"Sound support was non-existent by default." I don't know what years you are talking about, but in the early 00s I found audio in FreeBSD with OSS to just work

"Sound support was non-existent by default." I don't know what years you are talking about, but in the early 00s I found audio in FreeBSD with OSS to just work (if you had supported hw), especially compared to the mess that was Alsa, and the ever bigger mess that was Pulseaudio. It took years for audio in linux to become decent.