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GNU/Linux: medium integration, medium stability, high privacy, low price of hw and services, high freedom, high control over devices, high control over data, low amount of sneaky practices

Your choice.

Almost - integration of Linux devices with other ecosystems is the worst of all, unfortunately. As mentioned above: using Linux as a means of keeping control over your software only makes sense if you don't rely on cloud services that are worse from the perspective of freedom than a Windows or a Mac.

Not my experience. One time the hard drive of my Mac Mini crashed. I lost all my mp3s. Fortunately, they were all stored on my iPod, so I could just get them from there.

On Mac: There was an application that could do that, but Apple sued them and so was not available anymore. On Windows: Was not able to get those mp3's out (don't remember why exactly) On Linux: Was able to mount it and get those files out with some Open Source iTunes clone.

At that point, I totally ditched Apple.

high privacy

If you don't care that random X11 applications (e.g. your browser) can snoop keystrokes and mouse events or make screengrabs of any other X11 application.

But it doesn't matter anyway, because any application can grab any data from your home directory.

Unless you use Flatpak, bubblewrap, or some other sandboxing technology.

Disclaimer: I use Linux 95% of the time. But we should be honest about the shortcomings. Desktop Linux is not secure and you only have privacy if you trust all of your applications.

Everyone who cares about privacy uses Firefox browser for other reasons already so browser was a poor example.

There's also Wayland as a replacement for X11, but granted not all applications support it.

> But we should be honest about the shortcomings. Desktop Linux is not secure and you only have privacy if you trust all of your applications.

No operating system is secure when it comes to installing untrusted applications. The strength of desktop Linux is the vast amounts of available free and open-source software, ergo software that you can actually trust. To my knowledge, no other OS beats that - usually you can't even trust your OS itself these days.

Plus we already have a universally supported sandboxing technology, it's our web browser. I can use Microsoft's software inside a Firefox container when I'm forced to, without giving them access to my home folder, keystrokes/mouse events, etc. Even better, half of the requests those things would make are blocked by uBO.

Fine for open source applications. Sandbox would be improvement.

How can one trust closed source software?

It's not like there isn't a number of screen recording and keylogging tools and/or malware available for any mainstream desktop OS.

Your comment makes it sound like this is a problem that only X11 has.

It's not like there isn't a number of screen recording and keylogging tools and/or malware available for any mainstream desktop OS.

Sandboxed macOS apps (e.g. anything from the Mac App Store) cannot log keystrokes or make screen grabs without the user giving explicit permission to do so.

Also a choice between several desktop environments developed and maintained by actual enthusiasts.

It is not for everyone, but for us who love one of them it is fantastic :-)

On the other hands, I'm running Linux: 0 price, can't get more open than that, fully customizable, etc.

So it seems sometimes you can get all the good things at once.

On a Likert scale of None-Low-Medium-High-VeryHigh I'd be hard pressed to rate any contemporary Desktop OS better than Medium on stability. Too much stuff breaks too often on all of them.

FOSS

- even lower price (upcycled hardware)

- even higher privacy (how can one trust closed source?)

- even higher freedom (replace any part of the stack)

- no sneaking

- high stability

- high control oven device

in right hands