Admittedly he does very little with his computer. He often said these days it's mostly reading and writing emails and merging patches. And he often stated he does not know nor care much about how his desktop works. He uses stock Fedora and spends his time inside his Micro Emacs clone, and laments he's not even doing much coding these days.
I wouldn't be surprised if he had a harder time than an average sweng to set up a LAMP server or troubleshoot networking issues.
Being central to the kernel development doesn't automatically mean you're a computer wiz.
Writing version 0.1 of a kernel from scratch very much does mean you are a computer wiz, how else are you going to make it run? You need to program the base hardware of the computer manually!
Of course if to you a computer wiz is someone who knows how to write a web page, or how Windows works, or how you use Photoshop, then no that’s not what you need. Then again the people who know that probably aren’t enough of a computer wiz to write a kernel from scratch.
Not really it does not. We differ on the definition of wiz: you mean one that knows really well how the hardware works, in this context I mean someone that knows how to "program" a computer. This is why I used the very generic word "wiz" and not software engineer. I mean being generally proficient, and he said he is not.
Knowing the exact procedure to enter protected mode in x86 doesn't mean knowing how to troubleshoot network issues, setting up a Wireguard connection or figuring out why systemd doesn't want to start that process.
And in any case, as I mentioned, Linus hasn't been doing much coding these days. These days Linus is a world class product manager. This is main role, and he has admitted that himself. His main responsibilities and daily duties have evolved since 1991, and so has the computing world.
In my opinion a computer wiz has enough talent and knowledge about tech that he can very quickly learn how to do all these things. And I don’t doubt for a second that Linus would be able to learn Wireguard, systemd or any networking system within a few days to a level far exceeding most people, insofar he doesn’t already know.
Linus didn’t just build the most used kernel on the planet, he also built the most used revision control system on the planet and has proven to be an effective project manager, whatever people think about his style. You’d probably be short sighted to dismiss any of his abilities.
you are right and I agree with you on fast learning path, knowledge and being smart in general. The original point though, it all started with
> It’s very easy to be minimalistic when you’re doing very little.
Still makes sense even for Linus, as he probably not need to have say Hadoop running in Docker Desktop, Chromecast playing videos/casting and whatever beyond things related to kernel development on the coding machine vs general case machine.
I wouldn't be surprised if he had a harder time than an average sweng to set up a LAMP server or troubleshoot networking issues.
Being central to the kernel development doesn't automatically mean you're a computer wiz.