Probably the easiest place to start is appropriately reporting a bug that you’re impacted by.

Take note of the version of the affected program you are using (likely depends on your distro). It could be that the bug has been fixed in a more recent release, and you don’t want to create noise for an issue that has already been resolved and hasn’t made it to you, or is specific to the build for your distro.

Once you’ve figured out where the issue must lie, make a report with detailed steps on how to reproduce the issue. Don’t ghost the thread, if a dev asks followup questions, try to help give feedback.

If you’re lucky, and they post a commit to fix the issue, take a look at it and try to understand what it is doing. Over time, you’ll start to get a feel for how open development works.

Let me clarify that the entire story script, were it to win an award, would go to someone who can walk up on stage and receive it.

That’s sooooo not the question