I have also read that, back then, Linux was better at supporting common hardware than the BSDs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338 https://news.ycomb

I have also read that, back then, Linux was better at supporting common hardware than the BSDs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338). My personal experience at the time is that I didn't even consider the BSDs; Linux had UMSDOS, which allowed me to try it out without having to repartition and/or reformat (then later I noticed that I was nearly always on Linux, so I reformatted a whole partition as ext2 and dedicated it exclusively to Linux).