Alt text: meme with the 'Always has been' format Linux, MacOS, OpenBSD and ChromeOS logos on top of the Earth The first astronaut says 'Wait, it's all Unix?' A Windows logo, on top of the second astronaut. The second astronaut says 'Always has been' and points a gun to the first astronaut.
I agree.
A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.
Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven't bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.
BSD kernel and is hardware driver policies are still very interesting to use and mess with. I run OPNsense on a device that has recently completely replaced my residential router and it's fun to realize how complex everything is magically working together on a system that looks and feels familiar but is literally completely alien outside of GNU applications and package manager.
When I played around with FreeBSD I was fascinated by Securelevels and file flags. I don't have any real use for that functionality on the systems that I run, but I probably would've thought of something by now if it was a Linux feature.
Im using freebsd on my nas because it has better zfs support than linux does. Or at least was the case as of a couple years ago.
Originally i just threw a few extra drives into my old Arch machine, but i noticed my package upgrades were being held back because zfs on linux (or whatever they called it) was dependant on older kernels or something. I cant remember the exact details.
I owe myself a fresh install of freebsd on decent, well-supported hardware sometime. I end up shoving it on niche, constrained or old hardware to see if I can get better results than linux. One day, I'll give it a real rundown on modern hardware.