Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.
My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.
Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time.
My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.
Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.
Sun got by because they had faster and more reliable hardware than what was available in the x86 space at the time. eBay's services ran on a handful of 64 CPU Starfire servers. And proprietary UNIX workstations had a bunch of specialized apps that weren't available on Linux at that point.
That's really an old-school UNIX convention that should have died with the move from teletypes to CRT terminals. The default behavior was that ERASE was # and KILL was @ (rather than backspace and Ctrl-C). It was typical for these to get set properly on logging in.
Linux won on the server side because they got just as right as Unix. The crappy UI (windows) was the one that didn't work with shell scripting, didn't work with ssh, etc.
Once you have git and actions, I don't think that the language really matters all that much.
That wasn't even true back then.
The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation!
Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??)
Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...
Somewhere, I still have a Red Hat 5 retail CD. I'm not sure, but I might have bought it at Borders Books rather than a computer shop. I know I bought a few CD-ROM collections at the bookstore.
Minix existed at the time too, I know because I ran it on an 8088 PC.
But within a few years, linux started gaining mindshare and was starting to replace proprietary unix especially on individual PCs.
It wasn't until mid 1992 that distros started to exist, and I'd say it took a bit of time for those to be complete enough to be usable for someone with a goal other than smoke-testing the kernel on their PC.
I can say for certain that I, a complete newbie, was able to boot SLS Linux floppies in early 1993, and within a couple months I was installing Slackware to HDD.
You also had SuSE, which really started as German-localized Slackware.
Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.
Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.
like smartphones ;-)
Then Intel came out with dual-core processors, which was the new hotness. So he wrote a followup page, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".
At the time, I thought they were funny, and made reasonable arguments. But in retrospect, they were just trying to distract the customers from the fact that Intel was overtaking them.