I agree that the results might have been not too different if the lawsuit would have been settled earlier, but nonetheless, even a couple of years of delay for BSD was enough to let Linux mature enough to be usable for normal work, not only for experiments.

If the initial toy version of Linux would have competed since the beginning with BSD, it might have been abandoned without further development.

I have started to use both Linux and FreeBSD simultaneously, in 1995, after receiving some Slackware CD's with a computer magazine and after buying the FreeBSD 2.0 CD's.

I have continued to use both of them until today, even if before 2003 ... 2005 I had been using FreeBSD much more than Linux and since 2003 ... 2005 I have been using Linux much more than FreeBSD.

Even early Linux was nice, as long as you did not attempt to fight with X Windows to get a GUI and you were content with the CLI.

However early FreeBSD distributions were in a completely different class of quality than early Linux distributions.

The documentation of early FreeBSD was superb and it included absolutely everything that you would ever want to know. The excellent FreeBSD packet manager did not have equivalents in any Linux distribution, much less in Windows or Mac OS, and it provided useful applications covering most of the needs existing at that time.

At least for the tasks that were important for me at that time, e.g. networking, the speed of FreeBSD was much greater than of both Linux and Windows NT.

Early FreeBSD was also much more reliable than both Linux and Windows NT. For example, at that time I could not yet afford to have UPSes for all computers, even if I was located in a place with frequent power failures.

The FreeBSD UFS with soft updates has always survived without problems after any power failures, while both the computers with Windows NTFS and those with Linux having early versions of the Linux file systems with journaling, have frequently become unbootable after power failures, despite the journals.

So the increasing popularity of Linux was not caused by it being a better OS.

I would guess that the popularity of early Linux was due to its distribution model.

To experience BSD in a time when it was not yet feasible to make large downloads over the Internet, you had to buy the CD sets for either FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD.

The CD sets were quite cheap in comparison to a non-pirated Windows copy, but they still required you to make a committed decision about that.

On the other hand, to experience Linux, I did not have to do anything. At least in Europe, where I lived, a large number of computer magazines, which were still popular as an important source of information at that time, before everything moved on the Internet, came very frequently bundled with Linux installation CD's, so in a short time I got maybe a dozen of Linux CD's, without explicitly searching for them. If I had them, why not use them?

While in the beginning FreeBSD was without doubt better than Linux, that changed in time due to the far larger number of Linux developers.

The main problem of Linux and FreeBSD, then as also today, is that all peripheral device manufactures write Windows drivers for them but they do not publish their documentation and few provide drivers for Linux or FreeBSD.

So in the following years after the initial introduction, more people have written reverse-engineered device drivers for Linux than for FreeBSD, so for any random computer it became much more likely that its hardware was supported by Linux than by FreeBSD.

For example in 2001 I bought some motherboards with a VIA chipset for Athlon CPUs. I could not use FreeBSD on them, as I desired, because there were weird data corruption events, either on hard-disks or on recordable CDs.

I had to use Linux, which worked fine. Later I discovered that the VIA Athlon chipset had a horrible bug in the ATA controller, which caused the data corruption, and VIA kept the bug secret. The Windows drivers included a workaround that serialized the write commands to the ATA controller, avoiding the corruption. Some Linux developer reverse engineered the VIA driver and added the workaround to the Linux kernel, while the FreeBSD kernel did not handle this quirk.

There were many such examples that contributed to Linux becoming more and more popular.

The turning point when Linux leapfrogged FreeBSD and began to have an increasing advance over it was around 2003, when Intel introduced Pentium 4 with SMT (a.k.a. Hyperthreading) and 2005, when AMD introduced multicore CPUs.

In the beginning the BSD systems could not use more than 1 thread at all, so they were not able to use efficiently the new processors. The BSD systems needed many years to become MT capable.

On the other hand, Linux had very quickly versions able to use multiple threads and then the kernel was improved at a very quick pace to become more and more scalable.