imecth
Chromebooks are a privacy nightmare and have shitty lifespans though. It's a poor comparison too because at this point you're buying new hardware instead of installing different software.
Modern distros are very resilient as long as you stick to the big ones, maybe even more than windows. There's plenty of benefits for regular people too. A few off the top of my mind, the OS doesn't have ads, no privacy minefield, less malware. Gotta keep in mind that at the end of the day, most people only use their pc to open the browser.
Well the first step would probably be to open an issue.
Edge is just chrome...
Like I said already: I have never had that problem in any other project.
If you think there's a problem, you should report it.
If they don't see my worth or I am actually worthless to have around I'll search for someplace else.
Gotta stick around to find out.
It's like this everywhere, you'll always be initially met with circumspection. Passer-by contributions are not a help, helping out new contributors is a lot of effort that not every maintainer wants to deal with. You want to help, that's great, but you're not entitled to helping.
Gnome might be a club, but it's definitely not closed, you just need to put in the effort to show you're worth having around.
Well as far as i can see you've only had a problem with evince, which is retired btw. Gnome isn't a giant blob, each maintainer handles their project in their own way.
With that both statements could have some truth: 5/6 MRs could be merged and it could still be that they dislike external contributions.
External contributions aren't really a thing, 99% of contributions come from people that have been contributing for a while.
As for your MR, you need to go where help is actually wanted, solve issues nobody has gotten to yet. Newer projects are typically easier to contribute to. Probably inquire a bit about the maintainers and project direction in general first.
Gnome is a very large project with hundreds of different developers and maintainers. I can't speak to your experience but you should avoid generalizing like that, also filing a complaint is always an option; there's a few people over the years that have been kicked out.