Your mileage may vary for performance. It really depends what OS and what hardware. In my experience saying all BSDs are slower at rendering would be too broad a statement.

If you've done Arch and Debian server installs, you'll be fine installing a major BSD. Just answer prompts and you are done, particularly if you are using the default disk partitioning scheme. Consider NetBSD. It's known for its wide hardware compatibility. X is pre-installed, just "startx".

What I mean is that no one will stop you. When you ascertain your own right to do it, it doesn't mean much that I don't believe you are entitled to it. It's pretty much common practice. That is more a semantic matter at this point, but yes I stand by that being messed up for a project the size of Nix.

I don’t think that being a dictator for your project is necessarily “toxic”

Yeah, it is not necessarily toxic. It is at a lot more risk of being, though. Even a collectively managed project will mess up and upset the community, but then there is a sense of shared responsibility and more deliberation on what to do. With a BDFL, it's just whatever. After your project reaches a certain size, that risk keeps increasing... exponentially.

I have projects that take contributions and I work on others that do not

Precisely. You see, if we take this into the context of a smaller project, specially one managed by a single person as you seem to be coming back to, that is a very different context. I don't think an OSS maintainer should be laboring physically and emotionally to meet the demands of users. That is a well-known problem there. If this person doesn't even want to have contact with the community and just ship code once an year, fine. They are just sharing things with the world at no cost. In this context, "suck it up and just fork it" is indeed the way to go.

When you take something as big as NixOS though, that can really be inverted. Now you have a very large number of people who are laboring physically and emotionally to sustain a very large project, and the original creator shifts to a very different place to. It's another discussion entirely.

If pursuing your own vision is the sole purpose intended, it would not be limited at all.

I guess it can be simple like that when you are the maintainer. It is definetly not as simple when there are many of them. Of course you can run it like that and many do, but the whole mentality is pretty limited.

My statement is not that you have to do whatever anyone asks in your project that you maintain. My statement is that a community that contributes towards a project has a say in it. You might want to ignore it, handle it BDFL-style, politely and cynically decline, whatever.

Not really about what is the absolute correct answer. Our values are clearly different. More like what I believe works best in the long term.