1) The previous versions of BF linux dedicated server did not run nearly as well as the windows version. I say this not as a Windows advocate but from experience with my linux server. Windows would support more players smoothly from any given hardware configuration. I suspect this is more because of software maturity of the dedicated server program than anything else.
2) Again from my experience from my server I would not recommend current versions of Mandrake for this kind of linux usage. Visit the OS forum and look at what people are recommending. I am on Mandrake now, but will be moving to a different distro when I make the time to do so. Mandrake has become more of a distro for grandmas and not a distro for tweakers. It has lots of wizards that make things easy to set up... until you need to do something that isn't in one of the setup wizards, then everything becomes twice as difficult as with any other distro because nobody else does the same things like Mandrake does, and you basically need to undo everything the wizard did and then do it again in a way that other people from other distros can help you with.
3)
http://bf1942.lightcubed.com/ (this is the source of all things linux + BF series dedicated server, including a very helpful forum, BF2 discussion currently appears to be in the 'Discussion' forum, as they don't have a seperate BF2 forums breakout as of yet.)
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
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