On Thursday, January 4, 2018, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
First and foremost Linus was a MINIX user which was based on UNIX V7. That could explain his preference for SysV. People tend to forget that it was MINIX that sparked Linus' interest in the operating systems. The first public announcement of Linux was posted on the MINIX newsgroup.
Linux was basically a continuation of MINIX -- small, simple project, but heavily optimized for i386 and with a vision to become a production ready system instead of educational one. Its simplicity and freshness definitely attracted many people who wanted to have a small, simple Unix-like system on their PC. Sometimes it is just better to start something from scratch instead of relying on legacy and bloated solutions from the past.
BSD was already bloated and big. It was technically superior at that time, but at the cost of complexity. And it took a lot of effort to polish 386BSD to the point it was stable -- it definitely wasnt in the beginning.
--Andy