Can somebody explain to me, why we need another terminal, file manager, text editor and such? Just to call them all “cosmic apps”? Also who the fuck is going to use any of this on windows or even macOS?? Why waste manpower on this cross-platform compatibility?
Your experience with FreeBSD compared to OpenBSD is very similar to mine 5 years ago. Didn’t manage to get FreeBSD working but OpenBSD install was pretty easy. Although the performance still sucked compared to Linux.
Sadly there is no way around it. The mentioned alternatives like regolith have already been mentioned. There is also some smaller distros with prepared twm configs, but I can’t recommend it. Because if you want to customize it, you will have a hard time finding the right ways to do it.
Using alacritty for years on all linux devices, it does what its supposed to do. Recent change to toml configuration was a bit of hassle. But with the latest release the migration is no problem anymore.
There is no great/simple linux music player with proper cover display. Eliza was so wonky when I tried it months ago, the most simple functions didn’t work properly (like sorting for release year etc.)