Red Hat is widely used in the corporate world as they offer commercial support and training packages.
It is popular with those who have better knowledge of the Linux operating system and who prefer the command line over the various GUIs available.
Live DVDs or CDs are not an ideal way to provide bioinformatics computing, as they run from a CD/DVD drive.
This means they are slower than a traditional hard disk installation and have limited ability to be configured.
In general, Linux distributions have a wide range of official packages available, but this does not usually include much in the way of scientific support.
On the other hand, you can fine tune all to run at the highest speed utilizing the best of your processor (for example to actually use SSE and AVX and AVX2 CPU instructions).
The build-from-source option also allows the ports system to automate installation of software with a license that does not permit redistribution.
The pkgsrc package manager, originally forked from FreeBSD ports, is maintained by the NetBSD project, but aims to support all POSIX-compatible operating systems.
Providing support and documentation should be an important part of any BioLinux project, so that scientists who are not IT specialists may quickly find answers to their specific problems.