why Android isn't Linux
Jack is, apparently, unwilling or unable to admit in any systematic way that he knows the difference between the Linux kernel and the various OSes based on the Linux kernel. Notice, for instance, that he said "one of the biggest 'wrongs' to plague the Linux operating system was that it still had yet to find its way onto a tablet." He refers to "the Linux operating system" when, in fact, there's no such thing. There is no single Linux operating system. There are craptons of separate operating systems that are built on the Linux kernel, which is why I refer to "Linux-based systems" and "Linux distributions" and the like, but "the Linux operating system" does not exist. Before anyone gets on a GNU high horse, it should be noted that there is not a "GNU/Linux" operating system, either: there are, however, many operating systems based on the Linux kernel that use the GNU utilities as the basis of their userlands.
This unwillingness or inability to differentiate between the kernel and the OSes based on it in a meaningful way is very widespread, and I think it is behind the problems we see with people referring to how to do something "on Linux", where the explanation only works on a very small subset of Linux-based systems (primarily Ubuntu). One especially widespread example of this sort of thing is the practice of explaining how to do things at the shell, where commands start with "sudo". The majority of useful configurations out there for Linux-based systems (and other Unix-like OSes) still do not even have sudo installed as a universal sysadmin authentication tool; many such systems just use sudo the way it was meant to be used, as a way to carefully control what people are allowed to do when they need elevated privileges for some very specific tasks that happen to be critical to their job functions. Confusion arises at times when people using the "wrong" system (usually more "right" for their purposes than Ubuntu, though) run across such examples and can't figure out what's up with this sudo command that keeps erroring out.
In short, Jack Wallen is not saying that Android doesn't use the Linux kernel; he's saying it's not "the Linux operating system", a convenient fiction leveraged by propagandists and a gigantic myth that makes it difficult for the less knowledgeable to communicate meaningfully with others. Android isn't "the Linux operating system" specifically because it is not a full-featured Linux distribution in the tradition of Slackware, Fedora, Debian, Arch, or (of course) Ubuntu.
