Linus Torvalds Quotes

109 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Linus Torvalds
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.

Linus Torvalds
[…] 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
Is "I hope you all die a painful death" too strong?

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
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!

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

Linus Torvalds
[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.

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

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

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

Linus Torvalds
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.

Linus Torvalds
If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution.

Linus Torvalds
An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.

Linus Torvalds
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.

Linus Torvalds
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.

Linus Torvalds
Oh fuck. If I kill this guy, I'll have millions of nerds on my case.

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

Linus Torvalds
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.

Linus Torvalds
Most days I wake up thinking I'm the luckiest bastard alive.

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

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

Linus Torvalds
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.

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

Linus Torvalds
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!"?

Linus Torvalds