Linux is one of the prime examples of the Worse is Better motif in UNIX history. And to all your points I don't think it's outgrown this, it is not a particularly elegant kernel even by UNIX standards.
Linus and other early Linux people had a real good nose for performance.. not the gamesmanship kind just stacking often minuscule individual wins and avoiding too many layered architectural penalties. When it came time to worry about scalability Linux got lucky with the IBM investment who had also just purchased Sequent and knew a thing or two about SMP and NUMA.
Most commercial systems are antithetical to performance (there are some occasional exceptions). The infamous interaction of a Sun performance engineer trying to ridicule David Miller who was showing real world performance gains..
I think that keen performance really helped with adoption. Since the early days you might install Linux on hardware that was rescued from the garbage and do meaningful things with it whereas the contemporary commercial systems had forced it obsolete.
Linus and other early Linux people had a real good nose for performance.. not the gamesmanship kind just stacking often minuscule individual wins and avoiding too many layered architectural penalties. When it came time to worry about scalability Linux got lucky with the IBM investment who had also just purchased Sequent and knew a thing or two about SMP and NUMA.
Most commercial systems are antithetical to performance (there are some occasional exceptions). The infamous interaction of a Sun performance engineer trying to ridicule David Miller who was showing real world performance gains..
I think that keen performance really helped with adoption. Since the early days you might install Linux on hardware that was rescued from the garbage and do meaningful things with it whereas the contemporary commercial systems had forced it obsolete.