In 1997 Linux was still so niche that the hacker-to-user-ratio was definitely on par with BSD.

BSD was much less desktop oriented then, and there wasn't newbie friendly documentation around.

Whereas it was a niche but still relatively common for teenage hobbyists to install Linux, get X11 running, read the HOWTOs and surf the web with Netscape for Linux[1] on the home (or school) PC and geeking out on all the Unix things that you heard the older kids got to use at the university lab workstations.

You could argue those users had the hacker spirit of course and many of them did learn programming as well after a while since you still ended up building stuff from source half the time when you wanted to install something.

It helped that you could easily get your hands on cheap Linux install CDs in bookstores and computer shops.

[1] Netscape seems to have been at version 4.0 by 1997. WP thinks version 2 was already available for Linux.

Honestly, I didn't even think of BSD. I actually don't know anyone who uses it on a personal level, I assumed it was more of an OS that you had to use for your job. But I guess, given how niche it is for individual use, you'd be right. But to be pedantic, if you took something really obscure (like hobbyist OSes that have little practical use), you'd probably get to a 100% "hacker" user base.

Playstation, Juniper, NetApp, Netflix to name a few small users. If you touch any of these, you use it too.

I know many OSes are based on FreeBSD, I assumed that OP implied people who used the actual standard distribution of it, not highly-customized embedded or similar versions. Also, using Netflix wouldn't make one a BSD user just because it's what they run on their servers.

Don't forget macOS and iOS, Darwin is also derived from BSD.