Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar.

But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just install Fedora from its bootable live image, and it will work. Secure boot, suspend, Wifi, the special buttons on the keyboard, and so on. But the downside is enormous bloat and yes, often the kind of tinkering you really don't want to do any more, such as the Brother laser printer drivers still being shipped as 32-bit binaries and the installer silently failing because one particular 32-bit dependency wasn't autoinstalled. Or having to get an Ubuntu-dedicated installer (Displaylink!) to run on Fedora.

But here you have the "mainstream" Unix-ish OS absorbing all the bleeding edge stuff, all the bloat. Allowing FreeBSD free reign to be pure, with a higher average quality of user, which sets the tone of the whole scene. An echo of the old days, like Usenet before "Eternal September" and before Canter & Siegel - for those old enough to remember how it all felt back then.