Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.
I presume you mean MB and not GB? On native Atari hardware at least, you could only address up to 1 GB partitions on the very last TOS 4.04 based systems like the Falcon.
Yes. nobody had GB drives in those days. The drive I had on my ST was a 16 MB SCSI drive and the CPU ran at 8 MHz. The IBM XTs that were so popular at the time only had 10 MB hard drives and ran at 4.77 MHz.
Though my ST only had 1MB of RAM and a floppy, no hard drive. On that I ran a UUCP node to get email and news for a while. And some unix-like shells (Mupfel, I believe was one? Gulam was another great one). I did use MiNT a bit but the whole GNU toolset was a bit big for a floppy system, and the multitasking was only somewhat useful. You could get a unix-like environment without going fully MiNT.
The big jump for me was having a 200MB HD in my 486 when I got it. Massive life change.
Linux came later after also going through AIX, HP/UX, A/UX, AT&T SVr4, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1, ISC, ...