No, my claim is that Unix has good "bones", and Linux is all the hacks on top that make it work in the real world (more diverse hardware than Unix ever saw, diverse users, alternate models like Android and JVM, etc.) And that Linux needs some design leadership right now.
When you have good bones, the hacks have something to rest on. The system still has some coherence, and doesn't degrade into a pile of mud. Linux is wading dangerously into that territory.
When something is widely used, there is no option to not have hacks... you either have bad architecture and hacks, or good architecture and hacks.
There was a thread here a few days ago discussing how NT is the same... it has good bones from Cutler, but then Microsoft had to layer all the compatibility hacks on top, for Windows 95 earlier. That's probably true to some extent.
I guess I'm mainly saying that Windows is inferior in terms of system administration and scripting: shell scripts, fork/exec, shebang lines, the file system abstraction, etc. Threads and async I/O were not in the original Unix model, so it's perhaps not surprising if Windows does that better.
If AT&T was allowed to sell it, I doubt very much the market would have seen such good bones.
So like in any free gift regardless of quality, people build gadgets on top of gadgets and think that is the best there is.
The UNIX haters handbook still holds quite some truths when checking an actual version of HP-UX or other commercial UNIX es.
A fact of the UNIX free culture is that people only started contributing to gcc after Sun decided to stop offering the developer tools.
Some of us prefer doing administration of machines via tools like Active Directory or have an OS that has security access lists applied to every kernel object.
Also UNIX has lots to learn from mainframe OSes like IBM I, z/OS or Unisys MCP.
But their owners sells them, they weren't forced to give the source code for free to universities.
