Forgive me if you've already heard this a lot, but Slackware is often described as being a very "BSD-like" Linux and might be another way to get some of the philosophy you're seeking.
I've been using Slackware as my main desktop OS for a few years now (on my main personal and work laptops, plus my primary desktop; most of my other machines run OpenBSD, with the notable exceptions of one running Haiku and one currently running 9front). So far I've been overwhelmingly happy with it.
Indeed, Slackware, Void, or Arch. Or since the parent poster seems to be somewhat into scientific computing, NixOS could also be interesting. NixOS is like having virtualenvs for everything.
I'm in creative, but do a lot of graphics and video programming and research for fun and profit, as well as programming for the fun of it! One of these days I'm going to try Qubes OS and try playing with different OS' at the same time!