So your issues with Linux is that:
- Microsoft had a monopoly in the 90s
- Drivers weren't very good in the 90s
- Drivers have vastly improved in everything from wifi to GPUs to ethernet cards
- you believe Canonical is "in bed with" their competitor, Microsoft and this is somehow an issue with all Linux distros

You mistakenly believe that the pfsense either ditched or switch to Linux. They haven't. They have been and still are based on FreeBSD.

You mistakenly think I'm casting shade on any BSD. I'm not sure why since I haven't mentioned it and the initial post was about Linux and Bitcoin, not about any of the BSDs.

You seem to think that the number of years you used Linux makes you an expert on... checks notes... financial contributions to the Linux foundation?

You ignore that everyone is fleeing from pfSense to OPNsense as quickly as possible, but it has nothing to do with FreeBSD or Linux and everything to do with licensing.

So I'm having trouble seeing your point(s) in all this.

Are you suggesting that Corporations fund a foundation that maintains Linux and corporations do not fund a foundation that maintains bitcoin?

There are some things we seem to agree on:
- Hardware support used to suck and now it doesn't (sans nvidia). This is because hardware companies realized they can sell more products if they pay their developers to write drivers and contribute them upstream.
- We not keen on pfSense, though maybe for different reasons
- The biggest financial donations to the Linux foundation come from the biggest companies who use Linux
- We don't want to support Microsoft ✊
- BSD is a fine choice for an O/S (I'm partial to OpenBSD for their security decisions, but to each their own) 

 it's about the licensing!

you surely must know that microsoft and bill gates were the biggest driving force behind the entire edifice of closed source right?

open source is not some new thing, in the old days there was a vibrant community of PUBLIC DOMAIN software, i used to go to my local amiga store to buy copies of Fred Fish disks and bring them home and play with all kinds of cool things

microsoft almost completely snuffed out open source coming into the late 90s and yes linux did help because it was a platform you could run GNU on

and i can't help but feel that rage at this decades of corrupt manipulation of the tech industry by microsoft, their promotion of object oriented programming, for one thing, a legacy that is still a plague on programming, and the fact that it's almost impossible for me to find a kernel version that supports my AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT video card, when it has a fully open source driver!!!!

oh but no problem intel garbage or nvidia

we still have a long way to go to rooting out the pernicious influence of copyright on our industry