The distribution thing was key because a lot of people would not have had networked computers at the time. The first version of Linux I installed was Slackware. I downloaded 27 disk images for 3.5" floppies at the university on one of the handful of computers we had with an internet connection. I then biked home to install it. One of the disks turned out to be corrupted so, I had to take the bike back to fix that. I had no internet at home. That PC never got connected to a network. Slackware was great. It worked. I was able to get it going with the bundled documentation and some howtos that I printed at the university. Without that, I would have gotten stuck quickly.
Later, CD-ROMs became popular and I bought a red hat CD in a store. Cd burners were not that common at the time and I did not have access to one. Also, 700MB was a lot of space at the time. My hard disk was smaller than that. Red Hat came with a lot of software (more than I could actually install) and that quickly became the key selling point for distributions: lots of software and a convenient way to get it installed by people that did not necessarily have a lot of unix experience. The competition between Linux distributions was fierce. You had Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Mandrake, and more. Some of these were commercial companies that were making money from selling CDs. They had budgets for marketing and distribution, they payed people to write nice installers for them, they spent a lot of time testing things and fixing things that needed fixing, document things, offer support, etc.
BSD did not really compete much in that space. I never actually used it so I can't vouch for how easy or hard installing that would have been but I bet it would have been harder to install and probably did not have the same level of hardware support for the simple reason that far less people used it. I don't think I ever saw any BSD cds in the store. Was anyone even selling such cds commercially? They had the software but they lacked the distribution.
Later, CD-ROMs became popular and I bought a red hat CD in a store. Cd burners were not that common at the time and I did not have access to one. Also, 700MB was a lot of space at the time. My hard disk was smaller than that. Red Hat came with a lot of software (more than I could actually install) and that quickly became the key selling point for distributions: lots of software and a convenient way to get it installed by people that did not necessarily have a lot of unix experience. The competition between Linux distributions was fierce. You had Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Mandrake, and more. Some of these were commercial companies that were making money from selling CDs. They had budgets for marketing and distribution, they payed people to write nice installers for them, they spent a lot of time testing things and fixing things that needed fixing, document things, offer support, etc.
BSD did not really compete much in that space. I never actually used it so I can't vouch for how easy or hard installing that would have been but I bet it would have been harder to install and probably did not have the same level of hardware support for the simple reason that far less people used it. I don't think I ever saw any BSD cds in the store. Was anyone even selling such cds commercially? They had the software but they lacked the distribution.