I've read it for the first time recently, I was not aware this was such an old hat. It did resonate very much with me, though.

I have a bit of a problem with that "helping humanity" statement, though. What contribution can I realistically make, with what I'm able and willing to do, and is that worth it, considering it's frequently a very bad time for me?

Like, if I have to spend a weekend of spare time to fix a crazy dependency mess so that I have a working computer on Monday, that's a definite big net loss for me, because I'd rather spend my spare time doing things I enjoy. It's also a net loss if I can't properly do the presentation I need to do because I can't get scaling on this particular 4k projector to work right now; it's a net loss for me if I have to do a reboot and lose time, terminal state and state of running applications, because I forgot to do the USB-C unplug-wakeup-replug dance and now wifi is broken. I don't really see how humanity benefits when I struggle away my spare time without success on a sound chip that should really work, but maybe not with that exact kernel version, or maybe it's alsa? then give up and switch back to my Macbook. I'm definitely not going to learn C and systems programming and write my own drivers or do a deep dive into dependency resolution and make a better apt.

And I've spent evenings and weekends on such things, time and again, over almost 20 years now, with Suse, RedHat, CentOS, several Debians, X/K/Ubuntu, Knoppix, and a couple of smaller ones, because in principle I really like the idea of running this super customizable, secure, flexible, versatile, nerdy OS everywhere. I've spent a lot more time fixing Linux than I ever did for Windows or MacOS, and I got the least utility out of Linux by far, not counting servers and raspis and things like that router I built from a 200MHZ PC in the early 2000s, where I rarely run into issues.

And I'd like to think I'm not at the very bottom of the Linux learning curve by now, and I know my way around a Linux server well enough for most purposes. But seeing how coworkers who run Linux sink a lot of time in it because it's a bit of a hobby, really, and still struggle with things like the above, it does seem to be very expensive in terms of time if you don't enjoy this sort of thing – a huge lot more than, say, using a Macbook, if your needs aren't wildly incompatible with the defaults there. It might be really not for you if you need animations to be exactly 2.5 times as fast and can't live outside of i3; personally, I like the Windows and especially MacOS defaults more than anything I ever got put together myself in Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox, Openbox, ... still have to give i3 a shot.

Might be that's all wrong now and there is a combination of distro and hardware that is really foolproof and straightforward and where the wifi never breaks, and the displays scale well (all windows uniformly, across multiple displays with different dpi, even!), and USB-C is a walk in the park, and dependencies never go to hell, and you never have to copy-paste unintelligible stuff into config files and pray, but based on coworker anecdata and my (frustrating) experience getting a HiFiBerry sound card to work under Debian recently, I don't feel like Linux is there yet.