Whilst BSD isn’t linux per se, it still has a lasting legacy in the unix like space and notably has been used in game consoles like the PS4.
For you in your personal use case, have you tried a bsd distro? What was better compared to the average linux distro?
Apparently BSD is more modular with its jailing system and seems to have a lower resource usage.
I look at ones like NETBSD and FreeBSD and think, "what exactly do I get out of them that I wouldn’t with Linux say, Ubuntu or Void as an example?
What are your thoughts on BSD, you use FreeBSD before?
OPNsense is the best firewall, IPS, and IDS I’ve used. If they made a Linux version of that OS I’d switch to that in a heart beat becuase of driver compatibility
You may already know this but you can run OPNsense on top of Proxmox. That may mitigate the driver issues you are having.