Top 100 Linus Torvalds Quotes
#1. No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.
Linus Torvalds
#2. An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.
Linus Torvalds
#3. Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.
Linus Torvalds
#4. I actually think that I'm a rather optimistic and happy person; it's just that I'm not a very positive person, if you see the difference.
Linus Torvalds
#5. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.
Linus Torvalds
#6. People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themselves.
Linus Torvalds
#7. Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
Linus Torvalds
#8. I am pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself. However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also want it done well.
Linus Torvalds
#9. If you think penguins are fat and waddle, you have never been attacked by one running at you in excess of 100 miles per hour.
Linus Torvalds
#10. Being open source meant that I could work on the technical side (along with lots of other people), and others who had the interest and inclination could start up companies around it.
Linus Torvalds
#11. I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.
Linus Torvalds
#12. Hey, I'm a good software engineer, but I'm not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don't translate to 'good design sense'.
Linus Torvalds
#13. Right now some people are just running around in circles and claiming that moving things to the kernel automatically makes it more stable. I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this.
Linus Torvalds
#14. There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.
Linus Torvalds
#15. The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.
Linus Torvalds
#16. Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures.
Linus Torvalds
#17. Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do
Linus Torvalds
#18. I lose sleep if I end up feeling bad about something I've said. Usually that happens when I send something out without having read it over a few times, or when I call somebody names.
Linus Torvalds
#19. I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.
Linus Torvalds
#20. I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.
Linus Torvalds
#21. Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.
Linus Torvalds
#22. Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do.
Linus Torvalds
#23. I don't try to be a threat to MicroSoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows-the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.
Linus Torvalds
#24. 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.
Linus Torvalds
#25. So I've decided to be a very rich and famous person who doesn't really care about money, and who is very humble but who still makes a lot of money and is very famous, but is very humble and rich and famous ...
Linus Torvalds
#26. The correct form factor for a laptop is obviously 12 and 2 lbs, and I don't understand why everybody gets that wrong.
Linus Torvalds
#27. Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.
Linus Torvalds
#28. I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to.
Linus Torvalds
#29. One of the reasons I like open source is that it allows people to work on the parts they are good at, and I don't mean just on a technical level; some people are into the whole selling and support, and that's just not me.
Linus Torvalds
#30. I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters
Linus Torvalds
#31. Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral.
Linus Torvalds
#32. The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at any point pretty damn ugly.
Linus Torvalds
#33. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
Linus Torvalds
#34. I made very sure that I did not get involved with any of the commercial Linux companies, exactly so that I would be neutral and not ever seen as "working for the competition".
Linus Torvalds
#35. I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] ... but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.
Linus Torvalds
#36. An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.
Linus Torvalds
#37. The fame and reputation part came later, and never was much of a motivator, although it did enable me to work without feeling guilty about neglecting my studies.
Linus Torvalds
#38. Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests.
Linus Torvalds
#40. I don't think I'm unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.
Linus Torvalds
#41. When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.
Linus Torvalds
#42. I actually don't believe that everybody should necessarily try to learn to code. I think it's reasonably specialized, and nobody really expects most people to have to do it. It's not like knowing how to read and write and do basic math.
Linus Torvalds
#44. It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.
Linus Torvalds
#45. Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.
Linus Torvalds
#46. If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else.
Linus Torvalds
#47. Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life.
Linus Torvalds
#48. People will realize that software is not a product; you use it to build a product,
Linus Torvalds
#49. That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle.
Linus Torvalds
#50. While I may not get any money from Linux, I get a huge personal satisfaction from having written something that people really enjoy using, and that people find to be the best alternative for their needs.
Linus Torvalds
#51. I am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.
Linus Torvalds
#52. The economics of the security world are all horribly, horribly nasty and are largely based on fear, intimidation and blackmail.
Linus Torvalds
#53. On a purely technical side, I'm really very happy with how Linux gets used in a very wide set of different areas. It's important for development.
Linus Torvalds
#55. In many cases, the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.
Linus Torvalds
#56. In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.
Linus Torvalds
#57. I'm simply too content doing what I want to do to really have a very negative attitude towards MicroSoft. They make bad products - so what? I don't need to care, because I happily don't have to use them, and writing my own alternative has been a very gratifying experience in many ways.
Linus Torvalds
#58. When you hear voices in your head that tell you to shoot the pope, do you do what they say? Same thing goes for customers and managers. They are the crazy voices in your head, and you need to set them right, not just blindly do what they ask for.
Linus Torvalds
#59. What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.
Linus Torvalds
#60. Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.
Linus Torvalds
#61. I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.
Linus Torvalds
#62. I'm generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works.
Linus Torvalds
#63. I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'
Linus Torvalds
#64. I'd much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other.
Linus Torvalds
#65. A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open Windows
Linus Torvalds
#66. Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, THEN, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.
Linus Torvalds
#67. One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat - and there are a number of other Linux companies going public - basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.
Linus Torvalds
#68. I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.
Linus Torvalds
#70. I love making friends ... it's people I can't stand.
Linus Torvalds
#71. software is like sex : it's better when it's free..
Linus Torvalds
#72. There's innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I'm proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren't in other operating systems.
Linus Torvalds
#73. Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid.
Linus Torvalds
#74. The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question.
Linus Torvalds
#75. And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.
Linus Torvalds
#76. I don't think commercialization is the answer to anything. It's just one more facet of Linux, and not the deciding one by any means.
Linus Torvalds
#77. I've felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn't have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.
Linus Torvalds
#78. A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.
Linus Torvalds
#79. I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it's actually made cellphones very usable.
Linus Torvalds
#80. In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
Linus Torvalds
#81. If you want an application to be portable, you don't necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.
Linus Torvalds
#82. Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.
Linus Torvalds
#83. I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area.
Linus Torvalds
#84. I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.
Linus Torvalds
#85. It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.
Linus Torvalds
#86. Part of doing Linux was that I had to communicate a lot more instead of just being a geek in front of a computer.
Linus Torvalds
#87. It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.
Linus Torvalds
#89. By staying neutral, I end up being somebody that everybody can trust. Even if they don't always agree with my decisions, they know I'm not working against them.
Linus Torvalds
#91. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.
Linus Torvalds
#92. The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive.
Linus Torvalds
#93. Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.
Linus Torvalds
#94. I started Linux as a desktop operating system. And it's the only area where Linux hasn't completely taken over. That just annoys the hell out of me.
Linus Torvalds
#95. I've been very happy with the commercial Linux CD-ROM vendors linux Red Hat.
Linus Torvalds
#96. Me trying to make a business around Linux would have been a total disaster.
Linus Torvalds
#97. The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it.
Linus Torvalds
#98. If you have ever done any security work - and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust" - it wasn't security work, it was - masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development.
Linus Torvalds
#99. I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.
Linus Torvalds
#100. Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
Linus Torvalds
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
