Teenage Engineering gear is not meant to last. It is an illusion created by how their product looks like and how it is marketed. Once the warranty expires, you won't be able to repair products like TX-6. I've gotten bitten by that myself. TE does not really provide much support to its users to help them maintain and repair this expensive gear.
The defaults are absolutely sane. I've been using FreeBSD with root on ZFS on all sorts of workstations and laptops for many years now. It's always run just fine, even on cheap laptops with 2 GB of RAM.
It probably helps that OpenDTrace has a published specification that you can use to not only to reimplement bits of DTrace from scratch but also to agree on a common behavior across many operating systems: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-924.pdf
This may not be the answer you are looking for, but OccamBSD seems to be a way to produce a minimal image for use in FreeBSD jails, FreeBSD bhyve and Xen: https://github.com/michaeldexter/occambsd
The commit message does not mention any MFC timeline [1] so this feature is not planned to be merged back into existing stable branches. In other words, the first release with this feature is going to be FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE.
[1]: Also, you may look for the commit hash (a40cf4175c90142442d0c6515f6c83956336699) at https://mfc.kernelnomicon.org/ to see the back-porting status.
It's incredible how fast the whole transition is happening. I'm really grateful to the Libera Chat team for creating a space for the communities to move to. Amazing job!
There is also Modernish, which is a library for writing portable shell scripts and it seems to support all kinds of different versions of shells across a variety of operating systems. It really takes care of all the quirks and bugs every platform has.
I use (and develop) `goat`. It's like a shortcut manager for aliases for directories you go to often. And a way to make "cd ...." work for any number of dots.
I'm running FreeBSD on T480 and after I configured the audio backend in Firefox (one variable in about:config) and the webcamd driver (2 lines in rc.conf) I can do video calls just fine. Both Jitsi and Zoom work as expected.