Having answered the question a number of times, I decided to finally document¹ why/how I ended up using BSDs instead of Linux, taking a page from @vermaden's playbook².

tl;dr: a bit of push from Linux, a bit of pull from the BSDs.

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¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/why-bsds/

² https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/