The answer might be it was easier to duel-boot DOS with Linux in the early days (something about partitioning). However the takeoff point probably wasn't until a few years later when Linux 2.0 was the first with SMP support. Many other reasons contributed.
You could boot Linux from DOS back then, by using LOADLIN and relying on UMSDOS support which could manage a Linux-compatible filesystem within a DOS directory such as C:\LINUX\. No need to mess with partitioning at all. With some added prompts in AUTOEXEC.BAT, you could basically turn even plain DOS into something as powerful as a modern UEFI boot manager. Of course this stuff became less feasible after NT-based systems took over, making conventional dual boot and separate partitions the best choice overall.
I'm 99% certain you could boot BSD from DOS back then too. 386BSD 1.0 contains a "boot.exe" which works with FreeDOS -as long as you don't load anything else!
I think that FreeBSD 2.0 may have used the boot utility as well -but I'm not sure.
I remember when I encountered Linux in the late 90's there was a distro that sat on MS-DOS; I think it may have been "Monkey Linux" ( https://projectdevolve.tripod.com/table/descript.htm )? It wasn't Slackware -but I pretty quickly found slackware and began using "zipslack" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack) before diving in and doing a real Linux install.
So by 97 or so Linux was figuring out more sophisticated ways to co-exist with DOS if not Windows95. Probably had been for a couple years before that -but 97 is when I found Linux so I don't know.
And yes, by the time XP was released Linux was popular enough that people didn't bother making kludges like that any more. It probably didn't help that vfat and fat32 were different than the old umsdos file system so that the drawbacks out-weighed the benefits.
Yeah, BSD was still doing its funky "slice" subpartitioning scheme instead of using MBR partitions directly (and for the next two decades as well). Linux has always just used MBR/EBR partitions (prior to GPT).
Yes, exactly that. I wrote another reply about that. Running 386BSD on the PC I had available meant overwriting the disk, and that was not an option (it ran OS/2 and had to continue doing so for a time). So that's why I ended up with Linux (early 1992). I never had thoughts about GPL vs BSD at the time.
The autocorrect of dual booting to duel booting really encapsulates the spirit of the era. At that poit tbe #1 feature of OS/2 was the boot manager and the ability to boot into logical drives.
