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Linus Torvalds

177 quotes

“Sometimes you have one of those days that just shows how incompetent you are... Moral of the day: RTFM.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's Easter Sunday, which means that we're all about to gorge on mämmi (Right? You *do* have your carton of mämmi ready to go, don't you?).”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is good. We have a dishwasher again. Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking. I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(In response to a post of the Linux Kernel infrastructre maintainer showcasing an online scam mentioning God) Damn. Who will take care of the kernel.org infrastructure now? God really didn’t think that one through.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will now go back to my cave and continue pulling stuff, I just had to do something else for a while. Some people relax with a nice drink by the pool, I relax by playing around with inline asm.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The day we finally get rid of HIGHMEM I will dance on its grave. I have hated that thing for a long long time.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A third of a century. And it *still* isn't ready. I really need to get my sh*t together..”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You're a smart person. I feel like I've given you enough hints. Why don't you sit back and think about it, and let's make it clear: you have exactly two choices here:”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam. As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally, I have a firm belief that most firmware developers are not actually humans, but are instead caged rodents fed a solid diet of crack cocaine. Because that would explain a lot.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How about you accept the fact that maybe the problem is you. You think you know better. But the current process works. It has problems, but problems are a fact of life. There is no perfect.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And no, I am not looking for yes-men, and I like it when you call me out on my bullshit. I say some stupid things at times, there needs to be people who just stand up to me and tell me I'm full of shit.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I much prefer other people solving my problems for me. So me having to come up with a project is actually a failure of the world—and the world just hasn’t failed in the last 20 years for me.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm told that there are people claiming to "tokenize" my git repositories with my approval. I just want to clarify that that is not the case. I do not believe in monetizing my repositories. If you believe crypto-currencies are anything but a scam, I have a bridge to sell you. But I'm not selling source code.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's memorial day tomorrow here in the US, but like the USPS, "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" - nor memorial day - stops the merge window.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People are strange, and you can't fix people.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And yeah, I don't have a solid plan for when the major number itself gets big. But doing the math - by that time, I expect that we'll have somebody more competent in charge who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens. So I'm not going to worry about it.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Guys, that's the same logic as having a airbag in your car that just shoots you in the head. You're certainly "safe" from the vagaries of bad healthcare. But dammit, if anybody thinks that a "bullet to the head" should be called "safe", then that person damn well shouldn't be involved with kernel development.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you don't have technical reasons, you don't have reasons.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Revolution OS, documentary, 2001.
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Also quoted by: 林纳斯·托瓦兹 (zh)
“The desktop hasn't really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I'm known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That's why, to me, it's not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it's a really hard area to enter. I'm still working on it. It's been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I'll wear them down.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You don't know what you are talking about, you don't know what mRNA is, and you're spreading idiotic lies. Maybe you do so unwittingly, because of bad education. Maybe you do so because you've talked to "experts" or watched youtube videos by charlatans that don't know what they are talking about. But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me. [...] Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies. And if you insist on believing in the crazy conspiracy theories, at least SHUT THE HELL UP about it on Linux kernel discussion lists.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by “maintained” I really mean “mostly kept working”. It’s a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the “s” in scrappy is silent... Over the decades, I’ve “enhached” that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but it’s mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties... I don’t love the fact that it’s a very limited text editor. I’d like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc). Which is just a very long way to say: “Does anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindings”... And yes, I know one answer is “teach your fingers new ways”. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isn’t worth it to me... I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor... I’m not interested in yet another “runs in a terminal” editor, or some even older editor (ie “real” emacs, or vim) that just has had more lipstick applied over the years.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source