Consumers also use and benefit from those features, even if they're not directly aware of it. For instance, my mom, a non-nerd who lives overseas, uses an immutable and atomic distro, which has the benefit of never breaking. Since she lives far away, it is important that her PC has that sort of stability, especially since she uses it to edit and submit important documents and emails, and ocassionally print and scan stuff. The features found in the filesystem (btrfs) further contributes to this guarantee - such as CoW, which gives her distro the ability to take instant atomic snapshots of the drive and boot from them via the boot menu; data and metadata checksumming which detects silent corruption; self healing via background scrub etc.

Her PC is also 13+ years old (an old Dell Optiplex 9020), which is unsuitable for running any supported versions of Windows. The high -performance, efficient and low-memory-usage nature of Linux makes it possible for her to complete productivity tasks even on such old hardware.

There are also non-nerds benefiting from Linux on low-end gaming devices such as the Steam Deck, or the countless number of emulators such as the Anbernic RG35XX Series, Miyoo Mini etc. Linux is the reason that such humble hardware is feasible for gaming.

This is partially pointing out that every time these discussions invariably come up, nobody addresses the cognitive dissonance of ideologues claiming that the benefit of open source like Linux and Firefox is that “the community can hard fork it and maintain a free version”

Yet somehow this same logic somehow becomes invalid when any open source software made by Google is brought up.

If Linux was targeted for mobile devices, there would inevitably be wasted effort reinventing the wheel just to match the feature set of Android when there’s already a suitable base to start community work from.