The driver problem is even worse now than it was 20 years ago, in that there is quite a bit of hardware that we expect to work as a baseline these days. Each day things like FreeBSD become less and less of an option for general use, due to a lack of drivers. For example, it's a poor choice for newer laptops, as it doesn't have 802.11ac support.

New kernels and OSes that show up are at a massive disadvantage compared to Linux because of this. I think that an OS that prioritizes being able to borrow drivers from Linux or one of the BSDs would give itself an advantage.