Yes, because I wanted to reduce response latencies, and wanted something efficient to serve more people with minimal hardware. (I might go unikernel later, once I build a custom HTTP server.)

Linux also seemed to have changed quite a bit since the last time I used it in the 90's/early 2000s. With systemd, it doesn't seem like Unix anymore.

I also looked up recent Linux distributions to use, and was largely overwhelmed at the choices. I looked up FreeBSD, and it was just one distribution.