I've been a multiple decades long Linux user who recently switched to the BSD's full time, and the reason is exactly because of the latest trends in Linux.
Last Linux I used full time was CRUX, so that one didn't adopt any of these trends.
However, I did notice that it became increasingly harder to use even that when the wider community went for the latest shiniest trends possible.
nortonham immutable OS's like Fedora Silverblue, Nix/Guix
The only point I can see in it is if you want to give your grandma a UNIX-like PC to work with, or some office worker with absolutely no computing skills at all, but for tech savvy people like I I just can't see the point of it at all, yet it's being pushed mostly towards software engineers of all target audiences.
No really, you're a software engineer, you're supposed to know the OS you're working with from the inside out!
nortonham flatpak/snap/apppimage instead of traditional pkg management
I hate that a lot, but I can kind of see the necessity of it.
Because if your C library is glibc (which is the case for by far the most Linux distro's), it's an absolute pain in the ass to compile anything as a static binary or library, it's much easier with musl though.
So then you get things like those additional packaging formats and cope containers like Docker, which is yet another trend I really hate, both from a developer and server admin point of view.
I can tolerate AppImages a bit more than the others apart from its very cringy name, because they're technically just files and not a complete spaceship that bloats up your entire SSD with complete nonsense.
Some other trends I got to dislike are things like SystemD and the other Poetteringware, GNU software being very bloated, Linux kernel being bloated and very disconnected from its users since at least the Linux Kernel 3.x series, the wokening/politicization/toxicifization/diversity-and-inclusification/enshittification (or however you want to call it) of communities, Rust in the kernel, Wayland being pushed as hard as possible, the need to use 3 mutually incompatible audio abstractions (ALSA, PulseAudio, and Pipewire) just to get audio somewhat working, it's just a mess!
Linux has become the prime example of the more "accessible" you want to make something that previously wasn't, the more counter-projects spin up with a more "conservative" approach, the worse the experience gets for both sides.
