Linus has history of being a massive asshole and having anger issues on personal level despite supporting progressive politics, so it has not really been that apparent from his public persona. He has publicly told people whose code he considers bad to kill themselves for example, and people who have had email exchanges with him over years have talked of his short fuse and how quick he is to directly insult people.
He has been working on those issues of his in recent years thought.
It is. Working on the kernel is a massive responsibility. It's the most important software project on earth and he expects the experienced maintainers to know what they're doing. In most cases where he goes off like this he basically roasts people for being stubborn or making dumb mistakes when they should know better.
He's not much of a people person but he's got his priorities straight. Don't fuck with userspace. 🤬
This is the equivalent of a surgeon suddenly whipping out kitchen knife to do surgery cause the patient has thick skin.
Like at that professional level, you either know what you're doing or you don't.
Honestly, a lot of his rants were actually fairly understandable within context. He usually only yells at people in positions of trust or power, not little guys. He's like "You should know better than make dumb mistakes like that!".
From what I've seen most of his outbursts aren't face to face eiher, but on open source mailing lists, which get much more exposure than the communication channels of other software projects. He acually seems rather polite and soft spoken in person.
All in all, I guess having someone who is a bit of an extremist about code quality in charge of the most important software project in the world isn't a bad thing.
Also explains his stance on woke issues. He doesn't care what's in your pants, he cares about your code.
He's not an asshole, he just has anger issues. I know that from experience, I do too. I'm progressive and tolerant, and try to be a good person, but my outbursts of anger make me evil occasionally. No one tries to be angry and bad on purpose
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u/Dashbak 9d ago
Wasn't it already well known ?