Eu fiz algumas leituras sobre isso e a conclusão parece ser que é o shell padrão do GNU (usado pela maioria dos OS), e portanto vem simplesmente empacotado como parte do GNU, enquanto também tem 20 anos de desenvolvimento por trás, tornando-o estável e bem arredondado, é simplesmente o melhor em todos os aspectos, atendendo às necessidades de todos, exceto dos usuários mais avançados. p>
Para mais, leia Por que o bash é padrão no Linux? (a mesma pergunta no Unix e no Linux).
Só para adicionar um pouco mais a isso, existem muitos outros shells para testar, se você estiver interessado, aqui estão alguns desta resposta :
Zsh has more advanced interactive facilities, but a few quirks when it comes to scripting (less so now than back in the days). In the early to mid-1990s when Linux was in its infancy, zsh was virtually unknown.
Ksh was the de facto standard on commercial unices since the mid-1980s, but it was proprietary software until 2000, so not an option on Linux. Also, ksh had subpar command line editing capabilities, compared with bash.
Pdksh, a free clone of ksh, would have been an option, but it was not well-known and had poor command line edition capabilities. (Pdksh is no longer a very active project, even though it's still used in some BSDs, now that ATT ksh is free.)
Some distributions install an ash variant as
/bin/sh
. Ash (by which I mean any of the loose family of shells called ash) is designed to be small and fast, with no interactive features (it's only for editing scripts). The ash revival is relatively recent; in the 1990s the existing variants lacked a lot of features.Tcsh was the most advanced interactive shell until zsh came along, but it's incompatible with sh and not so good with scripting.