Social media addiction comes from frustration toward the devices people are using, and so does, more often than not, free software/open source advocacy.

Social media addicts could then learn to use better tools, especially GNU Emacs (which is diametrically opposed to social media, in the best way), but they generally stay addicted so it's hard to find a decent, drama free online FLOSS/hacker community.

Furthermore, whereas free software advocates generally use better tools, open source advocates are, frankly, grotesque at times, and certainly won't tell people they'll prefer to increase productivity metrics over fostering wellness and democracy, leading among other things people to confuse FLOSS with e.g. hacking or permacomputing and to speak on behalf of things they won't understand.

The onboarding process of libre software development is generally mediocre, not internationalized (Guix is an exception), and i18n of decent graphic tools (e.g. Linux Mint, which I wholeheartedly recommend) is rather new, so FLOSS communities (which need top notch IT infrastructure if anything to maintain and fix their machines) generally aren't up to date yet, and won't be for years because most of us use Mastodon anyway. This results in pedantic circlejerks about the CLI and I'm not even talking about sustained patterns of messaging on anonymous forums fostering depression among our communities, because our existence is a threat to Google and Microsoft (and to any kind of wannabe dictator – Putin, Bannon, your local right-wing representative, and so on).

As a symptom of that mess, Linux users on Mastodon (who generally aren't FLOSS activists) will basically catcall people into deleting their whole drive and installing Linux with FDE or into dual booting, even if our backup/restore programs are excellent. We still see installing Linux as a long-term commitment and not as something going along the lines of “let's backup your drive with Syncthing and install Linux Mint, we'll keep in touch if you want to get back on Windows”. Instead of taking a shower (metaphorically) and leading by the example by thriving IRL with a decent beginners-friendly distribution, we'll get ready to ask questions like “do you want a source-based or binary distro?”, “what do you think about rolling releases?”, or “do you really want to use glib/systemd?”, as if anything – any volunteer work – our pedantic quest for moral purity would hold in low esteem wasn't vastly superior to any 30-SLOCs snippet extracted from the Windows source code.

Simply put, if you want to install Linux you're gonna want to look for AFK user groups, have a depression mitigation plan, and consider everything a self-claimed “FLOSS activist” will tell you online as a tragic and suicidal projection of digital (+ AFK) abuse.

Besides that, there are many great female Linux influencers and one of them has rightly said that since she wasn't paying for software on Windows, everything she used had a better alternative on Linux. The Linux Mint UX is just better IMHO and the bugs, honestly, are rare and quickly fixed (whereas some Windows laptops will predictably disconnect from wifi networks, for years).