That sounds like a personal goal? I'm not sure I see any necessary reason that linux exist solely in either category (open-source true purpose, or popular desktop). Did I miss the argument?
I honestly do think you missed it and it's been laid out by my two comments. This isn't a personal goal of mine it's just how I see the economics of it. People that want their grandma/gf to use linux as a desktop - that is a personal goal. None of those people give a shit about using linux or they would already.
Read more -still not getting it. "Breeding corruption" is a throwaway line. How? What happens? Folks use the software in some way, that interferes with the open-source users' own use? I can't see that happening.
It's not the users the cause corruption it's who builds and desires to take control of the system. If billions of people are using something it becomes corrupt because of the immense value of billions of users attention. Looks at every tech company. Spying, ads, censorship. Taken to the extreme these goals are counter to each other. Just look at what Canonical did when Ubuntu got a whiff of becoming a desktop os. You could call it 'selling out'. It's a very common, perhaps inevitable, consequence of popularity.
And what does this do to open source forks of the code? How does it affect those developers at all?
I guess I'm obliquely commenting that keeping the project small and in the hands of open-source developers, may be pointless. Otherwise, why agonize over what others are doing with it? Either we want others to use the open-source version too so its a popular desktop with lots of attention, or we don't and becoming a popular desktop with lots of attention doesn't affect those open-source die-hards at all. Either way, a successful project becomes popular on a lot of desktops.