Tons of companies are shipping Linux without giving users access to the source code, it's just that only one has the term "Tivoization" named after it.
The website claims that sponsors have no direct influence on the project ("board seats are not for sale"). The reality is that no project of sufficient scale to fully implement web standards can survive without a significant amount of funding.
It's very new. Previously the system would just drop to a console with a message saying "Kernel panic: not syncing: [reason]" and a whole bunch of debug info.
But still, on a well-maintained system, that pretty much never happens. Mainly because Linux is significantly more resilient to faults in device drivers than Windows.
For me, the outdated packages in stable have actually gotten better over time, as DEs get closer to a place where I don't need any major updates to enjoy using them, Flatpaks become more readily available, and on a subjective level, I get less and less invested in current Linux news. Before Debian became my "forever distro", I'd hopped to it a few times, and often found myself wishing for a newer piece of software that wasn't in backports or flathub, or simply being bored with how stable it is, but that's been happening less and less. And I feel like Debian 12 in particular left me with software that I wouldn't mind being stuck with for two years.
I've gotten warnings to upgrade my browser with Debian's Firefox ESR, but they never affected a website's usability in a way that a newer version would fix, and they do provide security updates and new ESR series when they come out; even if you must have the newest Firefox, you can use the Flatpak.
Additionally, I'm currently on testing in order to get better support for my GPU, and each time I've tried to use it, it's worked for me for a longer time than the last as I get better at resolving or avoiding broken packages. If you do experience issues like the one you described, and can replicate them, and no one else has already reported them, you should report them to Debian's bug tracker. The whole point of Testing is to find and squash all the critical bugs before the next stable releases.
No distro I'm aware of still provides official box sets and CDs. Debian still provides materials for third parties to make them, though. Most of the vendors of pre-burned Linux media have also shut down, but one that seems to still exist (and offers Debian box sets) is https://www.shoplinuxonline.com/ .
This really bothers me. Closed standards locked behind a licensing fee may as well not be standards at all, in my opinion.
I remember when gitlab.com was the most accessible alternative to GitHub out there, but it seems they're only interested in internal enterprise usage now. Their main page was already completely unreadable to someone not versed in enterprise tech marketing lingo, and now this.
Thankfully Gitea and Forgejo have gotten better in the meantime, with Codeberg as a flagship instance of the latter.
GNOME and Plasma are so far separated that a merger would be impossible, without either eliminating one of the two or completely rewriting both, and I think they cover different niches. GNOME is for people who want a tightly integrated experience, and KDE is for people who want to customize their system. (I would also argue that it's not possible for there to be only one distro or DE, so long as all the components are open-source. Savvy users will always make their own stuff if they're allowed to.)
There's already plenty of cooperation between GNOME and KDE devs on common standards, support for each other's apps, etc. I hope this continues, and makes both desktops better. A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, like Wayland extensions, could definitely become shared between the two desktops.
Even worse: the .deb file's dependences are only available in a specific version of Ubuntu LTS or with PPAs.
Well, Linux is 32 years old; GNU goes back to 1984, and Unix all the way back to 1970! The history of this OS is much older than Linus Torvalds's involvement; he "only" created and maintains the most popular kernel.
But yes, happy birthday to Linux. Many thousands have contributed to making this operating system what it is today and they all have my utmost thanks for it.
F-Droid is the more valuable app store anyway. I always check there before Google Play.
LibreOffice has opened every DOC(X) the school has sent me, albeit imperfectly, and all assignments are turned in as PDFs, which I usually make using Markdown and LaTeX. I have had to use Office 365 for collaboration, but only about twice a year, and that runs very smoothly in Firefox. On one occasion I tried to collaborate with CryptPad, but it didn't work as well as I hoped.
Most computer labs at my uni run Windows 10, rarely 11, but a lot of the science labs run Linux. A surprising amount of the software required for classes has been open-source, too.
The most frustrating thing has been the lockdown browser used for some exams. My university library has computers I can borrow for exams, but yours might not, and they detect VMs, so you might have to dual boot for that.