I don't think someone who actually knows what it's like to experience suicidal thoughts would ever say something like that to people in a technical/professional context.
There is something to be said for the "tough love" Linux culture, but IMO, language as extreme as what I just quoted is just not acceptable.
For me, this is crossing the line from "Linus has an interesting and entertaining character" to "this person seems to be mentally disturbed."
For example, on the official Mozilla Bugzilla, diverting from technical debate to non-technical vitriolic commentary is a bannable offense, regardless of the value of the user's technical contribution.
It's just a toxic way of communicating, and if someone can't package their thoughts for public consumption, it may be better to keep their thoughts (semi-)private and leave it to someone more tactful to spread the word more widely and effect positive change.
Seriously, if you have a strong bout of suicidal thoughts in reaction to flippant remarks such at Torvalds's then you need to bring this up to a mental health professional because your current coping mechanism isn't working.
If you're merely tut-tutting with disapproval however I simply disagree. Wanting a world where people never get their feelings hurt is a fruitless quest.
I'm not merely "tut-tutting". I don't think telling people to commit suicide because of a legitimate technical disagrement or hurdle is acceptable. If you disagree, put up a reasoned argument or shut up.
Maybe this is one of the subtle cultural differences, but surely you agree it isn't fair to judge someone on your own cultural standard on the internet over something simple as a few words? If your truely offended by him, just ignore him.
In my mind the conversation is richer if we don't need to be so careful about dropping to the "Lowest Common denominator". Let there be colour, excitement, rants and exaggeration. In the end I think it helps understand people more then putting on the facade of beige that so many politically correct people insist on.
What Linus is saying is: if you don't agree with me, you're an incompetent developer, get out of the way and shut up, and I don't want to hear any counter-argument.
It's a means of quality enforcement, to some degree. OK. But there is a point where it goes too far.
I don't insist on political correctness. I haven't complained about Linus' normal insults but he's telling people to kill themselves... it's a step too far.
That's a pretty bold accusation to be making of people who simply typed some shit on the Internet.
Try reading further down the page - there are dozens of inoffensive posts by Torvalds.
There's been posts here on HN doing just what you're saying "Look, a quote from Torvalds where he's abrasive"... then people look back at the posting history where he's explaining his point, and he's had dozens of polite comments before reaching breaking point.
So yeah - try reading down the page further before you claim half of what he says is like this.
Every time I think of travelling to America again, I read something like this and think... nope, not worth it.
You know that UAC prompt you get when running setup.exe for an IM client? Ever wondered why there's an UAC prompt in the first place? Because Windows assumes that setup.exe needs admin privileges (unless .exe explicitly states that it doesn't). This piece of engineering doesn't even have a concept of ~/bin. In fact, there is/was an official W7 guideline that said that all programs must go into %ProgramFiles%, which is a system directory. Now, what sort of a imbecile decided that it's a good idea to let an underprivileged account install into a system directory - UAC or not - is beyond me. So, please, don't mix Windows in. While Linux distros have their dark moments, Windows is just one big service pack now.
You can install to c:\Users\%USERNAME% if you want to, if the installer lets you pick a path, this is how Chrome installs. Just like you can install into ~/bin if you want to, but you are going to have to go a little out of your way to do it.
Unprivileged accounts do not have write access to %ProgramFiles% by default in Windows.
"Look at them, they use C++... ha ha ha idiots. Oh look at them, they use Linux... utter and complete bloated garbage compared to real Unix."
Wash, rinse, repeat.
And it is not like commercial software community is never involved with any flamewars. When they do it, they do it for marketing and they do it professionally [1]
and i find it funny that people get upset so much over it. some "political correctness" crap. look, you don't control what other people say or does, but you can control how that affects you. if you're going to seriously get upset about someone telling you to "kill yourself", you should get yourself a psychiatrist. because you really just might.
Is it overkill for Linus's kids? Yes. But OpenSUSE wasn't put together for his kids.
> I first spent weeks arguing on a bugzilla that the security policy of requiring the root password for changing the timezone
The time zone is a completely presentational setting, something that users can be expected to want to change every so often. And it has no relation to timestamps.
On a laptop? A seriously doubt it. Make the bloody distro learn to differentiate between a server and a personal installation, and change the settings accordingly.
this is what you get when you are laissez-faire about how things operate in the land you helped create and ignore issues (via guidance and suggestions) for years on end. this happened with wifi some years ago, too, and didn't get attention until linus got a laptop with wifi.
this is just one reason why i stopped using linux day to day over ten years ago, happily.
It's gotten a whole lot better in the last 10 years.
i don't use it as my primary machine or dev machine any more.
i'd say i'm pretty up to date with it (and alternatives) and still disagree with you. "whole lot"? i disagree.
It's not Torvalds' responsibility, implied or otherwise, to manage what kind of password userspace requires for setting config settings.
without attention and respect from the guy in charge of the kernel, which gates security for the system, this is what you get.
Of course this doesn't make any sense on a laptop. But it doesn't look like there's any sane default. You need to choose your configuration properly and that's it. If OpenSUSE doesn't allow it, then yes... that's a bug.
If you force people to bypass security to do ordinary tasks, and train them to constantly enter the root password for everything, you don't actually have any security. It's like the password policy that's so impractical that everyone sticky-notes passwords to their monitors, or the Vista UAC.
Would it make a difference if s/Linus/JoeBlog/ mentioned it if the issue is so frustrating?
That said, modern linux certainly has mechanisms in place to handle this stuff. Fedora and Ubuntu don't seem to have a problem with seamless system configuration from the console user anyway.
As Linus said, the SUSE and Fedora way makes it hard to deploy in a business setting where you want users to be able to administrate their own machines but you don't want them to have the root password.
What would that be exactly? I didn't realize any Linux distro's worked well on MBA yet.
