[jjav]

There might be a correlation with mainstreaming, but that's not the root cause. I'm happy to use a mainstream OS if it is awesome.

A full honest answer is too long for a HN comment, could write a long article about it but won't do that.

I need an OS which is fully comprehensible and fully configurable to my exact taste and fully diagnosable at all levels. So basically the exact opposite of windows which is a massive blob of obscurity. Mac OS has been great for a couple decades, but the enshittification accelerates. As a tiny example, dtruss doesn't even work on newer Mac OS. That kind of nonsense is unacceptable.

An OS is supposed to be a platform & toolkit to enable me to use and diagnose the computer any way I need. Linux is still that, sure, but enshittification is creeping in. Wayland/systemd/gnome/etc is all movement in the wrong direction.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD are a breath of fresh air.