The eternal struggle between excellence and excellence Let me start by dismissing the opinion and anecdote at the start. In fact as far as I can tell you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Sun Sparc 2 running OpenBSD and the same machine running SunOS 4.x.x except for the fact that the OpenBSD machine would be faster. It's difficult to determine which would be 'better' without getting very subjective. Linux uses a very open development model. Almost anyone can contribute.
More contributors lead to many advantages and disadvantages.
This is especially true when you get into the fringe hardware areas like scanners, packet radio, video capture devices, etc. Some of these are sexier. Most people would say, and I would agree, that this is the wrong way to do threads. However, for most purposes it works. Linux supports my scanner with almost any SCSI host adapter in my house, however.