It's a community driven development. Literally there is no they, as each distro is developed by independent teams. There is no "Linux." Linux is a base and the OSes are developed from that base. It isn't a product like Windows where a company is making it to sell to you. It is a box of parts and the distros are teams putting it together the way they want and adding to it what they like to it. In order for Linux to "be a major desktop" as you say, "Linux" would have to exist as an independent entity, and it simply does not.

The standard base you're calling for is what Linux already is, and the distros are what people make of that base. There is no "they" to "distro [hop]" because that's how Linux was designed. For someone who claims to know about things, you always seem to chime in with the wrong information. I used o think you were borderline mentally disabled, or at the very least a very young child with a very limited understanding of the world. Now I just think you troll people because you have nothing better to do.

My understanding is that, by its very nature, AutoHotKey injects keyboard input events into the event queue (or something along those lines), and it also listens to keyboard input (so it knows when to trigger). This is something that malware could do:
* Send the keyboard shortcut to invoke the Run command, then start a program of the malware writer's choice. This may not be the best way to do nefarious stuff, but it's something that a hardware device could be programmed to do. (If you want to try this with hardware yourself, the Raspberry Pi Pico can do this; I note that there are plenty of legitimate uses for this functionality, like creating your own macro pad.)
* Read the keyboard input, log it somewhere, and then forward it to the application. In particular, this could result in the program logging things like username/password combos, which could then be sent to a remote server under the author's control. (If this sounds like a keylogger, that's because it is.)

Autohotkey by default works like a keylogger on the front end.

It's *really* easy to do this in C, to the point where it's way too easy to do that by accident. Forget one call to free(), and you have a memory leak, and if the program is one that typically runs for long periods of time, that can be a problem.

I know that Oblivion, when Shivering Isles was first released, had a bug that would cause the game to misbehave after a total of somewhere around 80 hours of gameplay, and this is stored in the save file. (According to UESP, this could happen after around 1,000 hours even without Shivering Isles installed.) This, of course, was frustrating for players who had long-running games.

(Fortunately, this bug has been fixed, and should not occur in the GOG version of Oblivion.)

Source: [url=https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering:Reference_Bug]https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering:Reference_Bug[/url]

You went to a non mainstream distro and expected it to perform as what one with 70% of the user base might..
sounds like a pebkac error.

it is a mainstream distro , its popularity is in the top3

Please just stop saying stupid things without thinking or at least analysing the methodology of that distrowatch website.

That site is not representative of all people who use Linux.

In fact that site is going to get most of its traffic from people like you who as you say distrohop.

Businesses using Linux are not going to visit that website -> a large demographic not represented in those statistics.

People who are happy and settled with their operating system are unlikely to visit that website -> even more people not represented.

So please don't quote "statistics" from a website which paints exactly the picture that suits your narrative of people not being able to use Linux long term because of some distribution's poor design choices.

Yes some Linux distributions are broken and need a lot of maintenance - but some of them are sane and require minimal maintenance. I recommend Fedora for a thoroughly boring distribution that works without problems.

<shrug> With bugs it is not always a single entity's fault. Looks like Steam this time but next time it might be something in the OS.

This was really a broken Steam issue, it just happened to manifest in rolling release distros due to an updated package in them (freetype2).Valve fixed it quickly too in a Steam client Beta update.

Stuff like this happens in software, regressions, bugs, incompatibilies etc.

What I'm interested in, is why is the self-proclaimed anti-linux fanatic using Linux and playing Steam games??

True, though when you close the game the leak goes away because the OS handles all that. And a number of languages that have garbage collection you intentionally just ignore what you don't need or don't do manual memory management. Though it shouldn't be used for critical real-time applications. (like say a heart monitor...)

Mmmm quite annoying...

Because trolls will do anything to get attention... </shrugs/>