It really bugs me that one of the first things he brings up is “zomg, you don’t have to compile your own kernel!”. I’ve been dailying Linux for a decade and I used it intermittently for probably a decade prior. I’ve had to compile my own kernel exactly zero times. I’ve chosen to once or twice, and that was 15+ years ago.
Has Linus installed Linux at all in the past ten years? It’s plug in a USB stick and go. The most technical thing is drive partitioning (which admittedly is pretty technical in the grand scale of $UtterNoob–>$UnixGuru), but that’s also not required. There’s no chasing down drivers or repos or anything. It’s easier than a Windows install, if for no other reason than not having to punch in a 25-digit product key.
Sure you can build Linux from various levels of scratch, but that’s an option, and you’d think he’d celebrate it as such.
Harrumph.
Linus does some really weird stuff sometimes, while acting as if this would be something completely normal everyone does. But, I think this is out of him not being in touch with Linux as much as a daily Linux user. He just don’t fully understand what he’s talking about so casually. At least not in the way a daily user would. I mean not disrespect against Linus. He just seems to fill his videos with techno babble a little but too much for “artistic” reasons. ;)
