Linux had more bleeding edge development, and that's what developers wanted, so that's what they wrote their apps for, and so that's what people used for workst

Linux had more bleeding edge development, and that's what developers wanted, so that's what they wrote their apps for, and so that's what people used for workstations, so that's what got all the newest hardware drivers, and new kernel features, and new desktop work, etc etc. Linux just had "more stuff". Without any other particular reason to pick one over the other, most people picked the one with "more stuff". Nobody wanted to install an OS for a server just to find out it couldn't run the latest software, or didn't have the latest drivers. In addition, the userland of the BSDs was different from GNU tools; if you were already installing GNU tools on every other OS you adminned, you might as well run the OS that's based on it. Finally, if you wanted Enterprise support, Linux was the only Open Source choice, afaik. Some at the timed claimed performance benefits from one or the other, but various benchmarks showed Linux and BSDs each had their respective performance strengths that could generally be overcome by tweaking.