- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
meme made by me using free libre open source software aka Gnu Image Manipulation Program (ak… aka GIMP) uwu
(Lemmy original meme fr)
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.
lol why the hate for LTT?
He took that initial gamers nexus thing and turned his whole org around imo. Their content is great again.
The new GN drama makes Steve look like a clown imo. And it makes the initial issue seem more and more like a hit job.
I don’t follow youtube or youtuber drama but you cannot really retroactively change the details I wrote below.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14665903
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.
Linus is giving away home made guitar pedals to kernel contributors
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/1/19/281
Nive guy
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.
he gets paid, more than enough
Now he does. Originally he did not.
For those downvoting, Linus Torvalds earned around $650k USD last year, solely from his work on Linux and not including any speaking gigs.
He’s not Bill Gates rich but Linus is very well off.
The value humanity gets from that is orders of magnitude greater
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?
Haha I was wondering the same. The hate score does not make sense
He really does have a point here…
In my office it is
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.
What’s wrong with LTT?
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.
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/
https://www.pcgamer.com/linus-tech-tips-temporarily-halts-operations-puts-out-apology-video-linus-made-a-clear-and-egregious-judgment-error/
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 only way to proceed was in that text and required effort to exactly type a phrase.
I’ve been using pop os for years now and never had an issue installing steam. It’s a great os.
Windows fanboys are the worst
Plus I love how you simps have nothing to say about LTT fucking lying in reviews/benchmarks for money but you’re all dogpiling me to defend a moronic string of actions in Linux. Spare me this shit
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.
Yeah, I don’t know either. It’s always possible that one complainer is the issue, but like you said:
I find it likely that she felt the environment was toxic. I don’t think she was lying; she probably knew she’d be making a lot of enemies.
Based on all the constant ribbing between the different teams on the show, I find it likely that there’s a lot of masculinity to go around.
When you’re running a business, it’s important to prevent people from making each other uncomfortable. Everyone you hire has a different tolerance, and it’s management’s job to ensure that reasonable expectations are met and people feel safe and valued.
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
Sure – but would they then respond to a prompt reading…
And then typing out that full exact phrase? I might do that, but only expecting/understanding that I may fuck my OS.
A layman would think: I am installing steam, I want to install steam. What do you mean potentially harmful? Steam ain’t a virus. I have no clue what pop* is and what it does. -> do as I say.
While the prompt is perfectly adequate for those that are technically experienced enough to recognize it is about to uninstall your desktop environment, that isn’t the case for someone who doesn’t know what their desktop environment is. Especially since there is an expectation that installing software does not break things (but, because shared libraries are shared more often than not in Linux, it could!)
I will always think that if you type commands you don’t understand, on an OS you don’t understand, in the face of a scary warning that forces you to type a phrase like that, you are an idiot and you get what you get. The fact that pop os had that issue for a brief period isn’t relevant. Linux and related free software has been developed for decades and despite software being one of the hardest things to get right, it’s largely plug and play these days. Some idiot fucking his system up against fair warnings won’t be changing that any time soon. Enjoy you win11 I guess though.
I don’t disagree, but the fact is that these people exist (see Linux TT for proof). When things go wrong in Linux, people often end up being directed towards a terminal, even if they shouldn’t be there for plenty of reasons. If you want to be accessible to a layman, largely plug and play is insufficient: it needs to be plug-and-play. I’ve had a wifi dongle not work, I had to compile a kernel module! Those kinds of experiences will cause people that try a flavour of Linux as a desktop os to go elsewhere. Furthermore, I have seen this warning pop up with colleagues when updating software. While they were smart enough to not continue, this stuff does throw up a massive roadblock when it does, especially if you are a layman. If the instructions tell you to install using apt - and this pops up, what would you do? You still want to install the software. It is just a massive source of frustration when something like this happens, even if rare. Doing something sensible (like installing or updating software) should never result in stuff like this popping up.
The moment you need to enter a terminal to fix something - the OS would be irreparably damaged for the average Joe. I would love an immutable distro that would be usable by these people without the risk of harming themselves.
You’re failing to acknowledge that “these types of people exist” are largely a product of anti-educational resources like this particular LTT video. I’ve daily driven Ubuntu based oses for about 4 years solid now and never saw a warning like he saw. That is an extreme outlier, but his video presented it as common in the minds of probably a couple million people.
As for things being plug and play, Windows isn’t either. I’ve used all versions of that OS except 8 and 11 and I’ve had problems as bad or worse than anything on Linux plenty of times. Updates have trashed my ability to boot on a few occasions. Yet to hear folks like you tell it, windows just works but Linux is only usable if you’re willing to fix major problems all the time. That was probably true 15 years ago but it just flat out isn’t anymore. You’re not doing anyone any favors except Microsoft by continuing to spread the misinformation that windows is nearly flawless but Linux is unapproachable.
There’s a reason windows flatly refuses to do some things no matter how much you may want to. It’s people that would do exactly that without any thought or hesitation.
I prefer a system that warms me but lets me do what I want with safeguards. But I don’t buy for a second that many people would do this dumb shit. It requires too much effort for one.
I too prefer that. However, I also know there is a large subset of computer users that just want their magic box to work and I don’t think it would be a bad thing if there was a Linux distro they could use.
Well it sounds like we want the same result, but I will submit there already are a few.
I have seen people struggle with install wizards on windows… so basically if we set up some Ubuntu or a similar OS for many people, they’d be happy with it. People just aren’t that great when any speed bump comes up and that’s true on windows also.
To be fair, as someone that works in IT…most people would ignore that pop up
It was not a popup. It was a message in a terminal window. Which not only would most users not use, you’d definitely think they would rapid-fire Y when there is scary message in all caps right about the “y/n” prompt.
Edit: it wasn’t even pressing Y. To proceed, he had to ignore the warning which was pretty clear, then type out manually “Yes, do as I say!” then press enter. Regular users who aren’t total morons asking for trouble wouldn’t do that.
I do some game modding, and sometimes have to hack together software to help with it, some of which ends up public.
One of my programs relied on the location of other, existing files and so would poke around at runtime to see where the user had launched it from, alerting the user if it was in a location where it wasn’t supported. If that happened, an interactive message box pops up with the title “UNSUPPORTED LOCATION” and text that says, verbatim sans my [notes]:
You can’t skip or just “OK” the message to dismiss it, otherwise the program just immediately begins a managed shutdown of itself to prevent any of the aforementioned potential errors from occurring. I STILL had a user message me saying how making them type in “I understand” was a weird thing to make them do in order to use the program. Thankfully I think they’ve been the only one so far so it’s certainly not the norm, but the average computer user is also much less tech-savvy than someone downloading mods for a video game.
One of my favorite sayings at work is “you can’t make people read.” Some workflow has changed, and management wants to alert everyone? They’re very quick to go “oh just post a sign or send a memo.” No, you can’t make people read. People will miss it, even if it’s a gigantic flashing neon sign.
Yeah, I maintain that it’s not realistic that a person new to linux would do what he did here. I mean, sure, some people might, but the warning on the screen is really fucking clear it’s not a good idea, and it’s not the kind of “OK” modal that people are used to safely dismissing without reading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M%3Ft%3D638
Counter point: The removal of your desktop environment should not under any circumstances be within the possibility space of side effects for trying to install a common piece of desktop software, regardless of the warnings provided or confirmations required.
This was an issue with the OS, and the Pop_OS! team fixed it in an update very soon after this. A month earlier or later and Linus would not have encountered it.
So he nuked the OS on purpose and then blamed Linux.
Tell me, when should you ever have the need to nuke your OS in this way?
Does it hold any value to have this feature in your OS?
Because to me, it doesn’t. So it sounds like a Linux problem.
No, he nuked the OS because he’s one of those people who shuts down all thought when they’re outside of their depth and smashes buttons. His impression of OS’s is that recovery will always be there to save you.
For a beginner, he had no business digging that deep into the terminal without reading. They were trying to speedrun using Linux with no knowledge.
And this was early in Wayland, a lot of shit didn’t play nice yet. Hell some of it still doesn’t play nice.
If his goal was to install an OS, install steam, install OBS and play some games, he NEVER should have run into most of these issues.
At the time he installed it, there was probably a dep issue installing steam from his package manager. He could have installed it one of a dozen different ways. He wasn’t intent on making it work he was intent on showing it was out of the reach of the command user.
The OS did not work out of the box. He manually used the terminal because it did not work.
deleted by creator
Exactly. And for the record I’ve been gaming on pop os since around the time he made the video I linked in this thread and I did not run into that error he got, nor did I ever get presented with a choice to possibly nuke my OS. I don’t get what weird thing he did here.
On a video card driver install in text mode?
Nope… I’ll bully through an install, but when something says WARNING or CRITICAL, I read that shit. Nobody spends any time on error messages. If you see a long error message telling you it’s important, it didn’t get there by accident or an overabundance of caution. It got there from having to listen to a hundred people bitch about an unexpected result.
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.
Probably block this community then, unless you’re a troll in which case I assume you’ll let me know here.
Why? Is that opinion not allowed in here?
If you hate Linux why are you spreading negativity about it in a Linux community?
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.
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.
He can be rude but that’s what working with people leads to.
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.
This tracks with other Russian social media efforts.
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.
In your own link he’s referring to the people decrying the decision as trolls, not the maintainers.
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.
No, thank you for holding yourself accountable.
He supports tivoization.
“He doesn’t think he should fight it as a top priority” is not the same as “he supports it”.
I looked at the wiki page, but I’m still not sure why/how he supports that. Got a link I can read up on?
Edit: read some more and googled more and I don’t see him supporting it, rather it seems he takes issue with trying to dictate to hardware makers what they can do.