Top 236 Quotes & Sayings by Linus Torvalds - Page 2

I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals.

People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.

I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.

Once you start thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best product, you're screwed.

The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That's my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal.

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.

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.

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.

I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room - by far - should be the occasional purring of the cat.

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.

Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life.

I'm generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works.

I'm a technical manager, but I don't have to take care of people. I only have to worry about technology itself.

Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.

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.

Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.

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.

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.

Programmers are in the enviable position of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like that, but not that many.

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.

I don't think I'm unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

I don't actually go to that many conferences. I do that a couple of times a year. Normally, I am not recognized; people don't throw their panties at me. I'm a perfectly normal person sitting in my den just doing my job.

I don't see myself as a visionary at all.

I see myself as a technical person who chose a great project and a great way of doing that project.

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.

In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making good operating systems.

The economics of the security world are all horribly, horribly nasty and are largely based on fear, intimidation and blackmail.

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.

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.

Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.

Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

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.

Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.

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

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.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

People will realize that software is not a product; you use it to build a product.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.

Most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

Every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I'm going to live forever.

I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that solves several things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not that the program does what you want, it's that it also does something that you didn't start out wanting.

People who are doing things for fun do things the right way by themselves.

In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people.

No problem is too big it can't be run away from

I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.

We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.

All operating systems sucks, but Linux just sucks less

Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain.

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

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.

Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.

I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.

UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.

A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open Windows

If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

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