Linux is literally a kernel itself.

Your wording shows lack of understanding of GNU/Linux history since Linux is the kernel and all the distros just build around it. But even bigger tragedy is thinking that this is awesome. We had an amazing kernel/os called BeOS that would run circles around Linux, Windows and MacOS. While Linux may have raw performance benchmark crown, it is essentially DOS of the OS world where you can run a process fast but user experience is similar to what was there in the 80's - one application can freeze the UI for all. BeOS could run a number of multimedia and animation applications simultaneously on a single core CPU with UI being still completely responsive. Today you can still see what could have been by trying out Haiku OS.