Linux is an offshoot of Minix, which is an offshoot of the Unixes of the late 80's-early 90's. It's true to oldschool Unix in lots of ways, but the BSDs are much more faithful to the originals from way back in the day. Binary support is completely different (of course as in a linux binary won't work for BSD), as well as many filesystem/directory structure parts. But they're still very similar. Linux is complicated, yes, but some distros are a little bit simpler than, say, tooling with OpenBSD. If I'm wrong at all, anyone feel free to correct me
