Apple.
I uses to be a huge Apple fan pre-2010. Everything worked, was smooth, wasn't Windows, and it was fun trying out the terminal despite it being pretty useless for most things on Mac.
At the new decade is when it felt like Apple was becoming what it is today: a walled garden with priority of mobile devices at the detriment of Macintosh. Started to really look at Linux as an alternative (only tried Ubuntu in a VM around the time of Unity coming out) early 2010s, but didn't make the full leap until around 2013 when I installed Linux Mint and got a Raspberry Pi to begin to mess around with. Now I solely run a mix of Debian and Void on all my machines and I couldn't be happier.
For Matrix, I'd recommend conduit over synapse, with the expectation that all of synapse's features haven't yet been added (most notably support for spaces, which may or may not be a dealbreaker).
It's incredibly easy to set-up and very lightweight. I never self-hosted synapse due to how resource-heavy it is, and constantly had issues with dendrite racking up resources as well.conduit has honestly been the easiest thing I've self-hosted.
here's a list of public searx & SearXNG instances
If anyone has good experiences with any of them, definitely share!
There's always nushell. It's fairly new, not quite to 1.0 yet (0.96.1 at time of writing), but the constant breaking changes seemed to have stopped. It hits all your points and it's quite fun to use when writing scripts. Bonus that it's also pretty much tailor-made to manipulate data.