meme made by me using free libre open source software aka Gnu Image Manipulation Program (ak… aka GIMP) uwu
(Lemmy original meme fr)
People always call Linus Torvalds an asshole, but I’ve yet to see anything from him that didn’t make sense. And the fact that he eventually took community feedback and decided to take time off to deal with his anger issues is commendable.
Linus TT can go and fuck itself though.
He’s definitely a fuck your feelings type. No nonsense and sometimes harsh but like you said it’s almost always justified. I’ll take that over fake ass, greedy LTT Linus “oops I got caught so now I’ll apologize or try to hide it and then apologize” any day of the week.
LTT could have just said fuck you’re right my bad, every single time he gets caught fucking up.
Honey: yeah we really wanted to do but that NDA was nasty and have you seen their lawyers, sorry guys We have ousted sponsors before but it just didn’t make business sense in this case. 99% would have went “yeah we get you”
Billit labs: We did not mean to fuck these guys over, erm twice. We have (repurchase the prototype off who we sent it to or compensated them for the price of machining a new part too sufficiently high tolerance) and if they provide us with a another piece and exact instructions we’ll cover them in a future video gratis.
These things didn’t need to turn into PR disasters.
Only an asshole when talking about contributing to Linux from what I’ve seen
That may be, don’t think I’ve heard him talk about anything else. One of my favorite clips ever is his message to nvidia. Some things are worth being angry about. And because of his angry public reaction, I became aware of nvidia’s anti-FOSS efforts. So it’s not all bad imo.
You spend all your adult life nurturing a baby like the Linux kernel, a lot of it unpaid, and you’ll be a bit touchy about what goes into it too.
True.
Here’s a dataset of most of his rants from the LKML along with the “hate” rating of each.
https://github.com/corollari/linusrants?tab=readme-ov-file#linusrants
Telling someone they need to get their act together or you’ll ignore their shit is considered more hateful than asking for someone to be retroactively aborted?
Linus is giving away home made guitar pedals to kernel contributors
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/1/19/281
Nive guy
For an embarrassingly long time I thought they were the same person, and I wondered why anyone would look up to that tool, and call him a genius, when he couldn’t even benchmark an HDMI cable correctly (literally the only video of his I watched, and yes, I know that it wouldn’t have mattered even if he did do it properly).
Now that I know that its 2 separate assholes, I feel like LTT is even more of a tool who leans into the identity confusion on purpose for more internet clout.
He did a video about trying out linux from a novice perspective. It felt pretty disingenuous and likely led many people to conclude they shouldn’t even try it for themselves. The part that was most egregious is that he installed steam in a weird way and on that particular OS config there was a warning that said essentially “IF YOU INSTALL THIS YOUR OS WILL PROBABLY BE BRICKED. CONTINUE?” He concluded a regular user wouldn’t read that message, which I find not believable. It was a very scary warning. He continued with the install and then acted surprised when the system wouldn’t boot anymore afterward, citing it as evidence that linux was not good for the average user. Many pointed out that if he’d installed steam in several other more common ways of doing so, none of that would’ve happened. I think he was doing it exclusively on cli, which a novice would try to avoid.
Also I saw a couple videos others did showing how LTT had hired someone from a big hardware company (forget which) and around that time started giving better reviews to that company’s products and fudging benchmark numbers of competitors to look worse. When others couldn’t recreate those benchmark results and released all the data to prove it, he shrugged it off without really admitting wrongdoing at first, vaguely talking about how they’d done their best. That was a pattern of behavior.
Also one of their former employees felt uncomfortable as a woman in their workplace, saying it felt really toxic and bad for mental health. Fuck that guy and that company.
Sources:
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-recent-criticism-of-linus-tech-tips-explained/
one of their former employees felt uncomfortable as a woman in their workplace,
All the other stuff is 100%
This particular one is 50/50.
He did halt production.
He hired a CEO to manage him.
They did put policies in place to make sure this didn’t happen
That’s a reasonable response. Better than I expected honestly.
We’ll never know if the investigation was viable. They either buried that stuff so deep it couldn’t come back up, or the other employees are okay and maybe she was oversensitive. If he had a decent number of women on his productions, I might even give him the benefit of the doubt. It might be that it’s a boys club and they’re all used to toxic ribbing. We don’t know, we can’t trust the investigation as truth.
In a vacuum, each of the individual items is just a red flag. When you put them all together, it does seem to form a pattern.
To be fair, as someone that works in IT…most people would ignore that pop up
He concluded a regular user wouldn’t read that message, which I find not believable
Oh boy I’ve worked with IT professionals like that. Something unexpected happens and they completely fail to read or understand what text they’re presented with. This is especially common with those not comfortable in a shell
About the steam Linux thing, He tried to install it the proper way, but that didn’t work, so he had to install it from the terminal, because of a misconfiguration by Pop!_OS it required the desktop environment to be uninstalled to install steam.
What kind of fucked up OS decides that it needs to uninstall the DE to install steam?
Also the warning was buried in a bunch of text, that a novice user can’t understand.
This is 100% on Pop!_OS
The Linux thing pissed me off. He went out of his way not to follow instructions and tried to windows bully through shit, then called it out as unusable. Then he repeated the same garbage in different distros like he wasn’t the problem.
Then there was when he had Honey for a sponsor, found out that they were link-jacking people, dropped them as a sponsor, and never said a word about it. He was the reason thousands of people were using the platform that was stealing from people and couldn’t be bothered to mention it on the wan show? When he dropped a VPN because they doxed someone, he had no problem with calling them out.
Then there is this whole spat between him and gamers nexus where his current response is well yeah I did wrong stuff, but they didn’t give me warning and a chance to do damage control which is unethical.
He tends to blow people at conventions off with “who are you and why should I care” meanwhile Luke is nice and amicable.
He refuses to own being wrong. He’s childish. and every damn time I go back to try to listen to WAN show to get news, he comes out with some other piece of crap.
Torvalds and Sebastion are both assholes.
His channel brings news in, turns it into a digestable feed for the masses. That’s commendable.
That was an amazing video showcasing how bad Linux is for the average user.
There are very few things right.
Worker abuse, sexual harassment, blatant disregard with the truth, stealing review equipment from small companies, returning said equipment damaged when threatened legal action…
The only good thing about it is that they dress their lies in pretty videos.
If you want a tech channel that is actually worth your time, check out Gamers Nexus. I’m not even a gamer but their content drags me in and their commitment to the truth is what all other technical publications should have.
Gamers Nexus I find often dragging on, they can’t seem to edit their videos well. The technical details are good and the reviews well done, but the host has such a self-important demeanor it’s hard to listen to. The recent shift from tech to drama/attack videos is also disappointing. Hardware unboxed and level1techs is much better in my opinion.
This has all been disproven, GN has a bone to pick with LTT and you’re falling into blatant misinformation.
He’s an imbecile and knows nothing about tech. I watched him interconnect buildings then run Windows file transfer to test it. You know, instead of a legitimate tool like iperf. He constantly gets shit wrong about linux as others pointed out. Videos I saw on Android TV boxes were also extremely inaccurate so he could push Google’s product. Like literally everything he does with linux and android is dumb as fuck. I thought at least he was accurate with the gaming industry videos as I don’t know enough about it. But then that gamernexus video dropped and I was like holy shit… this guy can’t do anything right.
I watched him interconnect buildings then run Windows file transfer to test it.
If you’re mainly going to use a network connection to transfer files between Windows computers, then transferring files between Windows computers is going to be the most accurate benchmark possible.
EDIT: I apologize to everyone who has so far read this comment. I misunderstood what Linus Torvalds meant in the interview I mentioned. I thought he was just calling the Russian kernel contributors “Internet trolls”, be he was actually referring to Russian “troll farms” taking advantage of the controversy generated by how the Linux Foundation removed the Russian devs from kernel development without saying a word, to entice outrage and try to get the Foundation’s decision reversed. (afaik they had to do it because the US government ordered them to, and the foundation is hosted in the US.) I’m leaving the post in its original form for posterity.
I think the way Torvalds treated the Russian kernel maintainers that got silently removed from development (a situation that, by itself, was completely mishandled) was awful to say the least. In a interview, he said they were all Internet trolls, and referenced conflicts between Finland and Russia to “explain” his disdain for Russians. Say what you want, but I usually call a person that judges others based on their country of birth alone, an asshole. Not just that, but such behaviour sounds extremely ungrateful when we are talking about people who contributed in extremely important ways to Torvalds’ biggest project of his life. I used to have a positive view of Torvalds, but this kind of ruined it for me.
He didn’t call the maintainers trolls.
In brief, the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel stated that the dismissals were simply made in line with the policy of sanctions on the Russian aggressors in the Ukraine war.
Moreover, Torvalds didn’t pull any punches when he said “lots of Russian trolls” were working to make the recent decision look unpopular. Torvalds directly accused Russia of wielding its army of social media bots in an attempt to fake a grassroots campaign and reverse the Russian maintainer cull.
This tracks with other Russian social media efforts.
So I interpreted this interview the wrong way. This changes everything!
Thank you for letting me know that I was making a misinformed comment. I’m editing it as we speak.
He did tho. I don’t know where and why you’ve pulled these quotes from, when the original message is available publicaly, and where it’s very clear whom exactly he accused.
I don’t follow youtube or youtuber drama but you cannot really retroactively change the details I wrote below.
but I’ve yet to see anything from him that didn’t make sense.
He supports tivoization.
