What are you even talking about ?

In the 90s, it was hard :-)

It made sense to recompile the kernel to make it fit your hardware.

It was a mess to find peripherals that were working with Linux.

Not sure about those numbers: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances

Wasn’t there some discussions earlier about the fact that government funding was less than 1% of what’s needed to run NPR ?

Lol. How to explain without explaining 101.

Being average does not mean that there is no room to explain stuff…

Define average person.

Why not keep everything in your LAN and setup a wire guard bastion ?