Who said this person was on the “left”? In any case, who cares. I don’t care about winning people over to the “left”. I’m a communist, and history has shown that proletarian revolutions aren’t primarily composed of politically active “leftists”, socialists, etc. Revolutions are made by working class people acting out of self-interest, whether or not they’ve attained a socialist/communist consciousness (and often times, they haven’t).

How’s the firmware support/availability? For things like graphics tablets, graphics drivers, etc?

I don’t think OpenBSD has binary compat with Linux but most Linux software should just need a recompile for BSDs—I’m discouraged from porting given that when it’s not a simple recompile I’d have much less idea what to do.

The reasons people use Linux are for qualities other than the ones affected by AI use. AI use has implications for code quality, correctness, and security. But none of those are why people use Linux. People use Linux over BSD or other Unixes because Linux supports the most hardware, has the biggest software ecosystem, and being a monolithic kernel is much easier to get up and running with lots of hardware without needing to install separate drivers. Those qualities still need to be addressed by BSDs or whatever alternatives before people will start migrating from Linux.

I say this as someone who regularly uses and enjoys an OpenBSD machine. I couldn’t use it as my main machine because it just doesn’t have the same software availability and plug-and-use hardware support as Linux. Porting software to a new target is not a trivial task for most users. I package a few things for the AUR and that’s much easier as the software already supports x86_64 Linux; I just have to write a script to install it. I think OpenBSD is a nice OS but I highly doubt Linux users will migrate any time soon. Think about how many people were clinging onto X11 because Wayland didn’t support their super specific workflow. And a migration to an entirely different OS would be worse.

If you want something more featureful, OpenRC is decent.

I usually use runit, which is much more lightweight, which I like.

You can try out distros with different inits in VMs and see what you like. Or if you’re the distro-hopping kind, just distro-hop.

Good luck trying to maintain the mammoth that is systemd… why not just switch to an alternative init system and focus your efforts on contributing to those, instead of trying to single-handedly maintain such a huge codebase?