An Interview with Linus Torvalds

If there are any Linus fans out there, listen up. Today you will have an opportunity to take a trip into one of the most influential minds behind this OS we call Linux.

So what’s going on with Linux and Linus these days? There are a lot of people who are asking, with yet another delay of Microsoft’s Vista. Linux could emerge a victor in this voracious vindication for valor with the votive that there is value in the virtues of running Linux. That being said, you may call him Linus… and this was our interView:

Will: Did you ever expect Linux to get as popular as it did?

Linus: Obviously not. Nobody did.

In fact, I have this theory that _if_ you put your expectations high and set lofty goals, you’ll just fail. You’ll worry about all the things you need to get done, and you’ll be discouraged by how much work there is left to do.

So the way I worked (and still work) is to just worry about “today”. No huge expectations, just doing whatever makes sense at the time, and enjoy doing it.

Will: Having used myself many different distros of Linux including SuSE, Red Hat, Mandriva, etc… Do you have a personal favorite mainstream distro?

Linus: I used to actively make sure I used several different ones, just to not be biased. So I had a RH box _and_ a SuSE one, and switched between them, for example. At some point I decided it doesn’t really matter any more: the market is big enough that nobody cares what _I_ do, so just for simplicity
I ended up doing just one distribution so that my different machines looked as similar as possible.

Of course, the “one distribution” has changed over time. It used to be SuSE, then when I switched to PowerPC it was YellowDog, then when Fedora did a PPC version I switched to that (so that I could have the same thing on my G5 desktop and my regular x86 laptop).

So right now it happens to be FC5. Whether that is “favourite” or not, I’m not sure. It’s more of a random choice….. Source: The Network Administration