Sooo there's free software (“Everyone should be able to write open source software!”) and there's open source software (people programming their own computers for their own communities). Ideally, Neima should be able to program her computer to help her kids do their homework or for their sports club. So there's open source software that's written for the developers community, and there's open source software that's written for the GNOME community, which is polished and truly a delightful experience for new users: if for example you installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon, you'd connect to the wifi and probably be immediately greeted with a notification telling you that your printer has been added and is ready to go.
I'm not saying that Linux users should learn programming, especially if they don't know about e.g. GNU Guix, Skribe/Skribilo/Haunt, or SICP (that's directly referenced by the Haunt info pages – I promise you, starting a blog as an English speaker with a Skribe implementation and reading SICP once you get comfortable enough could get you started in months); but that of course, learning any field on such a platform as Stack Overflow would provide an absolutely stupid experience, whereas the ideal learning medium is books.
It isn't enough for Google to insert far-right suggestions in YouTube shorts; they've deliberately sabotaged features in their search engine to get us to generate more ads, and Google Scholar results are, by the way, the bottom of the barrel too. Compare queries results to "sex work" or "borderline disorder transgender" with those of HAL and wonder why there's a public distrust in science. More broadly, Google hinders our relationship to information, and we're both trading it for a far-right agenda.
The same is just as true for LaTeX: it's a great, intuitive language, provided that you read some good introduction on the topic. As a matter of fact, Maïeul Rouquette's French-speaking book is available for free on HAL.
I'm more and more fed up as I write that and I'm pretty sure it shows. You may totally use open source software, meant for the non-technical community of a graphical library, desktop environment, Linux distribution, and so forth. But if you really wanted to "learn Linux", please install any distro you're comfortable with and read some good book on whatever topic you want to work on.
Pardon, ce n'est pas une demande d'alternative, je ne me plains pas du site web, je me plains de l'état de l'économie de la création de contenus.
On vivrait sans doute dans une société très différente sans Twitter, entre autres raisons car les standards de publication en ligne seraient plus élevés et car les quelques deux millions de comptes Mastodon mensuels actifs comprendraient et respecteraient la valeur de ce travail.
Mon blog personnel par exemple me coûte 20€/mois, sur un revenu de 900€/mois, et une publication en particulier a fait plus de 1000 vues, et continuait d'être partagée quand mon nom de domaine venait d'expirer. Elle m'avait fait du bien à écrire et elle faisait du bien à mes lectaires. Je n'ai pas reçu un seul don pour maintenir mon infrastructure à flot, donc je suis désolée pour les personnes concernées mais elles attendront que j'aie une IP fixe.
EDIT : ça me met très mal à l'aise mais je n'ai pas le choix, mon blog doit avoir 30% de downtime à ce compte-là -- raison pour laquelle j'exportais mes billets en tant que PDF. Je veux simplement rendre compte du fait que sans adtech, et sans promotion d'une autre activité commerciale, on ne peut pas vivre de la création de contenus.
PS : je me souviens de ce texte d'un blogueur iranien, gracié après six ans de prison, publié en 2015 et traduit par Libération : https://www.liberation.fr/ecrans/2015/07/20/six-ans-apres-internet-se-recroqueville_1351044/