It's possible to watch all this collapse and enjoy it because us plebs have already been living in a recession since 2022. Biden-pilled liberals and economics writers alike have been calling proletarians Chicken Littles for a few years, saying this was a "vibecession", that the economy was strong and household confidence was false consciousness. Look at the fundamentals, you idiots, look at the stats! Nevermind that our bank accounts were empty, our rents were up, prices were skyrocketing and the vultures of legalized sports betting, payday loan apps and credit card default circled relentlessly. Anecdote is not the singular of data, they told us, while we watched more and more of our mutuals turn to less and less effective mutual aid funds to get by. The jobs opening numbers are strong, they said, as friends got laid-off and those looking for jobs couldn't even get an interview.

https://all-cats-are-beautiful.ghost.io/lets-all-watch-the-tech-economy-die/?ref=all-cats-are-beautiful-newsletter#/portal/signup/free

A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so many options of base software because there are in general many different options to pick. Linux being just a kernel itself specifically creates an environment which encourages this (to some extent). This is both a blessing and a curse, for people wanting to write software targeting linux there now is some matrix of options they must test under if they want it to work with all the various software choices. BSD systems, unlike Linux, tend to include more than just a kernel by default, generally including some "blessed" c library, c compiler, libraries and programs. This makes targeting the system a bit easier, in the sense that you can assume there is a larger set of software on a BSD machine than you could with some system that uses a Linux kernel. Even with BSD however, not all of the software is in control of those in charge of the system itself, there is still a large amount of shared code between these systems for things like the c compiler. There are some pros and cons to this situation. On the plus side these systems get to reap the benefits of the work put in to these other projects (gnu, llvm, and so on), but this also does lead to there being some differences in design. Put in another way, if someone wanted the ability to touch every line of code (in the upstream sense), they would have to be a member of some non trivial amount of communities.