[soganess]

1. It's a moral good (free as in freedom). Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux, which (i++) attracts more users. As a corollary to #1: do you really want Billy G spying on your mom?

2. It's often better for the environment to keep old hardware running (manufacturing emissions usually dwarf operational ones for consumer devices).

And a more personal corollary to #2: I love old hardware and don't want to see it die (and I'm not talking about vintage tech). A 16+ core Haswell Xeon (that riiiing) and Polaris RX 480 (HWS, why yes) remain perfectly useful in the modern world. I like knowing both are out there, somewhere, just chugging away long after they were retired from some server or mining operation.

[palata]

> Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux

I don't think it is necessarily true. More users may mean that some platform (say Ubuntu) gets so much traction that the rest becomes irrelevant. I already see "free as in freedom" projects that only support the last two versions of Ubuntu, and couldn't care less about other distros. To the point where they will have hard dependencies on things that only work on Ubuntu and are very difficult to adapt to other distros.

> I love old hardware and don't want to see it die

I have a counter-example with Android. Android/AOSP is pretty good with backward compatibility. It is pretty easy for a developer to compile an app for older devices, the OS totally supports it.

But developers/companies will just happily target newer devices and drop older ones ("98% of our users are on Android "X", let's drop the support for older ones") and tend to test their apps on recent hardware (meaning that a perfectly fine device will still be able to run the app, but it will lag to the point where it is unusable). Happened to me: I had to change my phone because random apps (like banking or weather forecast, I'm not talking high-performance like games here) became unusable. A banking app just shows a few numbers, still they manage to make it lag on a phone from 2020.