Summary: PeppermintOS without systemd has more seeders than the "default" or the standard edition of the GNU/Linux distro; maybe they should consider making Devuan the default base system
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it