[AstralStorm]

He's not an asshole. He just uses profanity to make the point that would otherwise be missed.

An ass would be mean with no reason behind it. Linus always has a reason and often a good one.

Low tolerance for dumb and hacks is actually a good thing.

[NovaX]

He is very defensive and dismissive of his own mistakes. Linus suggested the removal of a memory barrier and subsequently broke locking on kernels for most of 2014. The fix did not get into most distributions until 2016, since it was kept quiet and not communicated. The result is that deadlocks seemingly occur at random, causing complaints from users of my libraries. It has wasted many hours of my time, and surely more for others. However the more experience you have, typically the more forgiving you are to mistakes as we all make them. Linus lacks that and acts childish, making it very difficult to respect someone who disrespects everyone else.