Well, I've used BSD since the 4.2BSD days. The object was that the local DEC sales guy pushed an VAX11/750 and BSD with promised CSRG support. He also promised that supporting HASP over a leased line to a S/370 would be no problem. CSRG tried to make it work for at least a year or two--they never could before we dropped the VAX and did our HASP using a PC/AT. Otherwise, BSD was surprisingly robust and we had very few crashes.
I'd been exposed somewhat to Unix V7 as part of a port to the then-not-ready-for-primetime 80286, but Intel largely did all of the kernel work. We had a PDP 11/70 to run the real thing, but my role was far from systems programming--mostly trying to port our existing 8085 program base over. Somewhere, I have a set of SysVR4 distribution tapes, but they're mostly of academic interest.
I started myself on Linux with a very early Slackware distro and eventually settled in with RH 3 then 5, then changed to Debian (I think). RH back in the day was the way to go because of the good organized support--and you got a book with it.
But as far as nuclear power plants goes, a VIA chipset would be "futuristic" or "bleeding edge" at best, considering that the last US nuclear plant to go online was in 1996 (construction started in 1973). How's Linux for paper tape support?
As far as security, I'm pretty old school. Nowadays, it seems that everyone wants to connect everything to the net, no matter that any benefit might be dubious at best. That just seems to be inviting the black-hat guys to fool with your stuff. After every report of an intrusion, I ask "Exactly why did all of this information
need to be online to the outside world 24/7?"
So yeah, I'm a fuddy-duddy--and proudly so.