On my company mail account I have collected circa 10000 mails during the past 10 years, which is circa 80 mails a month - and that is a lot.
If you're not following multiple high-volume mailing lists since a decade and archive every single e-mail I don't think its normal to have 50000 mails in a mailbox.
Ask them if they can give you their phone so you can check on what theyโre doing online and on their phone right now. Because, why would they trust a large company more than a good friend?
Maybe you can set it up for them? Itโs really the easiest way + it does not cost anything thatโs not paid for already anyways (electricity and an Internet connection).
Navigating a combination of the distroโs native package manager (apt, pacman, rpm, whatever), snap, flatpack and still having to set up the maintainersโ custom repositories to get stuff thatโs even remotely up-to-date somehow
This sounds like a you problem, to be honest. If you want the most up-to-date software, just use a distribution that updates very often or uses a rolling-release concept.
The different UI toolkits, desktop environment, window manager and compositor seem to be fighting each other.
If you use one of them, not that much. If you start mixing them it becomes a huge mess. At one point in time I had Ubuntu installed, running Gnome, but having Openbox as window manager set. It was an absolute mess. Nowadays I think it's even more of a mess, especially with gnome and this stupid Adwaita library with the stupid CSM.
But I happily ran pure Openbox on X11 for a decade and run labwc on Wayland since ca. 2 years now.
I do a lot of .NET programming and photo editing. I could probably replace VS with VScode or Ryder but itโs an additional hurdle. For photo editing, I havenโt found a single thing that fits my workflow the way Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop do.
Then stick with Windows. Or run this software in VM with GPU pass-through and KVM. I really don't see an issue here. Use the tool that best fits your needs.
Disabled by default, as of yet.