News Linus Torvalds rages against ‘random turd files’ in Linux 6.15-rc1 directories

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I find Linus' crankiness entertaining. My guess is that all the devs on the kernel team have experienced far worse from much less competent engineering managers. Reverse engineering modern hardware is getting more and more difficult: increased complexity. spotty documentation, sometime comepletely closed designs. It's a miracle this stuff works at all.
 
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jg.millirem said:
Torvalds, Jobs, Gates - all broken humans.
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I think Torvalds is pretty typical of the senior engineer type of person that I've worked with. He knows a lot and doesn't always have much patience for nonsense, which sometimes comes out in a post written when he's in a cranky or surly mood. At other times, I've seen him go to great lengths to explain his position and educate the other person. There's actually a lot of that in this post, but people just pick up on his hard-line stance and the language he used to characterize it.

In this post referenced by the article, all he's saying is that the build shouldn't leave random temp files. There are two problems with this. First is that he doesn't want any tests being run as part of the build, itself. The second is that tests should be well-behaved, which means not creating temp files that clutter up the source tree. Both are understandable points.

If he didn't use such colorful language and emphasize his hard-line position, there would've been nothing exceptional about this. However, he points out that such practices rarely ever make it into the main kernel branch and that's why he's trying to get everyone's attention. Multiple people dropped the ball, in order for this to have happened.

One thing I respect about Linus is that he's stayed in the trenches, in spite of Linux' stellar success. At least 10 years ago, he could've just stepped back and run the Linux Foundation, but the tech is his true passion. So, unlike Gates, who withdrew from the technical work as MS grew, Linus has been instrumental in every Linux kernel release that's ever happened. Not only that, but let's not forget that Linus also created Git, which is overwhelmingly the predominate source control system used today. So, that's two stellar successes he's had.

BTW, Steve Jobs was never technical. Even back when he worked at Atari, he was already getting Wozniak to do his work for him. He was visionary and uncompromising, which (eventually) worked to his advantage, but a technical genius he was not.
 
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wsanders11 said:
Reverse engineering modern hardware is getting more and more difficult: increased complexity. spotty documentation, sometime comepletely closed designs. It's a miracle this stuff works at all.
Click to expand...
Far and away, most hardware support in modern Linux is engineered by the hardware vendors, themselves. There are a few notable exceptions to this, such as the Asahi project, which adds support for running Linux on Apple's M-series SoCs.

Every now and then, someone tends to look at the biggest contributors to Linux, and the top spots are overwhelmingly occupied by a mix of hardware and cloud computing companies. Probably the most prolific non-professional developers are then in academia. Linux has come a long ways since it's origins as a "hobbyist" OS project.
 
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bit_user said:
I think Torvalds is pretty typical of the senior engineer type of person that I've worked with. He knows a lot and doesn't always have much patience for nonsense, which sometimes comes out in a post written when he's in a cranky or surly mood. At other times, I've seen him go to great lengths to explain his position and educate the other person. There's actually a lot of that in this post, but people just pick up on his hard-line stance and the language he used to characterize it.

In this post referenced by the article, all he's saying is that the build shouldn't leave random temp files. There are two problems with this. First is that he doesn't want any tests being run as part of the build, itself. The second is that tests should be well-behaved, which means not creating temp files that clutter up the source tree. Both are understandable points.

If he didn't use such colorful language and emphasize his hard-line position, there would've been nothing exceptional about this. However, he points out that such practices rarely ever make it into the main kernel branch and that's why he's trying to get everyone's attention. Multiple people dropped the ball, in order for this to have happened.

One thing I respect about Linus is that he's stayed in the trenches, in spite of Linux' stellar success. At least 10 years ago, he could've just stepped back and run the Linux Foundation, but the tech is his true passion. So, unlike Gates, who withdrew from the technical work as MS grew, Linus has been instrumental in every Linux kernel release that's ever happened. Not only that, but let's not forget that Linus also created Git, which is overwhelmingly the predominate source control system used today. So, that's two stellar successes he's had.

BTW, Steve Jobs was never technical. Even back when he worked at Atari, he was already getting Wozniak to do his work for him. He was visionary and uncompromising, which (eventually) worked to his advantage, but a technical genius he was not.
Click to expand...
Steve Jobs was technical he just happened to focus on the vision rather than on pure buildout. Remember he started Next and powered Pixar to creating revolution computer graphics none which happens until he bought the nascent company. To say Jobs isn’t technical is silly you need to understand the problem to solve the problem. Know what to build, how to build, when to build it takes extreme technical ability and Jobs goes down as one of the engineers that brought modern computing revolution about. It’s like arguing Larry Ellison isn’t technical because he didn’t sit around writing later versions of Oracle or create Java. These guys are engineers who start business not business guys who started businesses.

If Linus stopped being heavily involved in the actual coding of Linux would say he’s not technical?
 
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bit_user said:
I think Torvalds is pretty typical of the senior engineer type of person that I've worked with. He knows a lot and doesn't always have much patience for nonsense, which sometimes comes out in a post written when he's in a cranky or surly mood.
Click to expand...
I’ve seen this excuse so many times. The low social intelligence and/or impulse control of some people shouldn’t be normalized and used as cover for others. This one is mild for Torvalds.
 
When this misnomer of tech world and creature of finances Microsoft will finally go out of business?

99.8% of top supercomputers are finally just on one single OS - Linux. Most of cell phones are on Linux. More and more Chrome OS (Linux based) laptops which are twice cheaper than Microsoft based ones are on the shelves of Best Buy and Walmart.

Tech world would be better without MS.
 
Stomx said:
When this misnomer of tech world and creature of finances Microsoft will finally go out of business?

99.8% of top supercomputers are finally just on one single OS - Linux. Most of cell phones are on Linux. More and more Chrome OS (Linux based) laptops which are twice cheaper than Microsoft based ones are on the shelves of Best Buy and Walmart.

Tech world would be better without MS.
Click to expand...
As a Linux user since I was weeh lad and pretty much its inception, I’m going to have to disagree windows 10/11 is a dayum good OS. Windows 7 is still one of my all time favorite OSs… while windows wasn’t created to natively live in the embedded world or power the next supercomputer as a desktop OS and such use cases it’s solid. It’s successful for a reason … and not all of them evil. It’s not an apples to apples comparison ImHO.

Chrome OS is trash … yeah I said it. Like seriously trash of trash.
 
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acadia11 said:
Steve Jobs was technical he just happened to focus on the vision rather than on pure buildout. Remember he started Next and powered Pixar to creating revolution computer graphics none which happens until he bought the nascent company. To say Jobs isn’t technical is silly you need to understand the problem to solve the problem. Know what to build, how to build, when to build it takes extreme technical ability and Jobs goes down as one of the engineers that brought modern computing revolution about. It’s like arguing Larry Ellison isn’t technical because he didn’t sit around writing later versions of Oracle or create Java. These guys are engineers who start business not business guys who started businesses.

If Linus stopped being heavily involved in the actual coding of Linux would say he’s not technical?
Click to expand...
Steve Jobs main contributions are: early Apple computers (made by Wozniak), iPhone, and of course Apple company as we know it.

Steve Jobs was definitely part of the smartphone revolution, but to say that Jobs was somehow central in the "modern computing revolution" is a massive exaggeration. Smart phones are a really small part of IT. The list of far more important things than smartphones is long, and Jobs did not have any role in them, at all. Try Internet, computer technology and micro-electronics, modern software technologies, AI, and so on and so forth. Apple wanted to take credit for GUIs (Lisa, MacIntosh), but those things were stolen from Xerox. Jobs and Apple have been successful in some of the personal computing devices (iPod, iPhone), but that's it. If you are not and have never been an Apple customer, the only really significant thing about Jobs and Apple is smartphones. That's all.
 
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bit_user said:
I think Torvalds is pretty typical of the senior engineer type of person that I've worked with. He knows a lot and doesn't always have much patience for nonsense, which sometimes comes out in a post written when he's in a cranky or surly mood. At other times, I've seen him go to great lengths to explain his position and educate the other person. There's actually a lot of that in this post, but people just pick up on his hard-line stance and the language he used to characterize it.

In this post referenced by the article, all he's saying is that the build shouldn't leave random temp files. There are two problems with this. First is that he doesn't want any tests being run as part of the build, itself. The second is that tests should be well-behaved, which means not creating temp files that clutter up the source tree. Both are understandable points.

If he didn't use such colorful language and emphasize his hard-line position, there would've been nothing exceptional about this. However, he points out that such practices rarely ever make it into the main kernel branch and that's why he's trying to get everyone's attention. Multiple people dropped the ball, in order for this to have happened.

One thing I respect about Linus is that he's stayed in the trenches, in spite of Linux' stellar success. At least 10 years ago, he could've just stepped back and run the Linux Foundation, but the tech is his true passion. So, unlike Gates, who withdrew from the technical work as MS grew, Linus has been instrumental in every Linux kernel release that's ever happened. Not only that, but let's not forget that Linus also created Git, which is overwhelmingly the predominate source control system used today. So, that's two stellar successes he's had.

BTW, Steve Jobs was never technical. Even back when he worked at Atari, he was already getting Wozniak to do his work for him. He was visionary and uncompromising, which (eventually) worked to his advantage, but a technical genius he was not.
Click to expand...
Torvalds and I are on opposite edges of the same side of the coin... In the Windows-Linux world, I often rant about the issues induced by the release of WSL2, so still have to run some of my code on WSL1 for memory and performance reasons, but I have no one to listen to my rants.:)

BTW (since you brought it up): My first big assembly language project (as an exercise) was to translate Wozniak's Apple Monitor (CALL -151) to Commodore... Interesting window into his coding thought processes.
 
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acadia11 said:
Steve Jobs was technical he just happened to focus on the vision rather than on pure buildout. Remember he started Next and powered Pixar to creating revolution computer graphics none which happens until he bought the nascent company. To say Jobs isn’t technical is silly you need to understand the problem to solve the problem.
Click to expand...
Have you read the Isaacson biography? I did. He got the job by passing off Woz' work as his own and kept it by farming his work out to Woz. Then, there's also the thing where he was stealing parts from Atari so Woz could build the first Apple computer.

You don't need to be able to write code or design circuits to build companies, though. What he needed for Next and Pixar wasn't technical prowess, but vision and some business acumen.

Now, if you have some evidence that Steve Jobs ever did any technical work, I'd certainly be interested in seeing it.

ttquantia said:
Steve Jobs main contributions are: early Apple computers (made by Wozniak), iPhone, and of course Apple company as we know it.
Click to expand...
He was visionary and ambitious. I already said as much. Apple's push to design its own CPUs all happened during Jobs' tenure. That's when he hired Jim Keller, then bought P.A. Semi and Intrinsity.
 
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acadia11 said:
while windows wasn’t created to natively live in the embedded world
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TBH, I don't know why that should be an excuse. If you compare specs, the machines Windows NT was originally designed to run on are a lot less powerful than most embedded SoCs. Microsoft tried Windows CE for over a decade, but eventually abandoned it.

acadia11 said:
It’s successful for a reason … and not all of them evil.
Click to expand...
Tell that to the IBM OS/2 folks. OS/2 was technically ahead of Windows, at the time, but blocked from offering binary compatibility with Windows, via legal maneuvers. After that happened, IBM quickly shut it down. I worked at a company that had used it, and they all spoke very highly of it. These were software developers and pretty much all had a UNIX background, FWIW.
 
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For all you people commenting on "cranky" Linus, ahh, you better thank god we have someone in such a position to move the Linux kernel/GNU forward in such a dedicated manner. Thank goodness we still have a "Jobs" of our favorite OS. He could have just taken a payout and lived on a beach somewhere but we all should be super thankful for his dedication.👍
 
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