> Mostly I'm just tired of people claiming BSD is this amazing new thing
I don't think I've heard anybody claim BSD is new.
> Netflix, and other FAANGs, except those corps don't contribute enough back because of the license
I believe Netflix has upstreamed a lot to FreeBSD. They don't do it because the license compels them, they do it because upstreaming your changes makes maintenance easier.
> If my laptop's wifi didn't work I wouldn't just buy a usb-ethernet adapter and never bring it anywhere
I'm going to guess with this rant that you weren't using Linux in the olden days, because that's what it was like. The workaround isn't using wired ethernet by the way..you can get a USB wifi adapter or you can buy an m.2 wifi card. On on one of my machines I got a cheap m.2 Intel ax200 (just checked, about $15 on eBay) because it runs faster on FreeBSD than the one that shipped with my laptop.
>I'm going to guess with this rant that you weren't using Linux in the olden days, because that's what it was like.
I've been using Linux and BSD in one form or another since 2003, and I definitely used wpa_supplicant on the command line to connect my Thinkpad to WiFi. And you're right, it did suck. It was not a 9/10 experience by a long shot.
Do you remember ndiswrapper?
FreeBSD actually has a similar thing, you can run Linux wifi drivers inside a VM and pass through the adapter. There's a port called wifibox that does this.
You can even forward the Unix domain socket for wpa-supplicant from the guest to host, so all the normal tools that talk to wifi cards via that socket work transparently.
Regarding your wifi example. I did have to replace it with an intel one on my Lenovo because wifi would not work with something connected to Bluetooth (might have been USB . I don't recall). This is on Windows by the way. I just replaced it instead of fighting it. Same reason people prefer AMD on linux but this is changing with better Nvidia support.