Actually, though Linux is said to be "unix-like," it's more accurate to say that Linux is derivative of Minix (Andrew Tanenbaum's original micro-kernel based teaching OS), and the history between the two is a good read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX
Minix might be short for "mini unix" but it's not derived from Unix (Unix started out as a monolithic kernel, not a microkernel)
FWIW, I’m talking in broad terms of the functionality and command line interface for general users. They see the same broad functionality and issues regardless of whether we’re talking Linux, *BSD, OS X (at the command line), Solaris, HP-UX, SysVR2, etc. For the user who is used to GUI-based environments like Windows, Mac, etc - the first time they’re tasked with doing anything significant on a Unix system without a GUI, the sounds they make might as well come from someone who has been kicked in the groin.
The sounds don’t change at all (in my experience) if you change the particular flavor of Unix, or the shell (zsh, bash, sh, csh, tcsh, etc).
That said, re: your uKernel comments: even tho Linux took inspiration from Minix, it ended up a pretty conventional monolithic Unix kernel, and I remember all of the flames flying between Tanenbaum and Torvalds the first time. There’s certainly differences in exact implementations and source code inside Linux from a AT&T or BSD kernel, but on the whole, if you have crawled around inside SysV or BSD kernels, the Linux kernel doesn’t look at all alien. About the only other thing I can say is that Linux favors POSIX API’s, and therefore would appear to favor the SysV approach to interfaces and functional partitioning.
The “monolithic vs. uKernel” debate is an old one in operating systems, one I’ve had to personally fight in my career. The advantages of the uKernel are really nice, on paper and in reality if you’re willing to give up some performance.
But when it comes time to count up the cost of all the context switching and message passing latency.... well, let’s just say that the crap hits the fan the first time one comes up to the boss with a benchmark of a uKernel in a memory mapped environment.
Linus undoubtedly saw the same sorts of issues come up, so that’s why he tossed the Minix uKernel design overboard and went back to the conventional monolithic Unix kernel design.
If you ever get a chance, have a look at the source for Seventh Edition Unix on a PDP-11. Very clean, near, sparse and to-the-point.
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl
After V7, the Great Schism happened and the flamewars started in earnest.