Yes and no. The gaming industry serves as an illustrative example because we know the Sony Playstation 4 and 5 are both based on FreeBSD[0].

Compare Sony PlayStation Network[1]

  Monthly active users on PlayStation Network reached 123 million as of June 30, 2025.

  Valve reported 132 million active monthly players (that is, they used Steam within the month, as opposed to being logged in at exact the same time) at the end of 2021...

  This isn't scientific, but if the same ratio of active monthly to peak concurrent users held through to today, back of the napkin math would put Steam's current active monthly users at 221.5 million

FreeBSD code is also in iOS and macOS via Darwin, the Nintendo Switch, and the Microsoft Windows networking stack.

Evidently BSD is a go-to choice for consumers today, but many don't realize it, and those of us who do often do not think about it. That's because the BSD license and the companies that use it result in products that bear no resemblance to the BSD we know.

A similar situation occurred with Minix - to the extent that it's creator Andrew Tannenbaum had no idea it's install base was arguably bigger than Linux until 2017. Intel had put Minix into the Management Engine on their professional grade CPUs for years. The BSD license allowed Intel to put it everywhere without the knowledge of the wider Minix community.

In some key ways, BSD is already taking the Linux spot, however, I'd argue that BSD can't truly take the Linux spot because the GPL license makes the Linux spot what it is. I honestly can't say if this makes Linux better or worse off. The most advanced technology of our time is largely not choosing copyleft licenses, and for those who did choose it, they've taken steps to distance themselves from it[3][4][5][6].

Given all this, I think Hurd has more of a chance to be the spiritual successor to Linux (if it disappeared). The only caveat is there is zero chance for a big-tech-dominated $200M "Hurd Foundation" to arise due to Hurd's's affiliation with the Free Software Foundation. Not much of the Linux Foundation's money actually goes to Linux, so it may not matter in the grand scheme of things[7].

[0] https://wololo.net/2023/03/22/new-freebsd-vulnerabilities-co...

[1] https://www.psu.com/news/psn-hits-123-million-monthly-active...

[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/steam-just-cracked-4...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smar...

[4] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-...

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/

[6] https://lwn.net/Articles/655519/

[7] https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/The-annual-report-of-the-Linu...

Embedded for sure eats the world. If you're looking at that then QNX, FreeRTOS, and similar options are also big in the running. The thing is if you're targeting a particularly well-defined piece of hardware and application, and you know you're going to want to customize and optimize for that combination, then you're generally going to be better off with a smaller, simpler starting point than something which is designed to run on pretty much everything and for almost any application. The different licenses complement that, but I think even if the licenses swapped the design and goal difference would affect things more.

> A similar situation occurred with Minix - to the extent that it's creator Andrew Tannenbaum had no idea it's install base was arguably bigger than Linux until 2017. Intel had put Minix into the Management Engine on their professional grade CPUs for years. The BSD license allowed Intel to put it everywhere without the knowledge of the wider Minix community.

Off topic question, but wasn't that a violation of the BSD license? It does require a copyright notice.

> FreeBSD code is also in iOS and macOS via Darwin […]

It is a common belief that Darwin has allegedly descended from FreeBSD, but there is not a lot in there: a pretty ancient snapshot of the FreeBSD userland, another snapshot of the TCP/IP stack that has now completely diverged from the current FreeBSD TCP/IP stack (or, more correctly, the other way round), plus a few borrowed kernel level API's (kqueue is the most notable one).

VMM, VFS, driver layers, file systems etc etc do not share the same lineage.

> Evidently BSD is a go-to choice for consumers today, but many don't realize it, and those of us who do often do not think about it.

Is this not even more true than with Linux in the billions strong Android?