Depuis que j’ai appris à utiliser des dispositions personnalisées de clavier, j’ai l’impression que c’est le truc niche qui ne devrait absolument pas être niche, mais qui n’intéresse tout de même personne : depuis que j’ai appris bépo (ou ma version modifié béopô) et colemak-dh pour l’anglais, c’est tellement pratique et plus confortable (en plus d’être significativement plus rapide à taper), je comprend pas que les gens ne soient pas tous enclin à changer et qu’on ai pas ça à l’école alors qu’on est de plus en plus à utiliser des claviers au quotidien, y compris les gens qui travaillent dans le secteur ou qui ont tendance à vraiment beaucoup utiliser leur claviers. Honnêtement, ça me tue.

There is no proof to be a bias against non-male in the programming world. As far as I know, any country regardless of their gender equality effort up to a certain point have basically the same women to men ratio, which means it isn’t the action of some oppression or shaming. Worse, countries that are less egalitarian are a more equal ratio of women and men, like India, as opposed to a lot of western countries. It’ll never change unless you manage to brainwash a good amount of women into thinking they like programming, despite them not liking it.

Pop!OS is a pretty stable distro, so there shouldn’t be any dependencies problem: you usually have that on arch or arch based distros, even if it’s quite rare. Have you ever uninstalled Firefox and reinstalled it but without some of its dependencies? Or ignored a package it asked you to install with it afterwards? If not, maybe it’s just an update that went wrong, like the PC shut down during an update or something. So update your system, uninstall firefox and reinstall. Your data stored in your home directory (in .mozilla, a hidden folder) like your history, extensions, opened tabs, should be conserved, even if you use apt purge.

I’ll happily switch to Linux on the day when every new release works with no extra problems, tinkering, waiting or searching caused by my choice of OS.

Let me give you an honest answer that no Linux users is willing to give you (certainly because they fear to scare people off of Linux): you will never see the day where Linux will be equal if not better than Windows for gaming (which it can be sometimes, but it’s not always the case) if not a certain amount of people get out of their comfort zone and are willing to try something new. In fact, nobody can improve anything in their life if they’re not willing to get out of their comfort zone.

You’re already using a PC to play video games, I did this choice too, so trust me, you definitely have the energy to change for a better OS, something ever you recognize as having qualities outside of games. Otherwise, you would’ve played exclusively on console where you actually have a plug and play experience… unfortunately at the cost of your freedom to use the machine you bought however you want, besides all the other considerable disadvantages.

For me, Linux made as much progress as it can do, meaning now, for Linux to be viable for gaming, either companies start to move their asses and make Linux native games (which they can easily do, if they’re willing to use the right tools for their game like Vulkan) but I hardly see that coming any time soon, or new users have to come to Linux so that companies would finally care. Personally, I made my choice by making the first step.

Unless it’s a RAM filling issue, because you would have too little RAM, and even then, the entire OS crashing and not just Firefox would be very unlikely, I don’t see any reason for it to crash your entire OS. Regardless, there are Firefox forks that use much much less RAM. You’re using Windows, Mac or Linux first? Try to uninstall, clean everything and reinstall with a new profile, it may work, who knows. If not, then it has to be your OS.

You have to give them a reason to get interested in the OS and the programs they’re using. I gave Linux a try because I was concerned about privacy and I wanted to use more ethical and user respecting OS and software than what I used at that time. Linux and the FOSS world was an obvious choice for me. Custom ROM on Android was sort of the bridge which allowed me to transition. If it wasn’t for that, I would still be on Windows and I wouldn’t learn that much on how an operating system works and what differentiate them, aside from the look. The fact they’re kids or that they play games have nothing to do with it: a lot of adults don’t know either what type of OS they’re using, despite it being in their best interest. The problem is that we don’t give or show them the reason they should be interested, or at least be curious about it and most of time, before people get a degree, we end up killing their curiosity.

As they play Minecraft, you can advise them to switch to Prism Launcher instead of the minecraft launcher, especially if they mod the game, it’s much better for that. It could be a good start.