Just get a Mac, real UNIX descendant. Then run a FreeBSD VM to ssh into if your rather use FreeBSD but on sane hardware.
Some #GNU #linux programs are really trash, inconsistent UX, most notably example GNUpg with his fururistic chatbot-like experience that try to "understand what command you mean" failing everytime.
Another peak bad linux UX is the damned wireless wpa connection that require to use 5 different utilities inconsistent with each other just to connect to the damned wifi jesus and imagine to change resolv.conf file and set it to read-only just to make the dns-proxy stick and avoid network-manager rewritr the file every 2 minutes.
How many utilities are needed on openbsd? Just one, ifconfig. How pages is long a fucking config that set an automatic connection at startup with correct wpa resolution? 2 consistent and simple lines of config.
Hey nostr:nprofile1qqsw3znfr6vdnxrujezjrhlkqqjlvpcqx79ys7gcph9mkjjsy7zsgygpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsz8thwden5te0dehhxarj9ekh2arfdeuhwctvd3jhgtnrdakj7qgkwaehxw309ajkgetw9ehx7um5wghxcctwvshspg7dju I think I'm near to join your "hate linux club", I'm still on a gentoo machine compiling gcc because I fall for the "linux is the common standard" narrative and I have solarpanel so can compile free basically.
Discussion
Low end hardware is not a problem, I mostly dont need to do real work, just want compensate my enormous dick with having the most little, minimal, simple, optimized, secure and sane unix operating system.
*crying in librebooted thinkpad from 2008 that my girlfriend call "the toy pc"
That's is definitely not Linux 😂
but can linux be it?
Stripping all the unnecessery things from kernel + activate all the cpu attacks mitigations, IOMMU, all the kernel space protection and isolation, and even a MAC solution (but a bit anti-unix the idea of isolate programs, IDK if i like MAC).
Minimal grub instance, openrc to boot and manage deamons and even mangane wifi interfaces and connections (still need wpa supplicant and dhcpcd).
Musl libc, hardened toolchain stack-protection gcc based, wayland wlroots based minimal compositor (dwm clone), pure ALSA for audio.
From here all unix-like terminal based and, in the end, the big boi sir browser to actually do real things.
All the package (with the exception of the browser) are compiled on the machine fine-tuned to be minimal and strip out all the functions and abi/extension that I dont need (compiling mesa driver only for my machine, no code for other gpu for example....).
~100 mb on startup, fully functional without compromises, even a wallpaper, I can work with a python venv, go toolchain fully functional to test lnd and so on...
The problem with bsd is that, even if the base install is minimal, clean, sane and fully functional, I then need to take all the linux-userspace-packages to complete the os, and I end to need bash, gnupg and so on...
Here end my research, I dont know what I proved.