> The linux platform is these system calls. Everything else is userspace. This is exactly what makes it special.

This is exactly the attitude I meant by 'the kernel developers also have to take responsibility for, rather than shrugging their shoulders and pawning it off to GNU' and 'an OS is much more than just a kernel, it is a platform'.

By 'platform', I mean windowing toolkits, such as Wayland. Audio libraries like ALSA and PipeWire. Desktop idioms and libraries like DBus, and the entire freedesktop.org effort including Mesa and more. Init systems like systemd. Bootloaders like GRUB/systemd-boot. Networking, including systemd-networkd, iwd, and NetworkManager. Power and device management including PowerDevil, Bluez.

If all of this is considered 'user space' then my point is strongly vindicated. On most competitor OSs these comprise the 'platform'. You won't ever encounter a Windows or OS X developer arguing that USER32.DLL or Foundation is 'userspace' even if it is technically true and code from those libraries may only ever run in ring 3. From the average user's point of view, the only 'userspace' are end-user applications that they have installed, like Chrome, video games, etc. From that perspective, even purely user-mode applications that ship with the distro ought to considered 'platform'. This includes such trivia like calculator and camera applications.

We need to talk about the practical realities of a platform, not a theoretical, unattainable, and as I mentioned, useless ideal. These practical realities mean shipping a unified set of useful 'batteries included' user-mode libraries and applications. If one wants to develop the platform itself, then sure, the kernel has a nice stable interface, but on most Linux distributions the kernel is built from source anyway, so even that nicety is moot.