Linux isn’t a unicorn here. Sure FreeBSD has pretty good driver support. In fact back in the 00s I had fewer problems with FreeBSD WiFi drivers than Linux. I d

Linux isn’t a unicorn here. Sure FreeBSD has pretty good driver support. In fact back in the 00s I had fewer problems with FreeBSD WiFi drivers than Linux. I don’t know what the driver story is like for all of the other main BSDs but DragonflyBSD is a really interesting platform with some real innovations in the kernel. Technically XNU, the macOS kernel, is open source too. Though there doesn’t seem to be much community effort behind that. There’s also OpenIndiana. Which itself has some really novel ideas. Then you have smaller projects that have compatibility layers, for example Haiku can run some Linux and FreeBSD systems. ReactOS and Windows driver support. But even if you exclude them in favour of larger, more stable projects, there’s still plenty of options out there. I do also think you’re placing far too much emphasis on the kernel here. For example some platforms don’t guarantee ABI compatibility between releases, instead requiring their standard libraries being used as the kernel entry point (eg Darwin instead of XNU, or libc on some UNIXes). This is why people often talk about GNU/Linux, Darwin or NT as more than just a kernel. And that’s before we address the massive elephant in the room that is all the abstractions that sit on top of the userland. For example how so many applications these days are basically running inside a virtual machine called a “web browser”. These days a modern browser is almost like an OS in its own right. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking anything away from Linux nor the Linux kernel. But its main strength is its momentum rather than it being unique.