Take the first three letters of each name; Darwin gives you "dar" and Linux gives you "lin". Combining these, you get "darlin". Then, presumably the authors wanted a dictionary word for their name, so they chose darling.
Specifically for screenshot markup, I recommend using flameshot (https://flameshot.js.org/#/). It allows you to markup the screenshot right as you take it.
(I didn't down vote your post, but I just want to state my opinion)
Just because people play a game competitively, it doesn't make the game inherently competitive. For example, many people play Minecraft competitively; that doesn't make Minecraft a competitive game, just a game that you can play competitively.
Robotics competitions fit your criteria decently well. They are safe, have educational value, competitive and are decently high profile. More specifically, FIRST and Vex are both fairly wide spread.
I am currently attending a school at which GSuite and Gaggle are both used. I agree that Gaggle is extreme, especially the "three strikes" system.
On the other hand, I also try to avoid tying my school online identity to my personal online identity, and leave my school account for school. That also means not doing anything personal on district provided chromebooks. However, I only really know to do this due to knowledge in technology focused areas, not something most students have.
My main issue with this sort of tracking is that the students are very loosely told what it is tracked and how; at our school, students were told that the chromebooks used gaggle and not much more than that.
Overall, students and parents should definitely be better taught as to what occurs with surveillance, and in my opinion the current level of surveillance is extremely excessive.
The trillion dollars says you can behave like that on a large platform (iOS), but not much of that trillion dollars comes from the Mac, a comparatively small platform, does it?
On the other hand, discord server's do exist for that kind of communication; there are discord servers I am in that contain thousands of members and are about robotics, and often will have meaningful technical discussion about programming, design, etc.
Discord messages aren't actually unlimited; they are limited to 2,000 characters, unless this restriction was recently removed. I have personally encountered this, mainly when using code blocks.
There is manjaro i3 edition, and if I recall correctly another more minor distro that does i3 by default, but for the most part it is user installed, yes.
On one hand, time and effort is wasted doing the same thing 100 times with slight differences rather than just working on the same thing. But on the other hand, in my opinion these differences are very important. For example, you listed that only a few desktop environments are necessary. While that may be true for the vast majority of Linux users, the more fringe desktop environments/window managers are great. For example, I use i3wm daily and it's a pleasure to use. While some of the DEs listed in the article may have some tiling, the WMs designed specifically for tiling do it better (in my opinion). That's the glorious thing about there being many tools that do ostensibly the same thing, you can almost always find a tool that fits your niche use case.