Don’t forget Bluetooth, WiFi, and graphics (cough Nvidia). Or any peripheral, for that matter.
Until vendors stop forcing us to play games with their broken blobs, Linux will forever be just a grand experiment for frustrated hobbyists and unfortunate professionals around the globe. A digital tragedy of the commons.
Linux is the most widely used kernel in the entire world. If you consider 'Linux' to be the OS, it is #1. If you consider all distributions that use the Linux kernel, it is also #1, collectively and individually (Android.)
If you look at the ranked list of Supercomputers, Linux has the entire top 500.
What the hell are you talking about?
Which, worth noting, does its own thing for init & services ( https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/+/maste... ).
I think it's fair to assume they were talking about Linux as a desktop OS, which for some reason absolutely refuses to learn lessons from the other 99.9% of the market. And is also infatuated with internal fragmentation despite its tiny usage. That makes it really fun as a hobby for sure, and powerfully flexible for datacenter usages (from the mundane to the supercomputers). But also pretty terrible as a "I just want my laptop to work reliably & well" OS.
Which I had for the best part of 2 decades. Until systemd came along, infected pretty much every mainsteram distribution, and broke things that have always just worked like DNS.
Instead people decided "ooh mac is shiny, lets copy that". If I wanted OSX, I'd use a mac. If I wanted windows, I'd use windows.
Actually Apple has its own launchd service management system, and that one doesn't try to handle stuff like logging or dns. Apple changed the licensing of launchd to Apache license 2.0, but no linux distribution has adopted it. Ubuntu checked it out, but didn't use it because launchd used a more restrictive license at the time. Interesting that the license change didn't trigger a wider adoption of launchd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd#History
in a way this would disprove the assertion that everyone has to use systemd, because of dependency creep.