> Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so.

That's a matter of preference. Regardless, the Humanity theme is much closer to what standard GNOME looked like back then. Which goes against the original point that they were especially polished.

> Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.

What is with this weird, warped memory that is so common these days? First of all, many distros eschewed "Free Software purity": SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire, etc; and they definitely did it better than the early versions of Ubuntu. Ubuntu didn't get known for being "easy to install" until 2+ years after its release when jockey was reworked in 6.10/7.04. As to difficulty to install? The Anaconda, SuSE and Drak installers offered much the same experience as the standard debian installer that early versions of Ubuntu used, but with GUIs. And it took two minutes of googling "nvidia fedora core" to find RPMForge then click the "add to repos" link to add the necessary drivers to the single of the aforementioned distros that didn't offer it.

But sure, let's just do another direct comparison.

Here's the Ubuntu 4.10 install:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLX3vJgLdrw

Here's the installer for Fedora Core 1, which came out a year and a half before the first version of Ubuntu (even with the fact that this person chose to manually partition their disks, it's pretty streamlined):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6c3prrIhzI

If you honestly believe the Ubuntu install is easier or more friendly than the Fedora one, you're delusional.

And for further comparison:

Mandrake 10.1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTnKhruF9kc

Linspire 5.0:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_lL4HE5a0o

Yeah, you're right. They're much more difficult than Ubuntu to install (especially for "CompSci students").

In addition, their stance on Free Software went way too far when they started developing in their own bubble and refusing to upstream any of their patches. At the time they were mocked for their ugly brown color, for their overly opinionated stances and for holding back advancements in Linux. AIGLX's ( developed by Fedora+the Free Software community and the eventual GL extension to Xorg) development was delayed by the fight with Ubuntu/XGL, who just wanted something pretty now to show off. Same goes for all the constant fights they start [and always lose] to do things "their way": systemd vs upstart, flatpaks vs snap, mir vs wayland, GNOME vs ubiquity, etc, etc etc.

Their reputation has always been that they use the Linux community to do all the dirty work for them, and give nothing back. At least, for people actually involved in the community.

> The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.

There you go. This is why they were popular. In a time when many people were still on slower broadband or Dial-Up (or had to pay 3-10usd to order a disc); having a millionaire cover the cost of sending it to you was a big deal. Ubuntu 4.10-6.10 didn't get popular for being pretty, or easy to use, or having a great out-of-the-box experience; they did despite those things because it was super easy to get 5 discs and hand them out to your friends who knew nothing about Linux. They then worked on making the out-of-box experience better for themselves (and only themselves) while leeching off the established distros who did work with the community. Red Hat/Fedora is the big one, but Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSE, etc were also big contributors. Hell, it was common for Microsoft to contribute more to the Linux upstream than Canonical did.

> All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.

The one action. Making discs easy to get and distribute to people unaware.