Linus Torvalds called Linux bloated and scary. Did he really mean this and this? Kidding aside, it’s only natural that an OS that’s maturing will get fat with age. Hundreds of lines of code are being added each day. Linux now has over 2.7 million lines of code. Does Linux really need to go on a diet? Maybe. Maybe not.
I think the biggest misconception is that most people think Linux is the Gnome Desktop. It’s really not. In fact, you can run Linux using an entirely different graphical desktop environment like KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox, Icewm, Windowmaker and many, many others . So, it’s a bit deceiving, because users only see the graphical desktop environments and not the kernel.
It’s a good bet that Linus Torvalds was talking about the kernel and the kernel only.