It may be technically poor in your particular domain of operation, which you fail to elaborate on, but I think in the domain of operation it targets, i.e. servers with performance, it evidently considered good by a great deal of smart people. For example, it totally dominates the top500 supercomputers, is used by Google for their backend, by a large number (most?) hosting companies. This is primarily due to the overall performance characteristics being better (not some sub-benchmark where FreeBSD or Solaris or whatever pulls ahead by 1 or 2%).

That is to say, the Linux kernel is the fastest for general performance oriented server tasks. It may be the case that in some areas you can get some other unix-y operating systems to outperform it, and by all means use them in those circumstances for your projects, but I think your blanket unqualified dismissal of the thousands of kernel developers as being technically poor and ultimately "worse is better" is a bit over the top.

Do you know what Worse is Better means?

btw. the top500 Linux boxes run with OS bypass because the kernel just isn't fast enough. Nice try though.

This seems like a legitimate opinion. Why the -4?

EDIT: No, if you agree, upvote the other guy.

You can't malign a hugely successful piece of software without justifying your opinion in front of a very technical audience such as this.

Or, I guess you can and suffer the consequences (as OP did).

I do not think this is the way it should be. Thus I am glad he got modded back to neutral (which incidentally means 1 and not 0 in HN).

I think the relevant point is you shouldn't malign a project without justification. I'm really interested to know why the person thinks the kernel is technically deficient and since they didn't include that information, the comment itself is a big letdown. Not including any information on why the kernel is bad is about as informative as a comment simply saying "linux is teh rad." (I think it's troubling so many of those types of comments get upvoted.)

I agree with you on at least one point though, whether or not the project is large or popular shouldn't be relevant to the voting.

I mean, he initially wrote git too..