There is one good example of a good FOSS project with reliable funding and a thriving community, which is blender.

You know why blender is a success unlike other projects . Because it a very complicated piece of software that most of the community can’t just fork or start another project. so for FOSS projects to thrive they need more convergence of developpers to the same project . rather than divergence of efforts into multiple of projects. I know that this is not how FOSS works. but the reality is that without an urge to devellop projects in rivalary with the commercial ones. the resulting quality will always be mediocre.

another problem is the lack of proper documentation, It it very hard and time consuming to get familiarised with complex project codes. many of them are lacking proper documentation to encouraged newer devs to join in. the reality is that this takes time away from coding into documentation, but its an important ressource to encourage growth and participtation.

I just use linux until fstab inevitably breaks again and my system won’t boot. And then I install Windows again until I am fed up with how bloated and slow it has become, and install linux again. And then the cycle continues.

Buggy software, not so user friendly, things don’t work, new things to learn…

Sometimes you just wanna do a simple thing and you cannot do it and that really undermines your self esteem.

You try to find little working solutions when big techs with armies of engeneers and programmers are working against you.

Sometimes you find half of your software stops working and you need to go and understand why, fixing or checking for alternatives…

All of those issues are also present in proprietary software. Not sure why you think free and open source software is unique in that regard.

In my experience, FOSS generally works better than the proprietary alternative. It tends to have fewer features, but the features it does have are designed to be useful to the user rather than to collect more money from the user, and tend to be much more thoroughly debugged. My favorite example of this right now is Thunderbird versus Microsoft Outlook; the latter has plenty of bells and whistles, but trying to use it is an utterly infuriating experience.

Also, FOSS alternatives tend to be sparse in topics that most programmers don’t personally care about or don’t have access to. For example, there are a great many FOSS text editors, because every programmer needs one, whereas FOSS business accounting software is not so common, because most programmers don’t own businesses.

Aurora store stopping to work, apps getting blocked on lineage os or rooted phones, Reddit cleaning out all those amazing third party apps, Linux that wanna make you destroy your pc at times, Firefox remaining the only real alternative to chromium (only god knows for how long yet), google wanting to DRM everything, ig blocking my account because i was using barinsta (i cannot even delete it), Newpipe getting stuck after 1/4 of the video.

That’s a problem with proprietary software (i.e. proprietary apps and websites), not free and open source software (i.e. your browser, operating system, and Reddit client).

When a business refuses to do business with me because I use FOSS, I take that as an insult, and take my business elsewhere if I can. I suggest you do the same.

Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads?

Not as long as we practice capitalism, no. As long as investors demand that businesses grow faster than inflation, those businesses will look for ways to take more and more of your money, forever, until they finally collapse, and then the cycle of enshittification starts anew. What you want is stability and equality, but stability and equality are anathema to someone who wants to be richer than everyone else.