That would be an interesting timeline where open source BSD variants have all the hardware support and mindshare while Linux is an obscure project in the vein of Plan 9 or GNU Hurd..no idea how that would have played out.
FreeBSD and NetBSD were first released in 93, but I didn't hear about them until later. I don't think I would have been knowledgeable enough to install/use them back then, either.
I hadn't done any serious work with FreeBSD until earlier this year, when I set up my blog site on it. I wrote an article about that experience at https://jsilverfox.blog/post/freebsd/
The site is running well, I..just need to write more articles for it, eheh.
I vaguely remember Yggdrasil Linux, but I never ran it as it wasn't freely available and I was saving my money for Super Nintendo games, hehe. Slackware was free, though it took a long time to download over a 2400 (maybe 14.4) modem onto a stack of floppies, all while hoping that nothing got corrupted.
Then, the actual installation was quite a learning experience but I managed (somehow, far too long ago to remember exactly how) to get it running. Didn't have a graphics card for XFree86, but having multiple ttys/multitasking available after using DOS for so long felt extraordinary. ^^
I’ve been using Linux for..not quite 30 years, but getting there, and I’ve been a Linux sysadmin for over 20. I started on Slackware, ran that for about 15 years, went to Fedora, ran that for 12 or so, and I’ve been on Arch since.
So yeah, I know some things ^^
So long as you keep all of your traffic encrypted, no one'll be able to snoop on it, though they could already see destinations/type of traffic. Anyone who controls a VPN start or end point can see anything that tcpdump can reveal.