Thursday, November 21, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Linus Torvalds


Computer programmer, best known as the creator of the Linux kernel.
Linus Torvalds
I don't ask for money. I don't ask for sexual favors. I don't ask for access to the hardware you design and sell. I just ask for the thing I gave you: source code that I can use myself.
Torvalds quotes
If you still don't like it, that's OK: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do.
Torvalds
Gcc is crap.




Torvalds Linus quotes
"Regression testing"? What's that? If it compiles, it is good; if it boots up, it is perfect.
Torvalds Linus
Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, THEN, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.
Linus Torvalds quotes
…git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
Linus Torvalds
EFI is this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI).
Torvalds Linus quotes
Is "I hope you all die a painful death" too strong?
Torvalds
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
Torvalds Linus
I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work, if it just results in what I consider to be a better system. And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. I can say "I don't care" with a straight face, and really mean it.
Linus Torvalds
I hope I won't end up having to hunt you all down and kill you in your sleep.




Linus Torvalds quotes
There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong.
Linus Torvalds
Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. Apologies to minix-users who have heard enough about linux anyway. I'd like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but … time for some serious flamefesting!
Torvalds quotes
Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit.
Torvalds Linus
Why don't we write code that just works? Or absent a "just works" set of patches, why don't we revert to code that has years of testing? This kind of "I broke things, so now I will jiggle things randomly until they unbreak" is not acceptable. [...] Don't just make random changes. There really are only two acceptable models of development: "think and analyze" or "years and years of testing on thousands of machines". Those two really do work.
Torvalds Linus quotes
It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.
Linus Torvalds
Well, I probably won't get too good grades even without you: I had an argument (completely unrelated – not even pertaining to OS's) with the person here at the university that teaches OS design. I wonder when I'll learn :)
Linus Torvalds quotes
When you say, "I wrote a program that crashed Windows," people just stare at you blankly and say, "Hey, I got those with the system, for free."
Linus Torvalds
Friends don't let friends use [gcc] "-W".
Torvalds Linus
Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.


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