> [...] This kind of harassment is something I hear about often from many maintainers of projects on SourceHut. It breaks my heart and I feel helpless to do anything about it.
I most certainly can't provide an answer here but doesn't the medium (IRC, mailing lists, forums, etc) facilitate this toxic environment too? People whose sole intent is to manufacture a narrative in order to harass someone, or their project(s), are a lot more comfortable doing so online. They are guaranteed a wide audience, lots of views and publicity which in turn maximizes the damage. Rarely do I encounter this behavior in workplace meetings, conferences or venues that require physical attendance.
I never became comfortable with neither the scope of systemd as a project, nor the ever expanding set of skills required to effectively use it. I was tempted to use the word mastering, but that would make the goal seem even more elusive, especially since with every new version one's knowledge would have to expand to cover its new features. 10 years later, it still looks to me like the project with a solution for everything in the IT industry, following trends, trying to cover all the bases. Always new things to learn, always the goalpost moving further and further.
> [..] majority of readers or Docker users have never ever heard of FreeBSD Jails [..]
I would argue that said users have never heard of UNSHARE(1) either, although Linux pretty much wipes the floor with anything else when it comes to containers. You can use UNSHARE(1) to create your container, extract a base image of your preferred distribution, configure it and start an instance. Heck, you can even create and package a shell script that does all the above for you. Nobody does that on Linux even though UNSHARE(1) (and friends) are very much finished products. They are not the products people want, that is, application specific containerization solutions like Docker, or something that can be easily deployed at scale in a reproducible and compliant way.
> The systemd debacle is what led me down a rabbit hole toward the BSD's.
Like most, you could have simply moved to a distribution without systemd. Unlike Linux, the BSDs offer less choice when it comes to both init, service supervision and service management options. It is also evidenced in the comparison table in the OP. If anything the debacle resulted in creating more awareness and leaving people open to more choice.
That said, adopting one monolith instead of another sounds more like a knee jerk reaction than anything else.
> The proof in the pudding for me is to look at the running processes of a default system between BSD and Linux with systemd. Yikes.
This only scratches the surface. Daemons running under systemd have their PIDs supervised instead of using unreliable hacks like pidfiles. This is one of the reasons why systemd is preferred in large deployments and professional environments.
> Sorry if this sounds overly critical but I find it inethical to use the Chinese clones of Apple products.
Unlike most, not everyone is inclined to pay for the privilege of closed source, proprietary walled gardens (like those from Apple). People, especially those who believe in open source and free software ideals, consider the above practice unethical, which is probably why they don't buy Chinese made Apple laptops. Those users are largely in favor of sharing technological innovations for the benefit of everyone, instead of guarding them for a select few. So, no it is not unethical because, in the end, it doesn't harm the end user.
> musl appeals to me because I’m Australian and a sucker for an underdog it has a clean code base, permissive licensing, and is not a GNU project.
Although this is as good a reason as any, especially if someone is (politically) biased against the GNU project, I fail to see how and why the x86_64-musl target appeals to the OP in the first place. It ships a standard GNU userland, it uses GCC and GNU {core,bin}utils to (cross)compile most packages and GNU bash is a standard requirement for the build toolchain. Without the above, Void cannot exist.
A core property of the Voidlinux / musl-libc combination that goes unmentioned, is that one can easily leverage xbps-src as a native cross compilation toolchain to seamlessly (no porting/patching) generate static binaries for foreign architectures. As an example, one can generate static binaries for GNU tar and just use them on an android (bionic) device.
Finally, Void-linux ships with the xbps-uunshare utility as standard and allows a regular user to launch an unprivileged container with any distribution (like debian, ubuntu, etc). This way, the OP can enjoy the full gamut of software available on those glibc systems without the need to install and/or dual boot Windows.
> At least on 12-stable (idk if it made it into a 12.x-release) EVDEV_SUPPORT is enabled out of the box
The GENERIC kernel configuration for FreeBSD-12.x-release does not support EVDEV out of the box. It is there however for both 12 stable and of course head.
I most certainly can't provide an answer here but doesn't the medium (IRC, mailing lists, forums, etc) facilitate this toxic environment too? People whose sole intent is to manufacture a narrative in order to harass someone, or their project(s), are a lot more comfortable doing so online. They are guaranteed a wide audience, lots of views and publicity which in turn maximizes the damage. Rarely do I encounter this behavior in workplace meetings, conferences or venues that require physical attendance.