> and so you could install Linux without its own partition right beside DOS. Then you'd use loadlin which would load the kernel into memory and run it, basically shoving DOS out of memory.

It was more than just "install Linux without its own partition". It was "install Linux in a directory like C:\LINUX like a normal DOS application and start it from MS-DOS like a normal DOS application".

It's hard to overstate how important that was at the time. If you had a system running MS-DOS (like most people), with or without Windows 3.x (which also started from MS-DOS like a normal DOS application), you could install Linux without changing anything on your system, and if you didn't like it, you could simply delete the corresponding directory and everything would be gone. That (together with small Linux distributions which ran from a pair of floppies) made it much easier and low-risk to try Linux, and IMHO was one of the things which helped it gain enough marketshare and mindshare to later stand on its own.

(That was my own path with Linux: I started running it as a "normal DOS application" with UMSDOS and LOADLIN, then I moved to a dedicated partition with ext2 and LILO, and finally I discarded MS-DOS completely and gave the whole disk to Linux.)