Truth is in many ways stranger than fiction.

I heard of MakeMKV before, thing is that I generally don't buy blu-rays because of the downright horrible DRM schemes.

if DRM makes it harder for me to enjoy the content I bought and paid for (this includes limiting me to some lowres garbage even though my system is more than capable of playing HD and FHD video) compared to what I would get if I were to pirate it then it's a problem of distribution; not one of morality.

you will always have some group that pirates your content no matter what; but if buying gives me a worse product because of artificial restrictions put on it I can't give any less of a shit.
there's very few streaming platforms that even give me a decent option (and I don't even properly own my library; all I get is a license to watch/listen to something, one that could be revoked at any time in the future without me being able to do anything except complain about it).

Most dvd's should be fine as VLC can play almost any of them.

BD is where things get complicated because of DRM, expect almost none of them to work thanks to big corpo telling us what we can and can't do with something you bought and paid for (sadly enough streaming doesn't get much better either)

Sorry for the late response (for some reason eternity took a bit to show me this).

I used matrix a long time ago so I don't remember it too well but from what I recall my reasons for leaving are:

1. lack of proper apps There's a few apps for matrix; but if you want to use matrix as a discord replacement you are locked into either the official element app or hope a 3rd party app supports it. Additionally most clients are written using electron; which lies at the core of a lot of issues discord has.
2. voice calling This is less of a concern about matrix itself; but if you want to use it as a discord replacement VOIP is a hard requirement, discord has it's current market share because it had a really easy to set up and use VOIP service compared to skype (which ran itself into the ground to become teams) and teamspeak (which you need to host yourself or rent a server for). Matrix does 1:1 voice calls fine (it beats 2016 discord), but group and video calls are done over jitsi which takes the app from an annoying background electron hog to a devourer of frames when you're trying to play a game on less than ideal hardware. also because you can host a jitsi conference basically anywhere it defeats the purpose of doing one over matrix.
3. self-hosting This is something I've heard from others as I never hosted any of these; but this is from more than just luke smith's video. Matrix servers are resource hogs, especially compared to the xmpp/jabber servers which I've heard are pretty lightweight and have the ability to integrate accounts from mastodon, lemmy, pleroma, .... Do note that I don't have personal experience on this point, so take it with a grain of salt.
4. matrix is unintuitive This is coming from somebody who has braved the discord UI for ages which is far from intuitive either; but matrix takes a special medal in my book. It's like it's trying to mimic slack (which discord also does); but channels and servers are mixed? The UI for element (although nice looking) is straight up terrible, settings were all over the place, and when I finally thought I'd figured something out there's 3 more things I'd have to configure which are in totally different menus, friend and server channels are mixed with no way of separating them (unless there's an option in a settings panel somewhere; but even I who figured out discord's community onboarding didn't find it) The encryption and approval process for new apps is nice, on paper... in reality it means that if you get logged out on your main session (which I found constantly happened on element) you'd be unable to read any messages before and you now had to resecure your account through one of the settings panels which I will tell you right now that no sane person will ever figure out so now all the messages they send come with a warning attached. lastly there's the same issues you have with trying to onboard people onto mastodon or lemmy where they need to find an instance and deal with defederation; but turned up to 11 with nobody really explaining it. they also tell (suggest strongly so nobody really chooses anything else) you to make your account on the primary matrix server anyways which defeats the point of a decentralized protocol as nearly everyone is on the same instance.

1, 2, and 4 were by far my big gripes; and I probably could overcome 4 today now I'm familiar with the fediverse (which I wasn't even a year ago) and I bet the UI has improved at least a little since my last endeavor years ago; but 1 and 2 are dealbreakers if it ever wants to pull anyone from discord, either make the official app good, or get decent 3rd party ones; discord is surviving on linux because it's still the best option and it's not even a decent one, voice calling also needs to be improved if it wants me; because it's just easier to set up and host your own mumble server than get any shred of performance in matrix group calls and mumble's VOIP implementation is nothing short of excellent.

If japanese kanji show as their Chinese variant make sure you are using the proper font variant. My recommendation is noto-sans-cjk-jp.

Fedora does allow you to set the locale, it doesn't mention generating them so they might very well already be present You can use https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-administrators-guide/basic-system-configuration/System_Locale_and_Keyboard_Configuration/ to read more than I can tell you here.

sxhkd/swhkd, both support creating these natively and the second one works not just on Wayland, but also X11 and the TTY.

the upgrade from 0.18 to 0.19 apparently changed some things with the login system. I for example had to log out and back in on the Eternity app.

If the issue persists after that then you should probably file a bug report for your mobile app.

Exactly this worked best for me back in the day

Not just you, your brain is wired to pick up language, how did you learn your first one?

I’m German and while we have some mandatory English classes, they’re …well … not good.

I can attest that English classes here aren't great either (although most people here do speak English as a second or third language)

and at least the teacher I had first also had a VERY thick German accent

This is a known side effect of premature output (writing/speaking before you feel comfortable doing so), you don't just listen to what's around you, you primarily listen to yourself and pronunciation differs between languages, this premature output becomes toxic input for your brain which then uses that from then on (you can try and get rid of it; but it is really hard to do)

once I was halfway through the game my brain kinda switched to “English mode” and I actually learned words and grammar in a natural way instead of trying to force myself to understand what the hell a “singular past tense adverb” is.

Yup, that's natural understanding for you. When you speak a language you don't care about the rules; you should instinctively know them.

As for my issue with Duolingo: it ignores the amount of time it takes to properly acquire a language, if I were to split up all the time I spent watching english youtube into 5 minute chunks it'd take me well over 15 years (and that's just accounting for the initial 4 month span; I've learned more things after as I naturally used the language). Combine that with the fact it throws established research on this topic to the wayside to push the school-based one which we know goes against the natural way in which we learn. I found a great blog post online about this, while it mostly revolves around learning Japanese; the core principles apply to learning pretty much any language. The beginning of the post does sum the entire thing up pretty well though:

We do not recommend "language learning" apps like Duolingo, Lingodeer, Babbel, and others due to the fact that their methodology conflicts with AJATT's principles of immersion learning. Such apps do not actually help you with anything. There are no success stories. On the other hand, AJATTers typically reach fluency in just 18 months. The apps prevent you from reading interesting content in your target language, such as manga. And they make you more miserable in the end.

There are some really good parts in that blog that apply to any language; but a lot of it is geared towards Japanese specifically.

If you need a file host see if catbox fits your needs.

The best course of action is to consume as much content in the target language as possible, tv shows, music, YouTube videos... Your brain will eventually pick up on certain parts of the language naturally. Also the best thing you can do is to not force yourself to speak or write in that language until you are comfortable doing so (this is one of the biggest things doulingo does wrong).

I can attest to this method working as I went from barely knowing a couple of English words to speaking it in about 4 months (you could probably do less if you stick to what I outlined above). To back up this method I suggest you look at antimoon which is written by people who have used this to learn English as well.

If I can give my thoughts on what I've seen in research and linking various factors together.

1. A not insignificant amount of neurodivergent people tend to pursue a career in IT (mainly people with ASD), these people can learn a lot through self study as it tends to align more with their personal interests, at some point through this they may become exposed to Linux and open source and subsequently choose to learn about that.
2. Research has revealed a strong link between ASD and gender dysphoria. People diagnosed with ASD are ~4 times more likely to experience it.
3. Even if you go through gender reassignment, you are still subject to the societal programming associated with your initial gender (which for boys tends to include videogames).

While these 3 facts on their own don't mean much, I can see how these come together to create an above-average amount of trans women in the IT and Linux spheres and this only gets amplified by stereotypes.

That said, this is mere speculation on my end based on the things I mentioned above, I am sure it plays a role; but I cannot be sure as to how significant that is in the grand scheme of things.

I love how musk is trying to make X the everything app all on his centralized network, and here we are building a decentralized everything network with dozens of open platforms and good 3rd party clients outpacing whatever musk is trying to cook.