aaltouniversityace
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2012–2025
1:03:56 · 2M views · Jun 16, 2012
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.
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.
20 comments from Hacker News
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."
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
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.
> 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.
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.