Re: Dont get it
It's not so much that his code was bad, although obviously anyone starting out writing a kernel will learn a lot from there on. No, the real disagreement is over the way the kernel is designed. It is a monolithic kernel and years ago the opinion was that monolithic kernels were old hat and microkernels were the way forward.
Of course, there's been all sorts of different kernels and some even take bits of each such as the Amiga kernel. WIndows has a bit of a mishmash of kernel ideas.
Personally I think that what people consider to be "Linux" is not what Linus has created. The kernel is important but it isn't what people think Linux is, they're more likely to talk about the command line, Apache web server or Gnome/KDE.
The hardware support of Linux is the big strength, it supports a lot of hardware but at the same time this means that the kernel grows larger and larger. I used to roll my own kernels but it was becoming extremely tiresome due to the vast amounts of options in the kernel config pages.