There are some security issues and poor defaults with FreeBSD, these issues are ultimately what made me swerve left for the time being until these issues are resolved by the FreeBSD security team and devs. It makes me sad, because in my opinion FreeBSD is holistically developed as a unit, so it flows together! It feels coherent and sane, unlike Linux distros which are a disparate parts that are fused into a singular thing. In a way that is pretty fucking metal that all these separate projects are fused into working Linux distros which for the most part are stable…Kinda like a multicellular organism.

Yeah, honestly, it does sound like you have a good idea of where to start at least in terms of either learning Gentoo or FreeBSD. Purchasing recent/old but capable hardware that won’t put your current hardware at risk of getting borked due to experimentation, is for the best (as long as it won’t hurt the old pocketbook). I wouldn’t choose anything Apple because that hardware can be particularly annoying when it comes to driver support and the like, but if you want to live on the wild side. It’s your life and you can have all that smoke, because I can’t imagine the troubleshooting is going to be much fun.

For my part, I plan on learning about Gentoo in a sane timeframe because there is literally no hurry, my spare laptop is recent enough that compiling won’t take long and it will be supported by Gentoo. I love the idea of being able to set specific compiler flags within the package manager that automatically compile programs based on those user designated flags. I’ve wanted to test the viability of stripping systemd out of my life for a while now, openrc (which Gentoo uses as an init service) seems pretty cool and simple. The Gentoo Handbook is okay in terms of describing the process of installing Gentoo…So I hope after reading it several times, I will find the courage to actually install it on my spare laptop. ROFL As right now, it has Solus on it and that is a usability dream.