alt Hacker NewsThat's the same thing that people say about MS Office: nobody uses more than 15% of its feature set, but everyone uses a different 15%. "Linux" having these modules is what keeps it relevant and prevalent in different fields and niches. Whether distro's should ship this many modules by default is a different question, but then we're no longer talking about Linux the kernel.
Not just shipping features - that part is little more than disk space, for features already neatly isolated into modules. I see potential in improved tooling to express "do not autoload anything below this tree" in a more reliable and manageable manner. I know my 15% (far below that, actually), and many more users could express theirs in some deploy config.. If only that did not incur the cost of watching upstream changing things for no reason, or for the recurring reason of kconfig being a fairly error-prone method of expressing & validating dependency trees.