| I remember why I chose linux in 1998 for my desktop, and would choose for my server. Hardware compatibility. I could install Linux on my shabby work desktop, and it just worked. Actually it worked more stably than NT 4. Binary distros. I could apt-get install stuff onto my box in minutes. I rarely had to build things from source. Speed of change. Linux was acquiring features at a breakneck speed. Large companies started contributing. SMP, interesting networking stuff, better disk I/O, new filesystems, stuff like that. Hell, Windows emulation good enough to run StarCraft! It felt alive and cared for. It was apparent that many serious businesses want to bet big on Linux. Some say marketing; I say GPL and project guidance. I also had a lovely server box with FreeBSD. It had select compatible hardware. It had really nice documentation. It ran Apache and Squid pretty well. I had to build the latter from source IIRC. I had to build a lot from source (slow in 1998). If that was not available as a buildable package, I often had to tweak header files to make it build. For many amenities which I took for granted on my linux box, I decided that it's too much hassle to make them built on BSD. Features like SMP or journaling file systems were a bit late in FreeBSD. Maybe they were more solid, and achieved performance parity with Linux with time. Sadly, the industry largely made the choice. I also find modern Linux a mess, and run a minimalist distro (Void) on my laptop. I could consider running BSD on a server, but most servers now have to run VMs and containers within them, most tooling just assumes Linux. |
Yep, it was timing for me - the Asus BP6 allowed dual Celerons but only Windows 2000 and Linux 2.6 supported SMP. I was using FreeBSD at the time, but had to move because of hardware support.
But I wouldn't say it was hardware support alone - I think GNU/Linux won because of the licensing - FreeBSD not having a viral license would have turned people off contributing only to have their code distributed closed source by companies... that's my take anyway.