Care to point out which remarks were clueless or trollish?
"What’s typical for Unix, for example, is that all the tools, the C library, the kernel, are all maintained in the same repository, right? And they’re released in sync, have the same coding style, the same build infrastructure, the same release cycles – everything’s the same. So you get the entire central part of the operating system like that. If people claim that, because we stick a lot of things into the Systemd repository, then it’s un-Unixish, then it’s absolutely the opposite. It’s more Unix-ish than Linux ever was!"
I don't even know how you could get this misconception. This really does sound clueless or trollish.
The rest of the interview is of a better quality and you follow his reasoning much better even if in the end you would still disagree with him.
I am not saying that he is correct, I am just interpreting!
The disconnect between the Linux kernel and basic userland has been a criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years. It's part of the reason why BSD has a few forks and Linux has hundreds of distributions.
I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" in regards to the Linux kernel and the userland.
I know of Linus' disregard of POSIX where it's crappy or doesn't make any sense anymore in his opinion but that can't extend to the userland as Linus doesn't do userland.
Some clarification or links to said criticism would be welcome.
There's a joke from the 90's that goes something like "FreeBSD is what you get when Unix hackers write a Unix clone for the PC. Linux is what you get when PC hackers write a Unix clone for the PC." From the point of view of BSD or proprietary Unix fans, the early Linux distros were just throwing together a haphazard collection of poorly tested components.
"of" meaning "belonging to" not "directed at." Confused me for a bit too.
I see now what he meant with "disconnect between the Linux kernel and basic userland". As others have already pointed out, I also don't think that this is an integral part of what being like Unix is and I stand by my first assessment of him being wrong, trollish, or as an additional option, throwing in this argument to detract from the real criticism.
The article doesn't go into much detail why having the kernel and the userland being maintained by the same group is better. Neither on theoretical grounds nor with actual examples.
On theoretical grounds, I would agree that it should be benefitial although in my personal experience (Solaris, FreeBSD, OSX, Windows with Cygwin, Linux (normal userland and busybox for low-spec devices), it's not a given that this means necessarily a better user experience.
Solaris used to have (some years ago, haven't used it lately) and OSX still has a really bad default set and the sooner you replace them with the GNU tools, the better for your peace of mind. I'd even go so far and claim that Windows with Cygwin is a better user experience than those two.