Ideally, yes. It may not've been popular at that point, but Linus did. But what about the next Linus of 2017? Something like that's not going to be possible anymore. Just the basic necessary hardware drivers alone. The hardest challenge for Linux was just avoiding Winmodems. These days the entire nouveau project with years of research can't even manage to change the clock speed of your GPU. VESA's been all but abandoned so there's not even a way to set a widescreen framebuffer anymore for pure software rendering.

Nothing is gained from having hopelessly complex technology.