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Which BSD has its own desktop environment? Which BSD has centralized, discoverable settings? (discoverable meaning I don't have to dig into man pages to figure out what to do). BSD is better but still doesn't go far enough IMO.

FWIW, I have never needed to dig into Windows' help system or Google to figure out how to use Windows Settings or the old Control Panel.

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None of them. But GNU does not have this either. For awhile GNOME was part of the GNU project, but isn't now, and even when it was, X was not a GNU project.

GNU has this random assemblage of packages:

https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html

So add the Hurd to that, along with an actual distribution mechanism (not a trivial task), and what you get is something like a BSD.

Ah OK, I stand corrected. Looks like my pipe dream of getting a Unix derivative as unified as Windows stays unattainable then (although KDE Neon was pretty good last time I tried it, from a Settings point of view anyway)

Oh, not at all unattainable - a Unix derivative as unified as Windows is macOS. I've got a terminal and an Emacs running on my Mac right now.

But a free software one? No - that's the point of this article: the free software desktop users aren't willing to put up the resources it would take to develop what you're seeking.

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