I'm a bit bothered by how Linus is deified as the sole creator of Linux. This phenomenon of course is not unique to Linux and Linus, of course. We routinely look for heroes and lone wolves whom we want to believe did all of the work by themselves, but the reason I single out Linux is because it was "just" the missing component of the GNU operating system.

Whatever the relationship between GNU and Linux nowadays and despite the examples of GNU without Linux and Linux without GNU, for many years in the beginning they were inextricably tied together and would have never succeeded without the other. To say that Linux is by Linus and nobody but Linus is not fair to all the work that Linus based Linux on top of.

It's not just unfair, it's really confusing. Judging from the course description, the "Linux" that Linus Torvalds wrote / maintains (the kernel) is not the "Linux" that you learn about in this course (the UI/userspace).

We will probably arrive at a consensus about what to call Linux + GNU + everything else around the same time we agree what line endings should look like in text files.

Course title should have been Intro to GNU/Linux