> Technical superiority doesn't win ecosystem wars. Linux won through a combination of fast decisions, the viral GPL licence, and strong enterprise backing from Red Hat and IBM. Then Google, Facebook, and Amazon happened — hungry for datacenters, developing tools to manage growing infrastructure at scale. They set the direction for the entire industry.
In the mid 1990's the hardware driver support on Linux was much broader.
Copy / paste of my comment from last year about FreeBSD
I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.
The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640
The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that.
The sound card was another issue.
I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers"
When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
In the mid 1990's the hardware driver support on Linux was much broader.
Copy / paste of my comment from last year about FreeBSD
I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.
The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640
The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that.
The sound card was another issue.
I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers"
When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.