[qznc]

The funny thing is that I would mostly agree with him. The important detail is "Among the people who actually design operating systems." Linus would agree that Linux is not designed. It evolved. Very few OSs are designed these days.

The QNX microkernel is quite successful. L4 also seems to do well. The BSD Mach microkernel is still around. Minix is still around, although its reliability approach (similar to Erlang, let processes/drivers fail and restart) does not gain mindshare. Windows is considered a hybrid since NT. Likewise XNU/Darwin is Apple's hybrid.

Maybe the current state is more like: Neither micro nor monolithic won, but we know the tradeoffs now and an OS designer can decide per feature. For most applications the difference does not matter, though. Most applications build on a higher level platform (JVM, iOS, Browser, etc).

[jacquesm]

Linux did not evolve so much as that it tried very hard to emulate Unix but outside of the *BSD world.

I think microkernels will have their day in some part of the future.