I switched from Linux to OpenBSD, then to FreeBSD as my primary OS on my laptop, which involved a bit more set-up time than I was accustomed to with Linux, previously. Eventually I grew tired of the manual setup for so many things and bailed for Debian Sid.

It feels like a nice middle-ground. Most things work out of the box, but I still get to tinker and scratch that itch.

I went the same route. Arch -> Void -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Debian Stretch (no desktop, just xorg + i3).

I love it. No more random updates breaking things like in Arch. I can install things relatively smoothly and get them running quickly. If I really do need the latest version of something I can still install from source. Etc.

I just want to work on things, not configure things endlessly and deal with random bugs :-)

That is exactly how I feel.

Did the same, but for me the transition was from Linux (various flavours) to Mac OS. Feel even dirtier :(

You can use the server cli/conffile driven networking tools, ifupdown (pre-18) / netplan (18.04+) even if you are on a laptop and running GUI. Just uninstall NetworkManager.

You know what shits me? Restarting networking remotely and realising you also need to restart the routing to install your routes. Whoops, many many many times over.

Arch Linux is calling you

And what really stopped you from having your laptop finally configured?

Frankly there was just too much to learn - I remember being totally chuffed I had found a slimline xdm replacement with no dependency on Gnome / KDE and yeah it is good and it is lightweight and I knew where the source code was but ... even if I found a slim lightweight version of every thing on a modern desktop - well I could not even list all the components.

There is a some unix replacement project trying to rewrite major parts "simply". But in the end you just don't understand 90% of what is going on or you have a tiny tiny server.

It's like everything these days is npm - install one thing and suddenly you find there are 900 packages installed including left-pad-0.3.4

What's so dirty bypassing that isn't productive for you?

What does productive mean? The thing that get you satisfaction or money?

Being able to Just Do Things without mucking around in config files, building a, b, c things from source and dealing with random missing dependencies d, e, f. Then having to search online to fix Random Obscure Errors g, h i, etc, and so on. Or in the case of bsd-likes, maybe needing to write ports and adapt makefiles, etc.

I've gone Arch -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Debian for my main pc, and osx for my laptop. I used to like manually tweaking and configuring everything but these days I just want to turn on the computer and get into a workflow with as few headaches as possible.