No mention of knoppix, I think? For me that was the first live distro (hell, first distro at all) that cracked reliable hardware detection.
First time I tried Knoppix, booting to a desktop from CD without having to install anything with almost all of my hardware being functional...
...was probably the last time anything I did on a PC actually felt like magic.
And we still can't do that with Windows today. It took Microsoft nearly 20 years to even give us a USB installer option.
Yeah. It's still magic.
One of the magical experiences I remember with LNX-BBC was when we got Two-Kernel Monte working, which was a tool that let you boot a Linux kernel using a Linux userspace as the bootloader (not emulated or virtualized, but directly on the hardware, replacing the prior kernel and userspace). We had all kinds of fun with that, like netbooting over HTTP.
In fact I remember a whole discussion like "hey, PXE is too restrictive, we can ship 50 MB of code that does an arbitrary netboot using non-BIOS-included drivers, protocols, and authentication logic". I think someone did make a custom image to do this in some environment.
One thing I didn't know until I checked just now is that the Two-Kernel Monte replacement kexec is still maintained in the kernel! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kexec
Somehow I thought it had fallen by the wayside after a couple of years, but apparently not. So now I should go try some netbooting over HTTPS... :-)