To be fair, no OS has control over the hardware, only how it interacts with it. The cheap eBay clone and random PC fan failure are vanishingly rare for a datace

To be fair, no OS has control over the hardware, only how it interacts with it. The cheap eBay clone and random PC fan failure are vanishingly rare for a datacenter database environment. Still, the claim that merely selecting a an OS that may not suffer from this one particular issue results in a "bulletproof" setup is rather extraordinary. There may be other issues, some as a result of that OS choice (even if hardware issues are not). Additionally, the choice of a much less popular OS can, in and of itself, be a significant "bullet"-susceptibility factor, not just in terms of general supportability but, getting back to your point about hardware, how well one might expect it to behave with what's out there on the market.