Comment by knorker

Linus limited his scope to something that doesn't matter for users.

I think this is a valid criticism.

It's admirable to do the dishes, but the house is also on fire, so nobody will be able to enjoy the clean plates, so what's then even the point of doing the dishes?

In fact, in this analogy he could have saved the kitten instead of done the dishes.

Err, back from analogy land: ABI stability makes it harder to make things better, improving and replacing APIs. This is expected. But here we are in the worst of both worlds. Thanks to the kernel we are slowed down in improvements, and thanks to kinda-userspace (i.e. vdso & ld-linux), and userspace infra (libc, libstdc++, libm) we don't have ABI compatability either.

So it's lose-lose.