Is it me (and have I been hiding/asleep under a rock for a long time) or is Linus' tone vastly (and pleasantly) different from what his previous persona is known to be?
I actually loved (I mean really loved) reading the response as it not only was encouraging but also highly respectful and almost glowing with a trained sort of nuance! Just wow!
From what I've seen, Linus has always been mostly quite reasonable and constrictive, even before his 2018 "refection" that some others mentioned. Most of the time it was direct, but helpful, polite, and constructive. This is probably a big contributor to Linux's success.
It's just that on occasion he would rant and rave to people and call them retards or whatnot. People get a bit of a skewed perception because only those messages make the news and are famous, but that's not really representative of all the messages.
And when he did rant and rave, it was pretty much always towards established contributors who had screwed up somehow; people who in his opinion ought to know better, and most of the time he did have a good point. I don't approve of his style, but it's not like he would randomly call people idiots. It's not as if you ever ran the risk of being scolded by Linus if you were a new contributor sending a patch or anything.
tl;dr: Linus has always been like this, and was just occasionally an asshole.
That's the thing. I am very sure perception was tainted by my own laziness and "falling for" populist PR and it took pure coincidence to see the real side! Sigh.
"News" by definition is biased towards both rare and negative events, because common everyday things don't tend to be news. "New contributor gets a very helpful response from Linus" isn't news, and neither is "man spills someone's pint in a pub, they apologize and everything is okay", "woman walks home at night nothing happened", etc.
Quite frankly I consider most of the news to be worse than useless and actively harmful (and news is different from journalism; journalism is great).
(also, I see now I misspelled constructive as "constrictive" in my previous comment do'h facepalm)
I don't read the lkml enough to truly know, but in 2018 he made a public apology and (IIRC) took some time off to go work on his behavior. So maybe that's it!
I agree that I found his messages here to be quite pleasant.
his infamous rants are outliers. caricatures of Linus as some whackjob that always goes on lengthy, profanity-ridden tirades at the slightest minimal provocation are all vastly overstated.
I think he probably makes thousands of comments, yet the controversial ones make it out to the general community and form his reputation.
Also, I think what's really interesting is that with his feedback, could the language be actually be adapted to the kernel?
This would be fascinating because traditionally the code (the kernel in this case) has to adapt to the foibles of C. This could be the reverse, where not only could the language adapt, it might make the kernel technically better, and easier to read and modify.
> Is it me (...) or is Linus' tone vastly (...) different from what his previous persona is known to be?
Indeed, and I hate it. It's actually very scary, a creepy change in personality. Like the last scene in "one flew over the cuckoo's nest", where the main character is lobotomized and loses the spark on his eyes. Deeply, deeply troubling to behold. I wonder if the real Linus still exists behind all this or he's gone forever.
He's really changed. There is a subreddit /r/linusrants that documents his rants. In the last year there have been 9 posts, but most of those are reposts from previous years or not really rants or aimed at technologies, not people. Three years ago there were 27 posts.
And what makes this even more impressive is that he managed to do it despite being - in manys eyes - a very nice and reasonable person to start with, it wasn't like everything was falling apart around him and everyone was leaving their jobs as maintainers AFAIK, he just decided it would be better for the project if he left this part of his personality behind.
I actually loved (I mean really loved) reading the response as it not only was encouraging but also highly respectful and almost glowing with a trained sort of nuance! Just wow!