If you’re on Gnome, you can use Frog for step 1 then Dialect for step 2.

I use Rnote to write freely on a big whiteboard and Xournal++ for taking notes over PDFs of lectures.

Rnote has a much more modern and user-friendly interface while Xournal++ has more features and has been around for longer. I use both where I feel each excels.

Try giving this a try. I found it suggested in the Arch wiki to update the bios. It’s basically a bootable Windows environment from a USB. You can then try running your firmware updates through it. It worked to update my bios so I assume it should easily work with updating firmware for other devices.