You can also order USB flash drives with a linux iso already on it for ten bucks or so.

everyone should learn enough about how a computer works to be able to contribute in some way

Every user should give back either in the form of labor or with money. All of the problems you list are problems that could be solved with money.

Many FOSS projects don’t focus on getting a lot of donations or selling services. Non profits need revenue too. Even the sale of merch like stickers or mugs with the project logo could be used more effectively.

Contributing with labor is also not easily accessible or even always well received. Active outreach from the project to recruit users is also not practiced much. All of that is of course organizational and managerial work as well as media work and community management. If the volunteers are already overloaded, it won’t be done well of course.

Everything being done by a few frustrated, overworked people isn’t healthy or sustainable

Very much so. Voluntary work should only be done, if the work itself is enough reward or simply fun or as a learning experience. A project can be sustainable even if it’s carried by overworked frustrated people. It just needs a way to recruit new contributors at the rate people quit from burnout.

We can try to make things as accessible and easy to understand as possible

That’s where we’re at now with social media. Things are super accessible, but shallow and often based on pure emotional appeal.

Ubuntu used to mail out free install CDs for a while. Nowadays many people don’t have optical drives anymore though.

Choosing software is mostly choosing a tool get a job done. Microsoft has powerful software and a big ecosystem around it.

Windows is really good for administrating lots of workstations for large organizations for example.

LaTeX is great but it’s not an office suite.

Functional programmers still pretending side effects snd reals world applications don’t exist.

LaTeX is great for documents, mediocre for slides, questionable for spreadsheets, useless for mail and calendar.

Matrix/Element has shitty usability and reliability compared to Discord.

For lots of communities, they could use modern forum software like Discourse with better results.

Run Linux in a VM and share the file system with macOS.

Parallels has really great integration.

Mods do similar bans all the time. How you mod your community is up to you.

A forum where trolls congregate to gossip and organize harassment.

Standardizations and lower costs through economies of scale are great. However competition is also good, as is redundancy. Some strategic redundancy is also a good idea so the whole European defense doesn’t collapse because of something like Brexit or Orban in Hungary.

The requirements snd budgets for the armed forces vary significantly depending on the geography and infrastructure of a country and likely missions.

Having a military with diverse equipment means the enemy will have to learn about more systems and how to fight them.

Rifles make up a small part of the budget. Buying some weapons locally make them cheaper for the state as the money spent goes into the local economy and some of the cost flows back to the state in the form of taxes. So buying more expensive local weapons can be cheaper overall than importing a seemingly cheaper weapon.

Do you think it‘s all unpaid volunteer work?

I bought a cheap arm based Linux laptop a couple of years ago. The official distribution with full hardware support never received any updates. ARMbian didn’t fully support the hardware more than a year later. E.g. no sound output.

Looks like it’s still rough around the edges.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support

KDE Plasma 6.0 introduced experimental HDR support for Wayland session.

DRM clients can directly pass HDR metadata, but this is not available from regular userspace clients, only specialized software can use it.

Web browsers: No web browsers support HDR on Linux at this time.

Valve’s Steam compositor gamescope offers experimental HDR support.

How is support for HDR colors nowadays?