just a little bit of historical background to start with: years ago,
for the French translation we (?) decided to stick to the official
sexist grammar, mostly because doing anything else would have
immediately put us into some weirdos/anarchists/queers category in the
eyes of many people, and back then it felt like the Tails project
would have more impact wrt. its core mission without this. We were
weirdos enough without it. I dunno if it has worked, and I'm not 100%
I'm happy to have pushed in favour of this back then, but anyway:
that's what happened.
Now, we're years later, the Tails brand is a reference in its field,
we're respected, praised and all. I personally think (and told so to
some French translators ~1y ago IIRC) that it's time to switch to
gender-neutral language. There are many advantages in doing so,
I would feel more comfortable about it, and at this point it can't
harm the project in any serious way any more, and if it harms the
project, well, so be it, at least we'll have done the right thing™.
Regarding the specifics: I don't know about German, but at least in
French it's entirely possible to phrase text without any
gender-specific words, and without the male+female innovative language
that feels ugly to many people [of course they're wrong, but I'm told
that it's a subjective topic :] -- from experience, I can tell that
it's sometimes a challenge, and might lead here and there to some
weird phrasing, but it does work.
