Not sure about studio quality, but for video conferencing and doing some Twitch streams, I've being using a Blue Yeti Nano USB microphone for a few years (since COVID) with no issues on Linux.
It's unfortunate, but the reality is that many of the proprietary services are... free, convenient, and where the people are.
Most projects do not have a lot of funding, so it makes sense to use low cost platforms with the least amount of friction. I think most developers are aware of the risks and trade-offs, but make a pragmatic decision to use these proprietary services b/c the benefits for them outweigh the costs.
Yes, I've run into this issue recently. The /boot/efi folder is actually its own partition, so removing packages from / will not give your more space for the efi partition. On my recentish Pop install, the /boot/efi partition is about 512MB which is just about enough space for two kernels but... not much else (they may have increased this to 1GB for new installs).
The workaround I did was to simply delete one of the kernels in /boot/efi/EFI/Pop_OS-... (the ... is some string of letters). In this folder you should have the following:
As you can see, Pop stores the current kernel (vmlinuz) and ramdisk (initrd) along with the corresponding previous versions in case you need/want to revert back to the previous kernel. To free up some space, you can simply delete either the initrd.img-previous or vmlinuz-previous.efi file if you are not using the previous kernel. That should allow you to then download the firmware and update it.
After the firmware update, if you want to restore the previous (backup) kernel, you can copy it from /boot back to the efi folder above. Otherwise, the next kernel update will replace it for you anyways.
According to @soller@lemmy.world, they are still evaluating different CPUs... it's just that Intel provides information publically and so they can release it under the GPLv3 right now:
My friend has deployed Phorge for himself and appears to be happy with it.