

Booze.
I have huge chunks of memories missing and that ain’t exactly a bad thing for my older, and sober, self. (Sometimes I still get flashbacks of blurry memories and it is very anxiety inducing. Booze memories are weird and were written to some corrupt cells or something that only pop back up under strange conditions.)







They still probably need a ton of customization and tuning at the driver level and beyond, which open source allows for.
I am sure there is plenty of existing “super computer”-grade software in the wild already, but a majority of it probably needs quite a bit of hacking to get running smoothly on newer hardware configurations.
As a matter of speculation, the engineers and scientists that build these things are probably hyper-picky about how some processes execute and need extreme flexibility.
So, I would say it’s a combination of factors that make Linux a good choice.