To hazard a guess, in no particular order: * proprietary software. Yes, sometimes you need to run it. It's built for Linux but not for OpenBSD. * hardware sup

To hazard a guess, in no particular order: * proprietary software. Yes, sometimes you need to run it. It's built for Linux but not for OpenBSD. * hardware support. OpenBSD is better than it used to be, but it's still not as good as Linux. * apt/dpkg. There's just so, so much more prepackaged software available on Linux. (I miss Debian/kFreeBSD...) But primarily, I think, it's solely due to Linux network effects --- people learn Linux because Linux is everywhere so people learn Linux. There's just more people and more knowledge around. Which means that if you're porting an OS to a new platform, you go with Linux because you know that the skills are available, and probably a lot of the functionality is already there, and there's a bunch of different userland stacks that will already just work on it, etc, etc.