Linus Torvalds Quotes

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

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:

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

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

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?

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.

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!"?

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

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

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

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.

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

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 [...].

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.

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.