Saying something has too much bloat is ambiguous to the point of being useless. Many people use that term simply as meaning slow, or a lot of code, or even poor

Saying something has too much bloat is ambiguous to the point of being useless. Many people use that term simply as meaning slow, or a lot of code, or even poorly designed code. It's always better to describe things precisely. The interviewer asked Linus about benchmarks that show the kernel getting slower and slower each year. Linus acknowledged that the kernel is in fact slowing down. I don't think they would be worrying about badly configured kernels, or kernels with unnecessary modules loaded. I don't know what features Linus is talking about that make a properly configured Linux kernel bigger and slower than it was ten years ago. Nor do I see any explanation or examples cited on this page. I wish someone who understands would give some examples of the feature creep they're talking about.