I’m not the OP, but for me I yearned for two things: my favourite window manager and a system whose source code was easily within reach. I rarely use the latter and the former is something I could be coaxed away from over time, but really there’s little reason to change from a free and open system in 2023 when everything works so well.

I make do with being an XPS peasant compared to the beautiful rounded rectangles used by my peers on the basis that my machine is completely available to me in every way possible thanks to source code.