The short story is that during dive very critical years BSDs had the spectre of AT&T lawsuit over them, plus x86 ports were less known or commercial. From my un

The short story is that during dive very critical years BSDs had the spectre of AT&T lawsuit over them, plus x86 ports were less known or commercial. From my understanding this managed to get a critical mass for Linux on commodity hardware resulting in (real or perceived) situation where Linux had better chances of running well on what random enthusiast or cash strapped team might scrounge up from local used PC parts store compared to BSDs where existence of non-commercial port that doesn't require spending big money on used unix workstation. Later on there was less difference and more fashion (unless someone dug deep into optimization or why one or the other) but arguably BSDs were still pickier about hardware they ran on. And finally, I'd say around 2.6 kernel and NLPT, Linux actually was better for many in terms of performance - not to mention being stuff people were used to, with large software repositories, NAPI for high performance networking (at the same time OpenBSD would talk about how to physically swap your PCI NICs to make them share interrupts so interrupt on one would trigger driver receive queue for all of them), better known and corporate-tested commercial suppliers (RedHat, SuSE). For a time network heavy stuff and IPv6 favoured Free and NetBSD from my observations but that didn't last. Probably non trivial part is that those who evacuated from commercial unices to PCs were mostly moving from System V flavour after Sun switched from BSD base, so Linux systems being closer than BSD in behaviour and API might have impacted software porting (pure speculation on my part here). Meanwhile the only major commercial BSD based systems by late 1990s as people moved en masse to free unices on PCs was OSF/1, whose main incarnations in a larger number were Digital Unix aka Tru64 and NEXT STEP/OpenSTEP/MacOS X with all kinds of fun stuff like their BSDisms being older than FreeBSD forking out of BSD