how does the Linux kernel lack quality?

It did in the early days, especially up until 2.4 which was generally considered the first enterprise-ready kernel version. (You can argue about whether the old "enterprise-capable" definitions still applied but they were a benchmark for a lot of people.) Of course, lots of ancillary stuff too in userspace and outside the kernel related to filesystems and the like.

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throwaway2037 3 days ago | parent [-]

Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history#O...) tells me that version 2.4 was released in early 2001. That is a long time ago. Most of the commercial world was running SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, or AIX. So is it fair to say that the Linux kernel has been "quality" for 25 years now?

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rswail 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

2001 was immediately post dotcom crash and so all the people that had bought into the Sun "the network is the computer" were tossing out expensive E4Ks, and getting cheap intel servers to survive.

HP-UX and AIX were already legacy.

Linux 2.4 was when it hit critical mass because of the publicity of the dotcom boom and it was like what was left after the "tide went out and the market found out who was swimming naked".

	▲	ghaff 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Certainly. The 2.4 kernel and IBM embracing Linux at around that time pretty much made all proprietary Unix legacy. The desktop took longer with less well-defined transition points and, arguably, MacOS with its BSD foundations (and command line option) ended up being a good alternative for a lot of the non-Windows crowd--though Windows is still dominant as a desktop/laptop OS. (Windows/Azure are, of course, still major in backend corporate environments as well.)

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ghaff 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Quality by the standards at the time or at least a good value for most purposes. Yes.