Re: Watching paint dry
"Please wake me up when general userland drivers become available."
Too dangerous for no real benefit.
"Or when Linux becomes hard realtime."
Wrong horse for that course.
"Or when Linux provides its own init system."
The kernel already has it's own init system. After it runs, it passes control to init (if you are sane) or systemd (if you are not). The init receives the PID of 1 ... but computers count from 0. Did you ever stop to wonder what process had PID 0, and how it starts?
"Or when Linus swears again."
Daily, I'm sure ... he just keeps it out of publicly available print so the namby-pambys and hand-wringing curtain-twitchers have less to bitch about.