3 HN users recommended this interview3 months2012–2025score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN links it for individual clips: the Nvidia moment, his views on C and his blunt communication style. Some commenters say the whole talk is worth watching.
Linus Torvalds is interviewed at Aalto University in 2012, followed by an audience Q&A. He talks about Linux, kernel development and the desktop, and about Nvidia support. The Q&A has a well-known moment where he is blunt about Nvidia.
“the whole talk by itself is very recommendable” (HN, 2012)
in a q&a round at aalto university in finland linus adressed the question why linux never took off on the desktop: the lack of being a pre-installed os. he mentions that without preinstalled operating systems there's now way to gain a significant market share in the desktop segment. the whole talk by itself is very recommendable: [this video]
Linus explains Linux desktop lacks preinstalled OS presence; whole talk worth watching.
I'd like to piggy-back on your mention of Linus. It reminds me of a recent video I saw wherein he talked about how the work on the kernel works within a natural hierarchy. The whole video, IMHO is worth a watch, but the relevant snippet is here, you can watch from about 15:57 to about 18:20 to get the idea: [this video] I especially liked his comment at the end of this section: "The way people work ... is inherent in our brains ... the whole development process ... works really well ... we used the hierarchy that just worked on its own, and that turns out to be the right hierarchy."
That's a caricature of his actual position, please be more honest than that. edit: Here's another video that does a better job of conveying his reasons for being the way he is. [this video] He's also been on record as saying multiple times that a lot of it is because he comes from a culture that's much more abrasive than US.
TLDR: Linus at a Q&A, a woman asks why Nvidia still isn't providing any support for Optimus on Linux, Linus responds that Nvidia is being really difficult about that without good reason and "Fuck You Nvidia!" (flicks off the camera). Her question actually starts a minute earlier than the link: [this video] PS - Bravo Linus. This is issue is a real PITA, and a bit incongruent considering the historically awesome driver support Nvidia has provided for Linux.
Linus answers a Q&A question on Nvidia Optimus support.
Your link didn't quite work for me, starting in the 49th minute somewhere, Using a fragment identifier to demarc the time offset works better for me: [this video]
if you skip ahead to 1:00:30 a guy in the audience who works at Nvidia responds during Q&A, ever so politely. Linus responds, quite politely as well. [this video]
Nvidia employee in audience responds politely to Linus.
Linking to a specific time over 1 hour isn't working correctly for some reason, for whatever it's worth. (Or at least it hasn't been for me, anyway...) Nevermind, we were both just doing it wrong. This should work: [this video]
Later in the talk someone says they are working for nVidia and doing something with Tegra. I couldnt quite make it out, what is he saying? [this video]
Asks what an Nvidia employee said later in the talk.
Link to the source (Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds): [this video] I've found it while watching the video after the "fuck you nVidia" discussion: [link] Edit: Actual quote: "I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended" (without the "the" before "people").
While the post is fantastic in showing the pros/cons of the other languages, it doesn't talk about the advantages of C, advantages to some people at least. Here's Linus on replacing C: [this video]
That's an unfair judgement toward the C development community as a whole. There are legitimate use cases for C. If you're writing low-level, bare-metal programs then there is no other portable programming language that offers better semantics. C programmers often laud that language because they can easily reason what the output of the compiler will be. That is an extremely important and rare property for a portable programming language. But hey, don't listen to me, listen to an actual experienced C programmer: [this video]
I remember Linus mentioning [0] about the major benefits of tuning Linux for super computers that came to be really useful for when trying to get performance out of a mobile phones decades later. [0]: [this video]
Linus on supercomputer tuning benefiting mobile phones.
I agree.. people can be dishonest and hurtful while being perfectly polite, just like they can be honest, kind and caring while swearing like sailors. That is the difference that matters. When you ignore that and just look at the form, you get [link] Here's Linux talking about being straightforward, and why he cannot afford ambiguity: [this video]
Linus on being straightforward and avoiding ambiguity.
Linus seems to disagree with you. Albeit old [this video] It remains true. Rust uses references all over the place and reuses the same memory addresses within stack that once belonged to another object because the compiler can guarantee it, but that makes it much less reasonable to write. If you can reason with -O0 you can take it that your code will remain correct in later levels.
Steve Klabnik has done a lot for systems programming and that post is a lot more even-handed than you're suggesting. If, however, we're talking about the kernel then perhaps we should listen to what Torvalds says about this topic. "People who designed C, designed it at a time where the language had to be geared towards the output, so when I read C I can think about the Assembly that it will create": [this video] Consider that he said this in a time with C++, even if Rust was in its infancy: it is not as tied to the assembly it produces. Not by a long shot.
> I think that makes some sense for performance, too: people run databases where IO efficiency eventually translates to money saved every month, and then we desktop users benefit from many of those as well. Indeed, that's a huge advantage of Linux, the fact that we all run the same Linux kernel and benefit from improvements coming from all directions. Linus himself mentions this advantage here: [this video] There's a nice recent benchmark here (Bcachefs vs. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS): [link] Bcachefs is starting to look really good against Btrfs, no APFS or ZFS though, but still interesting nonetheless.
DrillShopper has already posted ( [link] ) the technical reason on why Linux does not do it this way: [link] Additionally, there is politics in play here. Not the politics that is normally discussed outside of HN, but the politics of having companies (at least) release the detailed specifications of their hardware. I cannot really state authoritatively what the Linux developers think on this side, but Linus brandishing his middle finger to Nvidia ( [this video] ) says a lot of things.
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![Frame from Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds [Full-length]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MShbP3OpASA/hq2.jpg)
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