While Linux was technically released a year or two earlier, the contemporaneous versions of FreeBSD were much more mature. Linux was pretty unusable as a production server for the first several years but FreeBSD was more than serviceable.

I used them both almost from the beginning of their existence. Linux was a novelty early on but FreeBSD was serving a lot of the load in Silicon Valley for a big chunk of the 1990s. Linux didn’t really hit its stride until the 2000s. Linux was pretty actively bad early on if you just needed a UNIX server.