Same reason the Hurd never materialized. Linux was good enough that nobody cared to put in the massive effort required to make the slightly better solution ind

Same reason the Hurd never materialized. Linux was good enough that nobody cared to put in the massive effort required to make the slightly better solution industry-strength. It's something like the death by a thousand cuts, only in this case, the thousand cuts are unsupported hardware and silly programs that don't have ports or package maintainers, but that people still want anyway. BSD gets away with being the unpopular but probably better alternative to Linux by a massive effort to port all linux software to it, and a great linux compatibility layer for things that aren't ported.