Dat one time when Satoshi decides that adding a "minimize to tray" feature in the Windows version might give us 300% more nodes, while porting Bitcoin to Linux would give us 3% more.
Discussion
As a big fan of Linux it is with sadness in my heart that I agree with this… 🥲
Basically 0 people ran linux on the desktop back then and no one was going to run a server for it (there weren't VPS's etc like today).
i was running red hat 5.1 in 1998, but not until 2007 did it become my daily driver, and i wasn't on the internet often until 2003
but it was pretty rare anyone who had the patience and skill to do it back then, i think you can say at the time of the inception of bitcoin it was just peeking over the horizon for the majority
Few people ran linux on the desktop back then, even most developers ran windows.
Everyone just installed bitcoin and ran it once then forgot about it, so starting it at login and running it in the background was the simplest way to increase the number of nodes online at any given time.
A Linux build wouldn't have really helped much in comparison; no one was going to run a server just to try it out (and there weren't easily deployable VPS's etc like today).