You're right, they can do whatever they want to do. That doesn't mean they are free from bring criticized for doing it.
I do not understand how we are defending a clickbait headline right now.
The headline was intentionally written in a way that it does not make sense to get someone to click it. By saying "read the article" we are rewarding that behavior.
Are you also going to defend the clickbait of Kotaku?
I understand why these companies do it, but I refuse to give them a free pass encouraging clicking a clickbait headline when talking about the fact that the headline does not make sense.
This title, at least not with the cover image included, did not artificially and pointlessly withhold information. The title doesn't mention chromeos or any other linux-based systems, but the picture includes a chromebook, and from that I knew the article was going to be about chromeos, and the title was a joke about chromeos being arguably both a linux system and not a linux system.
If you didn't, assuming you don't happen to be blind and assuming the images alt tag doesn't happen to be specific enough, the deficiency is in you not the article.
Myself, I would not be so eager to advertize that I don't get simple things like this.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/13/guardian-200-m...
My English teacher has this on the wall of his classroom: https://www.ambaile.org.uk/asset/49730/
While yes I have an issue with the article headline, the person I am responding to just saying "read the article" is just feeding into clickbait.
I really don't think we should be saying "it's their style" as a defense for bad clickbait headlines when we are actively spreading those headlines. Clickbait is a serious problem on the internet and here we are defending it? No... it deserves to be called out. I don't care how funny it is, they are not the onion.