True, except BSD had an installed base and a base of advocates back then dating back to the 1970s. BSD was the hacker Unix back when you could still credibly build a workstation around Motorola 68000 derivatives.
Now, the standard narrative here is that BSD was under a legal cloud in the early 1990s due to the USL v. BSDi lawsuit, but BSDs still existed in 1993, when the lawsuit was settled. Was the Linux marketing machine that dominant in 1993? Even before the kernel had hit version 1.0?
I think that's why BSD became to base of NeXT which was really in the workstation space at the time (and would later become Apple OS X). The thing with Linux was that many early web hackers would take a used PC and turn it into a server as their first hello world project. However many of these webmasters weren't hardcore Unix geeks with CS degrees but hobbyists -- and then the hobbyists turned pro.
Now, the standard narrative here is that BSD was under a legal cloud in the early 1990s due to the USL v. BSDi lawsuit, but BSDs still existed in 1993, when the lawsuit was settled. Was the Linux marketing machine that dominant in 1993? Even before the kernel had hit version 1.0?