Linux people

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?"

"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!"

"Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix."

"Portability is for people who cannot write new programs."

"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 :)"

"No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical."

"Dijkstra probably hates me."

"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*""

"If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program."

"You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now."

"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU Emacs would never make a good program."

"It's a bird … it's a plane … no, it's KernelMan, faster than a speeding bullet, to your rescue. Doing new kernel versions in under 5 seconds flat …"

"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had."

"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)"

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"

"If you still don't like it, that's OK: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do."

"…the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it."

"The main reason there are no raw devices [in Linux] is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea."

"Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did."

"(In answer to the question: In the extreme case, if it was just you doing all the code, and the rest of the world quietly used it, would it make sense to give it away free? Unless you're particularly grateful for other free things you've got off the Net, would the answer be No?":)"

""Regression testing"? What's that? If it compiles, it is good; if it boots up, it is perfect."

"My name is Linus Torvalds and I am your god."

"If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won."

"I was thrown out of fourth grade because I couldn't write my own name, and it's been all downhill from there."

"I'd like to say that I knew this would happen, that it's all part of the plan for world domination."

"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well."

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Yeah. And as Linus once said: most numerical problems today in pure CPU cycles are actually 3D games. … It's not "incorrect" to say that you want the result faster, even if that result doesn't match your theoretical models."

"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people."

"Hey, that's not a bug, that's a FEATURE! You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is? Guess what – it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car. It's you. And me. And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design. Right. "Sheer luck". Well, sheer luck, AND:"

"I allege that SCO is full of it."

"They are smoking crack."

"Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain."

"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect."

"Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease."

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

"2.6.: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two)."

"It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful."

"Don't bother. Bram doesn't know what he's talking about."

"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.)"

"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."

"I'm always right. This time I'm just even more right than usual."

"The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at any point pretty damn ugly."

"I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE."

"Now, most of you are probably going to be totally bored out of your minds on Christmas day, and here's the perfect distraction. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the stores will be closed, and there's really nothing better to do in between meals."

"For example, the GPLv2 in no way limits your use of the software. If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world ("Sharks with lasers on their heads!!"), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that's OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want."

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

"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."

"…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."

"EFI is this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI)."

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

"… even if the Hurd didn't depend on Linux code (and as far as I know, it does, but since I think they have their design heads firmly up their *sses anyway with that whole microkernel thing, I've never felt it was worth my time even looking at their code), I don't believe a religiously motivated development community can ever generate as good code except by pure chance."

"I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" – anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context")."

"Gcc is crap."

"Friends don't let friends use [gcc] "-W"."

"It's one of those rare "perfect" kernels. So if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own damn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways."

"Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it's not a crusade – it's just a superior way of working together and generating code."

"Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there's only one of me."

"If you have ever done any security work – and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust" – it wasn't security work, it was – masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development."

"So the whole "We have a list and we're not telling you" should tell you something. Don't you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they'd just tell us and go, "nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!"?"

"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."

"I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git."

"You try to claim that the GPLv3 causes "More developers", and that, my idiotic penpal, is just crazy talk that you made up."

"I have an ego the size of a small planet, but I'm not _always_ right [...]."

"Is "I hope you all die a painful death" too strong?"

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it."

"C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs."

"It has nothing to do with dinosaurs. Good taste doesn't go out of style"

"Yes, I realize that there's a lot of insane people out there. However, we generally don't do kernel design decisions based on them. But we can pat the insane users on the head and say "we won't guarantee it works, but if you eat your prozac, and don't bother us, go do your stupid things"."

"Controlling a laser with Linux is crazy, but everyone in this room is crazy in his own way. So if you want to use Linux to control an industrial welding laser, I have no problem with your using PREEMPT_RT."

"I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] … but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary."

"And what's the Internet without the rick-roll?"

"Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them."

"It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning."

"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."

"Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally."

"The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question."

"Your problem has nothing to do with git, and everything to do with emacs. And then you have the gall to talk about "Unix design" and not gumming programs together, when you yourself use the most gummed-up piece of absolute sh*t there is!"

"The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey on some serious mind-controlling substances [*]."

"Your code is shit."

"Crying that it's an application bug is like crying over the speed of light: you should deal with reality, not what you wish reality was."

"I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease."

"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."

"Your argument is shit."

"Every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I'm going to live forever."

"Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day. That's how much that paper is worth."

"Toto, I don't think we're talking white-socks-and-sandals any more."

"This whole ARM thing is a f*cking pain in the ass."

"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."

"So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place."

"We're not masturbating around with some research project. We never were. Even when Linux was young, the whole and only point was to make a *usable* system. It's why it's not some crazy drug-induced microkernel or other random crazy thing."

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

"People say that you should not micro-optimize; but, if what you love is micro-optimization, that's what you should do."

"I started Linux as a desktop operating system. And it's the only area where Linux hasn't completely taken over. That just annoys the hell out of me."

"Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. So, Nvidia, fuck you!"

"I wish everybody was as nice as I am."

"I tend to call myself an anti-visionary because to me, what is much more important than vision is execution. I've always quoted Edison saying that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration [...]."

"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended."

"[In response to Good job. More public indecency, less TSA, that's what I say."

"Somebody is trying to kill all the kernel developers."

"[...] 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."

"Obsessing about things is important, and things really do matter, but if you can't let go of them, you'll end up crazy."

"I'm not sentimental. Good riddance."

"WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"

"I realize that lawyers are brought up (probably from small children) to think that "technically true" is what matters, but when you make public PR statements, they should be more than "technically" true. They should be honest. There's a big f*cking difference."

"Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems."

"But this is definitely another of those "This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Al-biwan Ke-Viro, you're my only hope" issues. Al? Please don't make me wear that golden bikini."

"I hope I won't end up having to hunt you all down and kill you in your sleep."

"Whoever came up with "hold the shift key for eight seconds to turn on 'your keyboard is buggered' mode" should be shot."

"There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap."

"That's the spirit. Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me. Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies."

"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."

"XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horrible crap to exist."

"Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a *constant*. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We're talking "sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby" level retardation levels here."

"I don't respect people unless I think they deserve the respect. There are people who think that respect is something that should be given, and I happen to be one of the people who is perfectly happy saying no; respect should be earned. And without being earned, you don't get it. It's really that simple."

"One of the things, none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging [...] making binaries for linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass."

"[GPL] version 3 was not a good "here we give you version 2" and then we try to sneak in this new rules and try force everyone to upgrade; that was the part I disliked. The FSF did really sneaky stuff, downright immoral in my opinion."

"I may be a huge computer nerd, but even so I don't think education should be about computers. Not as a subject, and not as a classroom resource either."

"On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle."

"I don’t care about you."

"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."

"I am a lazy person, which is why I like open source, for other people to do work for me."

"We don't merge kernel code just because user space was written by a retarded monkey on crack."

"Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles (with warnings)."

"Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that shit again."

"I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really -- I mean -- I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there." But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am."

"I was 21 at the time, so I was young, but I had already programmed for half my life, basically. And every project before that had been completely personal and it was a revelation when people just started commenting, started giving feedback on your code. And even before they started giving code back, that was, I think, one of the big moments where I said, "I love other people!" Don't get me wrong -- I'm actually not a people person."

"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."

"Lawsuits destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we've built up over the years by being nice."

"The fact is, the people who have created open source and made it a success have been the developers doing work - and the companies that we could get involved by showing that we are not all insane crazy people like the FSF. The people who have *destroyed* projects have been lawyers that claimed to be out to "save" those projects."

"I've been personally pretty disappointed with ARM as a hardware platform, not as an instruction set, though I've had my issues there, too. [...] What I wanted to upgrade to was Acorn Archimedes ... the thing that gave ARM its name."

"None of this "there is no way to continue" bullshit. Because it is pure and utter SHIT."

"BULLSHIT. Have you _looked_ at the patches you are talking about? You should have - several of them bear your name. [...] As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. [...] WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?"

"It looks like the IT security world has hit a new low. If you work in security, and think you have some morals, I think you might want to add the tag-line "No, really, I'm not a whore. Pinky promise" to your business card. Because I thought the whole industry was corrupt before, but it's getting ridiculous. At what point will security people admit they have an attention-whoring problem?"

"Can I just once again state my love for it and hope it gets merged soon? Maybe the code isn't perfect, but I've skimmed it, and compared to the horrors that are OpenVPN and IPSec, it's a work of art."

"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."

"Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me."

"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."

"I know most of us are preparing for Christmas, but give it a whirl, ok? How important are those presents (and that family) anyway?"

"Please, as you emerge from your holiday-induced food coma, do give it a quick test so that we can all be happy about the final release next weekend."

"...today, March 14th, is the 29th anniversary of the Linux 1.0 announcement. Of course, there are other arguably more important dates in Linux history, but this is one of them."

"I’m actually a horrible MIS person, and I would never want to maintain my own server. I’m a programmer for chrissake! The same way you should fear me if I hold a soldering iron, you should be very very nervous if I were to do any server management... and on a similar note: not only am I not much of a MIS person, I’m also not much of a social networking person. I foresee a lot of disappointment in the future of any followers of this account."

"It’s Caturday. Minky is no longer with us, but this is probably my favorite picture of her."

"It’s Sunday, which means no more cat pictures, and instead just the usual -rc release. Prize for odd bug this week goes to an otherwise harmless off-by-one buglet that then in turn confused clang sufficiently to generate bogus code that our ‘objtool’ checks then (correctly) complained about it. This is the kind of exciting lives that us kernel developers lead."

"Pet peeve of the day: all the people talking about how ChatGPT is not “conscious” and how it does not “understand” what it is saying, but just putting likely-sounding words together into likely-sounding sentences. Extra bonus points for using an example of a math problem as a way to show how these AI chat-bots talk about things they don’t really understand. The irony. The lack of self-awareness. It burns."

"Sometimes you have one of those days that just shows how incompetent you are... Moral of the day: RTFM."

"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."

"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?)."

"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."

"(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."

"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."

"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."

"The day we finally get rid of HIGHMEM I will dance on its grave. I have hated that thing for a long long time."

"A third of a century. And it *still* isn't ready. I really need to get my sh*t together.."

"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:"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"People are strange, and you can't fix people."

"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."

"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."

"Software is like sex; it's better when it's free."

"The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children."

"OK, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus."

"95 percent of all software developers believe they are in the top 5 percent when it comes to knowledge and skills ."

"Guess what? Wheels have been round for a really long time, and anybody who "reinvents" the new wheel is generally considered a crackpot. It turns out that "round" is simply a good form for a wheel to have. It may be boring, but it just tends to roll better than a square, and "hipness" has nothing what-so-ever to do with it."

"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."

"First off, I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don't really mind). I've got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need? The thing is, being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as being world-class pays even better. I simply didn't need to start a commercial company. And it's just about the least interesting thing I can even imagine. I absolutely hate paperwork. I couldn't take care of employees if I tried. A company that I started would never have succeeded – it's simply not what I'm interested in! So instead, I have a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting, and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good."

"So LSM stays in. No ifs, buts, maybes or anything else. When I see the security people making sane arguments and agreeing on something, that will change. Quite frankly, I expect hell to freeze over before that happens, and pigs will be nesting in trees. But hey, I can hope."

"So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside."

"A big part of willpower is having something to aspire to, something to live for."

"Computer is not a device anymore. It is an extension of your mind and your gateway to other people."

"There are many examples of companies and countries that have improved their competitiveness and efficiency by adopting open source strategies. The creation of skills through all levels is of fundamental importance to both companies and countries."

"In the early days of the DCC I preferred to let the proponents do their thing and then see how it all worked out in the end. Now we are pretty close to the end."

"I urge telecommunications regulators to develop a commercial strategy for delivering effective access to the continent."

"Whenever there is a substantial change in an industry there are opportunities for new leaders to emerge."

"The future belongs to those who embrace global thinking without losing their identity and their culture."

"An experience like that changes your perspective on life and on the world."

"Don't forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away."

"I have a very simple question to people … who seem to suffer from excessive narcissism: please name three other persons who are smarter and more capable than you, in the field you work in. (In most cases they are utterly unable to answer that question honestly.)"

"A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines."

"Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."

"If I'm the only one pushing Linux gaming, we have a serious problem. I'm happy for the contributions I've made, but I would be happier to know that Linux gaming can continue if I get hit by a bus. There are others out there doing what I do. You should interview them too."

"I find if you're targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X right from the start, your code will probably work anywhere else that you might try it later... Writing code that is cross-platform from the start requires more discipline, but I find it is worth the effort."

"I happen to like the "feel" of OpenGL more, which isn't something I can explain well to those that aren't programmers, but I don't think it matters much at this point which API one chooses. More or less, you have feature parity between both APIs, both have made a handful of design mistakes, and both do a few things in slightly more pleasant ways than the other. Of course, the unforgivable thing about Direct3D is that it only works on Windows. If it was truly cross-platform, though, I wouldn't really object to using it. But since you write OpenGL almost everywhere, and Direct3D almost nowhere, it seems like a false choice to me."

"I think [Wine] will be, at a minimum, incredibly useful to archeology, like DosBox has been for playing Wing Commander. Certainly it has been known to save the day with modern titles, too. But to have it as the agreed-upon way to how you play video games on Linux is completely unacceptable for several reasons, both technical and moral."

"I can find lots of examples where a game won't make you rich, but I can't find a reasonable case where a Linux port doesn't have at least a small, positive return on investment."

"I found I loved playing Serious Sam (it really captured the feel of the original Doom!), and hated working a cash register, so I wrote to the only email address I could find for Croteam (one of their artists!), and talked them into letting me do a Linux port. From there, I had some luck and started collecting other work... Now I do this sort of thing full time. I've touched pretty much every major game engine of the last decade, and worked with a lot of games."

"What does NOT work best for anyone, though, is being forced to keep a Windows partition around just to play video games. The best operating system for playing games is the one that lets you keep your word processor, instant messenger, email, and music player open in the background while you play. The worst is the one that will force you to shut all that down just to screw around for a few minutes."

"The real threat to Linux adoption is Apple, not Microsoft. If you didn’t know, now you know."

"Q3A is probably one of my favorite codebases to have had the honor to work with. There’s just so many places where you get these “holy shit, that’s a brilliant idea” moments. I don’t know what Doom 3 looks like under the hood, but Quake 3 was a real marvel of engineering as much as anything else."

"What I do for a living is somewhat like mercenary prostitution... I spend a lot of energy trying to find games to bring to alternate platforms, like Linux and MacOS, and in my free time, I work on various open source projects, and other freebies like that... so I guess I'm a hooker with a heart of gold, sorta."

"Slackware was great in that it did the one thing I want my distro to do more than anything, and that's stay the hell out of my way... Gentoo basically stays the hell out of your way... and Portage goes a long way to basically do exactly what you'd have done on Slackware without having to do it manually... maybe I'm getting greedy in my old age, but I don't want to compile my packages anymore."

"Video games are sexy. People need to be aware that GNU/Linux is more than just something to drive your webservers... A lot of people (myself included) feel that video games are a major factor in getting GNU/Linux to the masses. I can't count the number of people that have said, "Thanks for porting [GAME X]! It was the only reason I kept a Windows partition around!""

"The simple fact is that code quality tends to improve as you move between platforms... non-obvious bugs on Windows become VERY obvious in the Linux port and vice versa, and thus get fixed. So even the Windows gamers will win in all of this."

"Thanks to Id fans everywhere .. special mention to Mac/Linux players and European gamers."

"id is both a technology and an art company, so we try to push the art and the technology to its edge on each game, and when you're into high-tech you want to make sure your game can run on several platforms, and you have some room to experiment with several architectures. We don't want to have a basic product, get it out the door, sell as many copies as we can, and then just do the next one. Everyone's putting a lot of soul into the games, and id has got enough money overhead to decide that they can afford to have game ports to show that technology is good on Linux and on Apple hardware."

"My main problem with 64-bit binary is that it’s one extra compile to do every time you want to release binaries, so you have to maintain one build system for your 64-bit binary and then every time you have to make a build you have to make sure you get both the 32-bit and 64. Really honestly, there’s not any kind of significant performance increase. If you have good compatibility you’re able to run 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit machine, that’s the performance you get. If you run a 64-bit binary, it’s not going to make much difference. The technology is cool, but there’s really not that much point for doing it."

"It seems to be really happening. I mean, my parents are using Linux. The setup is still the tricky point, but I set the machine up last time I was in France and they've been actually catching on and start to use it. They like OpenOffice, they like having GAIM and Firefox, they're really happy with that. My brother-in-law, who's really a Windows guy, just decided to install Linux because he was tired of his machine being slow and spyware and everything. He really didn't need that much help from me to get his stuff running, doing mail and chatting and all that basic web stuff, so I guess it's really picking up."

"Most of the network related programming in games has to do with providing a good interactive experience when playing over the internet. This matter is very different from serving web pages. The primary concern there is to handle connection latency, latency fluctuations, packet loss and bandwidth limitations, and pretty much hide all of that from the player's experience."

"It seems very odd to me that content would be removed based on an individual’s personal appreciation of relevance. If the article provides useful information and references, it should at least be valued for the efforts of the contributing individuals."

"I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done."

"Releasing Linux versions has always been a matter of higher code quality, good software architecture, and technical interest for the platform."

"I have a strongly held opinion about Transgaming and WineX. I feel that Transgaming is a company made up of good people with good intentions, but I believe that they are wrong. I feel that emulation will do far more harm than good in the long term for Linux. In the short-term it is a win; in the long term, I believe emulation is sacrificing the future for the present. Linux can stand on its own two feet. It is solid and strong, and does not need to cling to the leftovers of Windows."

"I personally believe open source is most important is in the operating system and in file formats. As long as those two things remain open source you can never have a monopoly. No company can dominate by any means except a superior product, and that puts the choice back into the hands of the public."

"The most popular games for Linux are evenly split. First person shooters such as Quake 3 and UT2K3 sell more copies to start with, but they trail off when the next graphics leap happens. Strategy games like Alpha Centauri still sell well for Linux, they dont sell as fast, but they last a whole lot longer. Kind of like the hare and the tortoise"

"Most games that we are approached with are too close to existing open source games for us to publish... we have no real desire to compete with open source products."

"Things like a spreadsheet and graphics package mean that people can use their computer for working. Games mean that people can ENJOY their computer. If all you have is productivity apps, then Linux will be a fine OS for work, but who is going to really want it around in the home if all they can do on it is work."

"The biggest challenges, technically, are 3D graphics and Networking. Network interoperability between Linux and Windows will rarely happen, because companies often use the proprietary Directplay library which cannot be ported over to Linux. We have created a multiplatform alternative, called Grapple, and we hope that over time, some Windows developers may pick this up to use in their titles, allowing cross platform multiplayer."

"If they come to us, we do all of the work and take all of the risk. They have no financial exposure. Making the client themselves is always risky. However you cannot look at it in terms of money only. When a game is ported to a second platform, it almost always exposes bugs and problems that would otherwise have been missed, as the developers have to re-work portions of the game. This will mean that creating a Linux version will increase the stability of the Windows version, and increase the quality of their core product, a fact that in itself may justify the cost of a Linux port."

"I wasn't a fan of the gameplay in Postal 2, I loved the message that the company was trying to put out. Because you can play Postal 2 in the most violent and graphic way, but you can also play it without hurting a single person. I don't know anyone who's played it like that, but I like that the people who made Postal are saying you can get through this game without any violence."

"If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong."