Linus Torvalds: Quotes about people

Linus Torvalds is Finnish-American software engineer and hacker. Explore interesting quotes on people.

Linus Torvalds: 300 quotes28 likes

“I like colorized diffs, but let's face it, those particular color choices will make most people decide to pick out their eyes with a fondue fork.

And that's not good. Digging in your eye-sockets with a fondue fork is strictly considered to be bad for your health, and seven out of nine optometrists are dead set against the practice.

So in order to avoid a lot of blind git users, please apply this patch.”

Linus Torvalds

Message to Git mailing list, 2006-06-22, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 http://lwn.net/Articles/190241/, 2000s, 2006

“I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.Please, just tell people to use KDE.”

Linus Torvalds

Message to usability@gnome.org mailing list, 2005-12-12, 2006-08-28, Torvalds, Linus http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00021.html, 2000s, 2005

“A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.”

Linus Torvalds

Torvalds: Waiting To See Sun's Open Solaris, 2005-02-01, Rooney, Paula, CRN, 2006-08-28 http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/59300278/torvalds-waiting-to-see-suns-open-solaris.htm, 2000s, 2005

“I don't doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.”

Linus Torvalds

Attributed Source: Desktop_architects list, 2007.8.3 https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/desktop_architects/2007-August/002446.html

“I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots.”

Linus Torvalds

LKML, April 21, 2006 http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/0aff8e90a185c176 2000s, 2006

“There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.”

Linus Torvalds

Microsoft Patches Linux; Linus Responds, 2009-06-22, Torvalds, Linus, 2009-06-26 http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7439, 2000s, 2009

“Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.)”

Linus Torvalds

2000s, 2005

“I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to.”

Linus Torvalds

Message to Linux kernel mailing list, 2006-09-22, Torvalds, Linus, 2008-06-07 http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/22/319, 2000s, 2006

“People say that you should not micro-optimize. But if what you love is micro-optimization… that's what you should do.”

Linus Torvalds

2010s, Audience Q&A following interview panel at Aalto University Center, 2012

“Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.”

Linus Torvalds

Source: Linux Times, 2004-10-25 http://web.archive.org/web/20050404020308/http://www.linuxtimes.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=145,

“Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.”

Linus Torvalds

<nowiki>Re: [ 00/19 http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&w=2, 3.10.1-stable review</nowiki>, Torvalds, Linus, 2013-07-15, 2013-07-17] 2010s, 2013

“Sometimes "pi = 3.14" is (a) infinitely faster than the "correct" answer and (b) the difference between the "correct" and the "wrong" answer is meaningless. And this is why I get upset when somebody dismisses performance issues based on "correctness". The thing is, some specious value of "correctness" is often irrelevant because it doesn't matter. While performance almost always matters. And I absolutely detest the fact that people so often dismiss performance concerns so readily.”

Linus Torvalds

Git mailing list, Fri, 8 Aug 2008
2000s, 2008

“I chose 1000 originally partly as a way to make sure that people that assumed HZ was 100 would get a swift kick in the pants.”

Linus Torvalds

Message to linux-kernel mailing list, 2005-07-08, Torvalds, Linus, 2007-05-28 http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/7/8/263, 2000s, 2005

“[…] I really hate big laptops. I can't understand people who lug around 15" (or 17"!) monsters. The right weight for a laptop is 1kg, no more.”

Linus Torvalds

2010s, 2012

“Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles”

Linus Torvalds

with warnings Torvalds, Linus, 2015-09-03, <nowiki>Linus Torvalds on the LKM mailing list</nowiki>, 2015-09-30 https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/9/3/428, 2010s, 2015

“" the most important part of open source is that people are allowed to do what they are good at" and " all that [diversity] stuff is just details and not really important."”

Linus Torvalds

Torvalds, Linus, 2015-01-15, <nowiki>Linus Torvalds on why he isn’t nice: &quot;I don’t care about you&quot;</nowiki>, 2015-01-20 http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/linus-torvalds-on-why-he-isnt-nice-i-dont-care-about-you/, 2010s, 2015

“Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy.”

Linus Torvalds

Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white. Linus compares Linux and BSDs, NewsForge, 2005-06-13, Barr, Joe, 2006-08-28 http://www.linux.com/articles/45571, 2000s, 2005