Flipping H E double hockeysticks! You aren’t supposed to use such fucking swearwords here!

I’m not a manager (used to be team lead, but managing is not for me), but I’ve worked under a few coleric managers and some that where able to communicate in a sensible way.

One of my bosses, for example (that was the job where I was team lead) had a pretty similar style of communication as Linus.

Sure, the company was his life work. But I also started there shortly after the company was founded and I too spent a lot of time and was very emotionally invested in the company and the products. And my boss was just human (and on top didn’t know a lot about the subject), so he made mistakes. And his judgement was often wrong.

But he was never able to accept that he made any mistakes. He’d offload all his mistakes onto some employee, while claiming that every idea that worked out was his, and not the idea of the employee who actually had the idea and had to convince him first. And every time something went wrong, he’d slam the door of some employee open and shouted and swore at that employee.

Turns out, that’s not a great way to encourage people working there. Most of the good people quit after one especially bad explosion of his.

Back to Linus: is it human to be angry that someone disagrees with you? Maybe.

Is it in any way helpful to anyone? Clearly not.

I am pretty sure that anyone who gets to be a maintainer on the Linux kernel is heavily invested and has sacrificed a lot to get there. Attacking them like Linus did, that really renders their life work worthless.

The maintainer did nothing with the purpose to harm the Linux kernel project. He just accepted a change that he thought would improve Linux. Disagreeing on a factual topic with your boss should never trigger an explosion like that.

I do understand what you mean, and it makes much more sense than advocating for venting.

But I still feel that putting emotions into a discussion about work performance isn’t the right way, especially when done in public.

In a situation like that where something caused a lot of negative emotions (that go beyond your work performance is bad), I think you should have two separate talks. One about the factual things where one is boss and the other is employee, and one about the hurt/emotions the behaviour caused and in this talk, both are just people resolving their personal problems.

Something like the issue in the OP really shouldn’t cause anger on Linus’ side, since it’s a totally factual issue. A propper response would have been to decline/revert the change while publically saying “This change validates that rule of the project” and then privately contacting the maintainer in question and tell him, “We talked about this repeatedly, if you don’t stop, we need to take consequences.”

Emotions should really only enter the picture when personal offenses where comitted before or maybe if the employee did something with the intent to hurt the project/company/manager.

But if you get really angry because your employee did something wrong, then that’s a problem on the side of the manager and not on the side of the employee.

That said, I think it’s totally ok to tell the employee about the consequences of their actions (“We lost X amount of money” or “It took Y amount of time to correct it” or something like that).

So you are saying personal offenses and coleric bosses are required to deliver quality?

How does screaming and shouting like a little kid in a temper tantrum increase quality?

If you need to resort to personal offenses to get your point across, you are either lacking a good point, communication skills or respect.

And behaving like a toddler tends to make people really respect you, right?

You want some stern words?

You are a useless peace of dead weight in this community. Your comments suck and you have no idea how people work and how to professionally communicate. I hope you never have a job, let alone one in a management role. You should leave and never come back. Get aborted retroactively! You make the world a worse place by your mere existance!

How do you feel about that? Are you going to change your behavior because of these “stern words”? Or are you going to think “What an idiot” and ignore everything I said?

And we both are just anonymous randos on the internet and while this comment is public, not a lot of people are going to read it and it will have zero impact to either of our lives.

Now imagine I was your boss, both of us are publically known people and I post this on the company social media account together with your full name.

And people still dig this up 10 years later to laugh at it.

Please reconsider your interpersonal behaviour.

If all your engineers fuck everything up, maybe the problem is with their leadership who never learned to communicate clearly and professionally.

I hope I never meet you. You really don’t know how to human.

I think removing someone’s maintainer status does communicate disappointment in their performance quite well.

And as for anger and frustration, these things really don’t matter in this circumstance. Work is not therapy. If you need to vent anger and frustration, get a therapist. Employees are employed to do their job, not to be the emotional punching bag for a manager who can’t control their temper.

If an employee doesn’t perform to expectations repeatedly and even after you had a few constructive one-on-ones, then demote them or fire them. No need to vent your anger on them and lose your professionalism.

Tbh, the first time a boss of mine loses their temper and verbally attacks a colleague like Linus did here, they have also lost all of my respect for them. And at that moment I will start to look for another job.

That’s the reason why average wealth doesn’t reflect the general living experience of the public.

Without London the UK would be ranking much lower on the average wealth scale.

I think, there is another underlying problem, and that is that many Linux users are overly defensive about their OS.

If Windows frequently bluescreens due to a driver, people also say that Windows sucks. But I’ve never seen a single instance where then a more experienced Windows user says “You are wrong, Windows is great, it’s just the manufacturer of the hardware who is at fault.”

To an average user, there is no difference between OS, drivers or even user space software.

And, tbh, if the system doesn’t run correctly (no matter which part of it) nobody really cares who is at fault. Because it’s not about putting blame on someone, but rather about the user wanting to do something and it doesn’t work.

For a bad comparison: Imagine you got a new car and directly after the warranty expired, the motor breaks down and needs to be replaced.

Would you then say “The car is ok, it’s just the supplier of the sealing rings of the piston who sucks”?

I’d rather say, “This car sucks”.

Yep, it’s an argument outdated by about 20 years. At that time 10 years difference between two machines meant that you had completely different machine.

But having a good 10yo machine now means it’s about on the same level as an entry-level machine now. My laptop I bought in 2013 for ~€700 had an i7 4th gen, which is totally fast enough for non-gaming usage, 8GB RAM, 500GB SSD and a dGPU that’s still faster than most iGPUs.

That are specs you can still find in modern entry-level PCs.

And that laptop has no issue running Win10 at all and if I workaround the arbitrary requirement for TPM2 and Intel Gen 8, it also runs fine. But I don’t want to risk that Microsoft sometime arbitrarily decides to not give me updates any more.

And also, the argument that it’s not a good choice to run a modern OS on a 25yo machine is a pretty dumb counter against the argument that a 10yo machine can run a modern OS without issue.

That’s an argument that wouldn’t even hit a barn door from a step away.

Sure, it’s much better than it has been a few years ago.

But it’s still not nearly at the point where I would blindly recommend it to non-technical people and call it easy. There’s still a way to go.

On the other hand I have no problem recommending Linux to the typical “I only use an OS to run a browser” user. That wasn’t the case 5 or 10 years ago.

I guess your experience must be universal and everyone who has issues must be really dumb. Is that how you see the world?

You are right with what you are saying, but for an average user it doesn’t matter who’s fault it is that their hardware and the OS don’t play nice together.

If they have Nvidia and it works perfectly out of the box on Windows, but not on Linux, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s the fault of Linux or Nvidia.

And sure, if you are buying a new device to run Linux on it, you can use that info to buy an ATI card that works better.

But more often than not people are switching from Windows to Linux on their existing hardware. Mostly because something doesn’t work (e.g. receiving updates on Win10 past 2024), and they’d rather switch OS than buy a new PC.

It’s kinda like IPv6.

But if I have to have a full Windows installation that I need to keep up to date, with the full setup of drivers and other software that I need to run games, what advantage does an average person (not software dev/IT enthusiast) have from running a second OS for the things that do work on both OSes?

It’s kinda like saying “This racing kit car is amazingly fast, you can tinker on it and reconfigure it, and for everything that you can’t do in the kit car, you can just keep a family minivan around”.

That’s nice for a racing/car enthusiast. But most people just want one car to do all they need.

I guess most people still access the internet. Websites track you no matter what OS you use.

You really want to run an OS from 2021 on hardware older than 2016? That’s not going to be a good idea, TPM or not.

Why?

10+ years of usage for a PC or laptop is completely normal outside the gamere/tech enthusiast bubble.

If you only use your PC for Amazon, Streaming and occasionally Word/Excel, a 10yo laptop is totally enough.

There’s some bug between KDE, my Nvidia GPU, Prime, Proton and DXVK that causes my whole system to freeze (can’t even switch to console) if I try to play games with the GPU selection set to “on-demand”.

If I completely disable the Intel GPU, it runs fine, but that means I basically can’t use the laptop without a charger (because the battery drains so fast), unless I switch the GPU setting (requires a reboot) every time I want to game.