like what if linux still was open source but had a lot of proprietary dependencies and packages and became more popular and therefore proprietary software came to it?? but it still would let you use any desktop environment and there would be a new proprietary desktop environment which was like gnome but easier

  • I think that would be absolutely pointless. The advantages of having a system that’s free to study, audit, modify, and contribute to goes away once you make it rely on proprietary software to work at all. In fact that’s not FOSS. There are already desktop operating system that works this way, with an open source kernel and core but reliant on proprietary software, with first party levels of support: they’re called macOS and ChromeOS