[xenago]

I feel the exact same. Marcan has done amazing work, and his random blog entries etc have saved me hours of debugging time in the past. But jeez, it is really painful to see him say absolute nonsense like "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas." - he has gotta Stop Posting and keep those kinds of thoughts away from his keyboard.

[hajile]

If Linus thinks that the social media angle is wrong, he should defuse situations before they become explosive because even if one of the devs didn't bring up the drama, there are dozens of news companies that would have printed up articles the second they found the discussion anyway.

Linus should have stepped in long before a maintainer blew their stack and started throwing out ultimatums. Once that happened, Linus could have still stopped everything with one sentence -- "Let me look into this.", but he did not.

Linus only got an opinion once things blew up on social media which proves that social media works which is the exact opposite of what he says he wants (and will just encourage more of the same).

[ferfumarma]

> Linus only got an opinion once things blew up on social media which proves that social media works which is the exact opposite of what he claims.

That is really an apt point. You can't condition people one way, and tell them to do the opposite.

[bigiain]

And it's not _that_ long ago since Linus was King of the arrogant and rude flame posts on what's effectively hos own "social media", the linux kernel mailing list.

10 years back, Linus _was_ "that guy". And it worked, extremely effectively, if you measure success by the ability to stamp on someone else's technical contribution by ridiculing them in public instead of making a convincing technical defense of his position in the discussion.

https://github.com/corollari/linusrants

[account42]

You can expect professionals to not act like trained monkeys.

[chikere232]

Well... the maintainer also shouldn't blow their stack

You can certainly imagine ways an authority figure could have defused a situation of a maintainer blowing their stack, but your framing kinda absolves the maintainer of any accountability for their actions.

A team member who needs a lot of defusing is doing something wrong, and needs to learn how to defuse themselves.

[CountHackulus]

What happens when Linus retires (or god forbid dies)? He can't defuse those situations forever, there needs to be some sort of process.

[tsimionescu]

Someone will have to take over Linus' role. There's no way that kernel development can work without a person in charge, at least not in anyway that is remotely similar to today.

[adastra22]

Not being remotely similar to today could be a very good thing.

[robertlagrant]

If you can point to a better model of a more successful kernel that would be interesting to read about.

[adastra22]

FreeBSD? But there is nothing fundamentally different in open-source project management between a kernel and any other large open-source project. The linux code base is the largest, but not by a large margin. Chrome, GCC, OpenOffice, Android (excluding the linux part obvs.), and the various BSDs are all comparable in scope, complexity, lines of code, and number of contributors. Only linux is (in)famous for having a toxic and unproductive culture.

[markhahn]

Odd. Linux is by far the most/largest/longest successful project. Or do you have a counterexample?

[adastra22]

I assume we're only comparing to operating systems, as I would say that e.g. Chrome as an open-source project is just as impactful if not more so. But generally speaking the Linux support experience is decidedly worse than *BSD or any proprietary OS. It is much harder to get patches upstreamed, and many hardware have errata that never get fixed. (If you haven't experienced this, it might be because companies like canonical and red hat maintain their own patches to support their customers.)

[account42]

Good for who? External parties that want to force their vision of what the project should be?

[rincebrain]

Linus, as someone far removed from LKML, seems like he hates external visibility of what he wants to be effectively "internal" discussion more than anything else.

Not in the sense of "he wants the mailing lists private", but in the sense that "he doesn't want public complaint about private discussions", which feels like an evolution of "technical merit should win", as a position.

[tacker2000]

I dont think Linus gives a damn about any social media drama. Why should he care?

[josephg]

It just ("just") sounds like he's out of alignment with the kernel development process.

That shouldn't be too surprising - I mean, its an old project with a whole lot of technical baggage. Projects tend to slow down over time. And that is legitimately really frustrating when you want to shake things up or push for change. I would be rubbish as a linux kernel developer. I have the wrong temperament for it.

There's a reason why some tech companies interview for both technical skill and culture fit. Sounds like he's got the technical chops, but he's not a good fit for linux.

And when you're in a situation like that, your choices are essentially Voice or Exit. Voice is to do what he's tried to do - kick up a fuss about the problems to try and get them fixed. Thats a skill on its own - and it sounds like he's not been super effective at that. The other option is Exit. Which of course - sensibly, he's now done.

> he has gotta Stop Posting and keep those kinds of thoughts away from his keyboard.

Nah. Bottling this stuff up is a bad long term play. You end up getting bitter, cynical and resentful. I think we've all worked with people like that, and its miserable - both for the person and for their coworkers. I think its better to shoot your shot. Even if you miss - as he has here - you learn a lot about yourself and the world. And there's no shortage of interesting projects out there to work on. Pick something that matches your speed.

[bigiain]

> some tech companies interview for both technical skill and culture fit. Sounds like he's got the technical chops, but he's not a good fit for linux.

You're right.

To fit with historical "linux culture" he needs to be much more aggressive and rude.

He needed to lead with something more inline with linux project leadership's examples, perhaps something like: Christoph " ... should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

https://github.com/corollari/linusrants

[adamors]

Yeah, reading these back in 2025 it's amazing Linux got as far as it did with Linus being like this for a long time.

[Aeolun]

But this is just frustration coming out. I don’t think for a moment he expected shaming on social media to work.

[preisschild]

But it did work. Linus actually got involved because of it...

[chikere232]

If we were dealing with a toddler, one could blame the parent for rewarding their misbehaviour attention... an adult developer not so much