It is an Nvidia problem. And we need to insist on Nvidia being the problem until they give in. Their lack of wanting to take responsibility for distributing graphics cards on the market by not developing working drivers and not even letting the community fix it by open sourcing their driver is not something we should tolerate anymore. They pissed people enough at this point over the years, with their lack of participation in an driver problem-free environment on Linux, so they should and they will take the blame.

Xorg and Wayland are two protocols every Desktop Environment use and is, from my limited knowledge on it, the thing that tells the DE how to behave and display windows on your screen. Since 1984, the Linux world uses Xorg (now at the 11 edition: X11) but now, there is a massive transition towards a protocol more secure and focused around privacy called Wayland because first, it’s objectively better, and because X11 will soon be deprecated/abandoned. But due to its way of handling things (like for example, windows can’t see each other: they think they’re alone on the PC, preventing some programs from spying on each others but also preventing them to communicate with each other, like to share screen or screenshot. We have portals to solve that now though, so no worries), Wayland struggle to convince everybody and therefore is heavily criticized, mostly because it’s sort of being forced due to the Xorg team letting the project die to develop Wayland, the successor, waiting for every distros and their DE to adopt it.

But despite not directly mentioning those protocols, you’re right by saying “you can just jump ships and unsubscribe from what you dislike” because honestly, nobody’s preventing people from continuing to use Xorg and groups from continuing the development of DE based on Xorg or simply continuing the Xorg project, but if they want to progress and evolve with the rest of the world, they will have to switch to Wayland eventually.

There is no proof to be a bias against non-male in the programming world. As far as I know, any country regardless of their gender equality effort up to a certain point have basically the same women to men ratio, which means it isn’t the action of some oppression or shaming. Worse, countries that are less egalitarian are a more equal ratio of women and men, like India, as opposed to a lot of western countries. It’ll never change unless you manage to brainwash a good amount of women into thinking they like programming, despite them not liking it.

Unless it’s a RAM filling issue, because you would have too little RAM, and even then, the entire OS crashing and not just Firefox would be very unlikely, I don’t see any reason for it to crash your entire OS. Regardless, there are Firefox forks that use much much less RAM. You’re using Windows, Mac or Linux first? Try to uninstall, clean everything and reinstall with a new profile, it may work, who knows. If not, then it has to be your OS.

You have to give them a reason to get interested in the OS and the programs they’re using. I gave Linux a try because I was concerned about privacy and I wanted to use more ethical and user respecting OS and software than what I used at that time. Linux and the FOSS world was an obvious choice for me. Custom ROM on Android was sort of the bridge which allowed me to transition. If it wasn’t for that, I would still be on Windows and I wouldn’t learn that much on how an operating system works and what differentiate them, aside from the look. The fact they’re kids or that they play games have nothing to do with it: a lot of adults don’t know either what type of OS they’re using, despite it being in their best interest. The problem is that we don’t give or show them the reason they should be interested, or at least be curious about it and most of time, before people get a degree, we end up killing their curiosity.

As they play Minecraft, you can advise them to switch to Prism Launcher instead of the minecraft launcher, especially if they mod the game, it’s much better for that. It could be a good start.