"I was surprised at the amount of Linux crap in it."
Try OpenBSD, no polkit, no consolekit, no pulseaudio. I've been running a full desktop (XFCE, firefox, and LibreOffice) on a Sun pizzabox for more than a decade now, all the Linux distros I've tried on it just crawl for a while and then die. I also have an old Lenovo L410 laptop running OpenBSD and it just flies.