Come to think of it.
* Both free, versatile, powerful, in short awesome
* Both faced with a competition either inferior or insanely priced, and in any case unfree as hell.
* Both with a base of enthusiast supporters all absolutely sure that "this year will be our year, we will take over the world!". Every year.
Except Linux has been around 23 years now. It has been adopted by maybe a 2% of tech enthousiasts, and behind the scenes by many big players as an invisible base for their services -but common people apparently still love to defragment and scan for viruses. Although many know there is something called "linux"; just as many have heard of bitcoin recently.
Still, the mental effort required for the change is commonly believed to be too much -although the transition has arguably been made as easy as it could possibly be.
So apparently, without a (really) big company to push for adoption, universal success among common people is unlikely.
(Oh: among crypto, Bitcoin is Debian -and Ripple looks a lot like it could be Ubuntu)