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Minix is very good for learning internals of operating system. In my second year of undergrad, I went through the code of minix and and it was a great learning experience. I could learn a lot about the internals of operating system by looking at real working code rather than just reading theories. The Linux code is too complicated for beginner. I think, Linux can not replace minix in educational world.

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Circa 1999 I studied Minix in a operating design course, but in the same way we studied Amoeba or Mach; in fact we used a pre 1.0 Linux kernel for practice (I don't remember the distro, it could be custom), and it was small enough to understand the different parts, hack, compile and run.

"Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" (included Minix) and "Modern Operating Systems" are great books and I think is because of them that Minix is relevant in OS teaching (specially OSDI, although I enjoyed MOS too).

EDIT: typo

In 1999, Linux was already in the 2.0s or 2.2s; did your course deliberately use an old Linux kernel for simplicity?

I think so. Besides the computers we had access in the laboratory were limited in resources so a smaller code base I guess had its benefits in compile time.

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