one thing I noticed is how a lot of FOSS have terrible user interfaces. Like keeping things plain, boring, “function over form” kind of design. Is that a thing in the scene?

Kinda/sorta. Generally the people you have building your architecture don’t have the same skills as a designer is what it boils down to. Single dev projects don’t get the chance to outsource frontends, so they just kinda deliver something that works and call it good enough.

Depends on your setup, but generally I recommend: https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper

If you have an available GPU for processing it’s insanely quick and better than OpenAI’s whisper.

Because developers use cross-compilable languages to pump out Windows executables without knowing or understanding or caring about the Windows environment. I mean, ~/.whatever still works under Windows.