience.

References

• [1] "End of 10". https://endof10.org (n.d, accessed 2026-01-15).
• [2] "Upgrade from Windows" - Free Software Foundation. https://fsf.org/windows (n.d, accessed 2026-01-15).