On a more optimistic note, based on this thread and the videos, I installed FPM and stdlib on my Linux VM the other day, for the second time. My initial experience (on Windows) was posted in this thread:
Maybe because it was my second time going through the process, things seemed to be much easier. Especially impressive was testing a large number of scientific libraries in a few seconds. I also greatly appreciated the ability to compile the bootstrap FPM version from a simple *.F90 source file. I hope this remains a convention, especially in security conscious environments. (See https://bootstrappable.org/ for further reasons)
My only suggestion: many developers do not have root access on their machine. I think the default should assume all libraries are going to be in a user controlled directory, as is done in the Perl community via a tool like Perlbrew: An Admin-Free Installation Tool.
The use case for Perlbrew is slightly different in that it had been a serious problem with the default system Perl on Linux very often being several versions out of date from the most recent version that Perl applications run on. A separate Perl install in a user account circumvented that problem.
If I wrote a simple shell script / tutorial to facilitate the process for newcomers, could that be posted somewhere on Fortran-Lang? The materials to ease the learning curve exist, but they simply aren’t accessible to anyone other than the highly motivated.