Parts of it are. The kernel is derived from a Mach microkernel (an experimental kernel in the 80s, which was theoretically supposed to allow different OS personalities to coexist in the same system, sharing resources; macOS’ Darwin/XNU kernel doesn’t implement this capability in full, but you do get the Mach Ports interprocess communication mechanism, and a BSD UNIX personality permanently attached).

IIRC, it’s still 100% privately held by the founders, who have no intention of selling up.

Another recommendation for Mullvad. Solid privacy options and no marketing snake oil

It’s possible though less than ideal. Drivers that connect to devices are part of the attack surface, and probably the part you’d least want implemented in C when the rest of the kernel is in Rust.

There’s a Pareto effect when it comes to them, in that you can cover a large proportion of use cases with a small amount of work, but the more special cases consume proportionately more effort. For a MVP, you could restrict support to standard USB and SATA devices, and get a device you can run headless, tethered to the network through a USB Ethernet adapter. For desktop support, you’d need to add video display support, and support for the wired/wireless networking capabilities of common chipsets would be useful. And assuming that you’re aiming only for current hardware (i.e. Intel/AMD boards and ARM/RISC-V SOCs), there are a lot of legacy drivers in Linux that you don’t need to bring along, from floppy drives to the framebuffers of old UNIX workstations. (I mean, if a hobbyist wants to get the kernel running on their vintage Sun SPARCstation, they can do so, but it won’t be a mainstream feature. A new Linux-compatible kernel can leave a lot of legacy devices behind and still be useful.)

Drew DeVault recently wrote a simple but functional UNIX kernel in a new systems programming language named Hare in about a month, which suggests that doing something similar in Rust would be equally feasible. One or two motivated individuals could get something up which is semi-useful (runs on a common x86 PC, has a console, a filesystem, functional if not necessarily high-performance scheduling and enough of the POSIX API to compile userspace programs for), upon which, what remained would be a lot of finishing work (device drivers, networking, and such), though not all of it necessary for all users. Doing this and keeping the goal of making it a drop-in replacement for the Linux kernel (as in, you can have both and select the one you boot into in your GRUB menu; eventually the new one will do enough well enough to replace Linux) sounds entirely feasible, and a new kernel codebase, implemented in a more structured, safer language sounds like it could deliver a good value proposition over the incumbent.

You’re thinking of a different denomination

If “he” uses Linux, there’s probably something xe/xey isn’t telling you.

If you access Google sites only in a special Firefox container, that still isolates your Google cookies from the rest of your tabs? Or does it just add a “you don’t get this from me” flag when it gives Google your user cookie, so it can pretend to not recognise you as it adds your web-browsing history to your ad-targeting profile (flagged appropriately as to keep it deniable, of course)?

IIRC, they get requests for data, and, if the request is valid, hand over what they have, which is virtually nothing as they don’t keep logs. There is no provision in Swedish or EU law that could compel them to start keeping logs.

The US used to require new citizens to renounce other nationalities, and I haven’t heard of them changing this. Rupert Murdoch had to renounce his Australian citizenship when he became a US citizen in the 80s. I think Linus was naturalised in the 90s or 00s, so not too long after.

Running a VM on your own machine (using VMWare or VirtualBox) with a clean install of the OS and a browser in that should suffice to prevent that. Fingerprinting would be mostly on things like installed apps/fonts, screen resolution, free disk space and such.

What do you mean by VPNs leaving you open to fingerprinting?

Wouldn’t he have had to renounce his Finnish citizenship to be naturalised?

In any case, as he’s based in the US, the European culture of taking an entire month off a year, and of almost everyone in the same country taking time off at the same time and things shutting down for a month, wouldn’t be something he participates in. Even if he had 30 days of leave a year and took all of July off, in the US that would be a personal idiosyncracy (“that’s just Linus being Linus”) rather than a mass cultural phenomenon.

He’s a naturalised American citizen as of a decade or two ago, IIRC.

Don’t forget that every recent Intel CPU contains an extra 486-based system on a chip running a stripped-down version of Minix (a predecessor of Linux), to implement the remote management engine.

The extra space is for two Electron apps of your choice.