Comment by pezezin

To remain clear: This is largely devil's advocate. I believe that niche platforms generally should be supported, and that includes GNU/Linux on amd64, and NetBSD on literal VAX (yes, that is an officially supported platform in current NetBSD), and RedoxOS on ARM, and OpenBSD on MIPS, and [...]. I just think it's really weird to claim that GNU/Linux, with 3% of the desktop market, should be supported, but a platform that is similarly a small fraction of Linux is dead weight that should be dropped.

With that said, remainder of this comment continues with the position that GNU/Linux, which I am writing this comment on, is obviously not worth supporting for the same reasons as i.e. MIPS and RISC-V.

> 1) Development resources are finite.

That is an argument in favor of cutting niche platforms like GNU/Linux.

> 2) Linux runs all of the world supercomputers,

You can't defend a niche OS by pointing out that it's used in a tiny niche market. How many supercomputers exist on earth? I'd bet you there are more working MIPS installations than supercomputers.

> most of the internet infrastructure (server, routers, etc),

I'll grant you headless machines used by IT folks, but that's still a specific subset of the market and it has little bearing on whether, say, Tor should support it as a desktop OS.

> most of the cellphones (Android),

Android/Linux is quite different from GNU/Linux; effectively nobody developing for Android is targeting Linux in any meaningful sense.

> and lots of other things. Its global marketshare is way bigger than macOS and all the BSD put together.

Only if we include embedded systems and servers. If you intend to target servers, then yes obviously Linux matters. Otherwise, not so much.

Try living without OpenSSH and the rest of *BSD contributions.