Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds

Arguably, there can be no perfect Linux PC. But what we can build is the perfect Linux PC for the creator of Linux.

“There can be only one.”

“Or hear me out, you guys could just build a PC together.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, okay. That could work.”

“That could work.”

For the folks too young to catch the Highlander reference, the joke is that we are both Linus and this can only end with one of us losing our heads. My mind is blown. So maybe that counts.

Guys, when I shot my shot asking the original tech Linus to come and do a collab with us, I had no idea what he’d say. I mean, he’s kind of a big deal, known for minor contributions to modern technology like Git and the Linux kernel, but he’s here, the granddaddy of the operating systems that power everything from the Android phone in your hand to data centers around the world to more recently your new gaming PC. All thanks to the incredible work of open-source developers and corporate sponsors like Valve. And I get to build a computer with them and ask him some of your questions.

And you think I’m the awkward one.

“Sorry. Look, I know that fangirling does make you a little bit uncomfortable.”

“Yes.”

“But you are here right now in my studio and this is so cool. So, I’ll tell you what. If you could just quickly sign my copy of this and then I’ll settle down. I promise.”

Okay. How cool is this, you guys? He made it out to ‘Fake Linus’ from the real one. This is officially more valuable to me than this message from our sponsor.

“What a segue.”

“…the one. It’s got the apps you need from those other guys.”

“You haven’t written anything more recent autobiographically, so I went with this and the Wikipedia page. So that’s about…”

“Yeah. No, that’s fine. I mean, this was literally what we talked about earlier that I’ll do anything once, like,”

“Right,”

“Come here.”

“I really enjoyed it.”

“Okay. No, I enjoyed the writing part. I do want to point out the David Diamond part. I actually wanted him to have the same font size as my name, but…”

“Oh, really?”

“The publisher said no.”

“They were right.”

“It was very much a collab.”

“He made that very clear in the parts that the italicized parts that are kind of his version of the telling of the story. But I really enjoyed this and I’m looking forward to hopefully asking you questions that are not thoroughly covered by your own autobiographical works but…”

“From 25 years ago.”

“I was going to ask you… that is one of my questions is, do you feel as detached from what you wrote then as I might be from something that I wrote when I was 19?”

“I actually don’t remember what I wrote.”

“Oh, okay. So then you might have forgotten the meaning of life, for instance. Oh yeah, because that’s in there.”

“That’s in there.”

“Yeah. It’s entertainment, by the way. And sex is a perfect example.”

“It started for survival.”

“And then it became for society.”

“And then also entertainment.”

“See, yeah, the entertainment part.”

“No, you were quite explicit in both meanings.”

“Okay.”

“Anything once. Anything once, right?”

“We’re not done yet. So you still have to do more.”

“When you say ‘Linus’, just to clarify, say a false Linus or something.”

“Fake Linus. Yeah.”

“Today I can live with that.”

Now, you did an interview with ZDNet a number of years back about your daily driver computer, which you built yourself, and we actually replicated that build. What did you think of our video?

“Oh, the one I never saw.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“I knew that was going to happen. And so the next thing I was going to ask you is, what about this video? Are you going to watch this video?”

“I probably won’t because I will be feeling way too self-conscious to actually watch it, but I might have to just because I will probably get emailed comments and then I will have to wonder about the comments.”

“I love that comments to you are email.”

“It’s the only media I use. Yeah. I don’t do the whole social media thing. So, it’s text for my family or email for everybody else.”

“Right. So, I can text you.”

“You actually can text me now.”

“Yeah, that’s actually pretty cool. So, you know what? Even though I am not one of the couple of dozen Torvalds’s on the planet, right?”

“I also have a made-up last name.”

“So, my mom broke from her family, changed her name, and then got my dad to agree to use her name for me.”

“Okay. So, I’m also Linus with also a last name with no genealogy whatsoever attached to it, which I thought was a weird thing for us to have in common.”

“Strange. Yeah. I mean, there’s literally maybe 20 Torvalds’s in the whole world because, yeah, my grandfather made that name up for very similar reasons.”

“This is so much fun. You are actually doing amazing. It’s nothing like that night that you barely slept before your first major speaking engagement, right? You really did read the book.”

“Of course.”

“Good on you.”

“What? You think I would fake it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shame.”

“Shame on people who collaborate with people and don’t actually read their book ahead of time.”

“Well, I didn’t watch your videos, so…”

“That’s fine. I am the beta Linus today, so I fully accept that that’s going to be what happens.”

What else is going to happen is we are actually going to build a computer at some point here. And if you watched our last video, it’s fine you didn’t, but if you have your computer, then this may be familiar to you.

We are starting with an AMD Threadripper. This time, a 9960X. This is a 24-core, 48-thread CPU that I imagine is going to absolutely rip it up for writing emails.

“It’s not the only thing I do, but I do spend a lot of time actually reading emails more than writing them because…”

“You can fit so much email in this bad boy.”

But of course you do have some high-performance demanding needs. Like, say for example…

“Yeah, I do compile the kernel a lot. So it’s part of my test requirements that when I merge other people’s code, because I don’t code myself very much anymore, one of the things I do between every single merge is compile the whole kernel with every module I can. And that’s where you want something fairly powerful. And I mean, I’m sure, you know, Nvidia is probably working on a way to make code compilation GPU accelerated, but is CPU still the way to go?”

“Yeah. And I can use as many cores as they can give me.”

“Why did we cheap out on him?”

“Oh, because I also… I actually, I mean, people ask me what I want and I was like, I don’t want the crazy high-end because I want it to be quiet and reliable and not like insane in any particular direction.”

“You know what? We actually take a very similar approach with our editing workstations. The, you know, the writers or whatever, they can play around with the latest generation stuff. They’re always one step down because I just want it to work. I think I’ve always wanted to have something that just is reliable. And that’s to me, I mean, that comes first. It needs to be something I can trust and work with. And then within that envelope, it needs to perform well and not be crazy bleeding edge.”

“And he’s letting me build it.”

“Yeah, that may be. Let’s see.”

“I’m having way too much fun today. This is like the best day I’ve had in the office in like a very long time. Seriously. Okay, I’m sorry. I said I would stop. I’m okay, I’m done. I’m done.”

Choosing a motherboard for Linux is pretty straightforward. You want all of the usual things you want out of a motherboard: nice robust cooling, good power delivery, all the I/O that you want. But of course, you want to make sure that all of the onboard components are supported by Linux. One of the big things that we looked for in a platform for you was support for ECC memory as well.

“Can you talk a little bit about why that’s so important?”

“I don’t understand why people don’t require ECC in their machines because being able to trust your machine is like the number one thing and without ECC your memory will go bad. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. I mean it just might take a few years. So when I built the machine you apparently shot a video around, I could not get ECC and I said ‘whatever, I’ll get reasonable RAM’ and it worked fine. It worked fine for a couple of years and then two years goes by and I start seeing ‘oopses’. I start seeing segmentation violations. I’m obviously doing this on a modern Linux kernel that is being developed right now. And my first reaction is, ‘Oh no, we have a bug.’ And I spent days on trying to figure out what the bug was until I just realized, no, it wasn’t a bug at all. It was my machine was not reliable.”

“So for you, this is not a question of, you know, I have to reboot my system because my game crashed.”

“Correct.”

“This is a question of I am working on software that millions of people around the world rely on. I need to know, right? I absolutely need to trust my machine. I mean, it’s a big thing. And I’m convinced that all the jokes about how unstable Windows is and blue screening, I guess it’s not a blue screen anymore, a big percentage of those were not actually software bugs. A big percentage of those are hardware being not reliable. And I mean in the gaming community you also do overclocking so you get extra unreliability from that.”

“You will find articles that talk about how DDR has ECC built in. But no, no it doesn’t.”

“It really does not. Some of them have ECC on the chips themselves but then if something goes wrong between the DIMM and the CPU you will never know. So you need to have end-to-end ECC. I actually think that’s one of the more egregious marketing claims of our current era here.”

“I find that so irritating. It’s a thing with me. I do not touch machines that don’t have ECC.”

“Well, this one does. Thanks, Kingston, for sending this over.”

“I know you hate voicemail.”

“Yeah,”

“That’s another thing that we can bond over.”

“I hate… Well, I don’t hate voicemail as much as I hate Zoom calls and things like that. I would not have gone through COVID if I had to Zoom call every day like some people I know because I would have… I mean there’s no way.”

“Maybe don’t include that part.”

“But see, I must have done this, but I don’t remember.”

“Oh, wait. Why am I building your computer? You know how to build computers.”

“I don’t build computers anymore. Literally, it’s 5 years since I built my last one. If you want me to build something, I actually… This is what I built.”

“I brought it for you. We’re getting show and tell.”

“We’re getting show and tell.”

“This I built.”

“Hold on. Okay, let me try and figure it out. Let me try and figure it out. Hold on. Okay, it has a button. It has a dial. It has power.”

“Oh, it’s a guitar effects pedal. It’s a bad one, don’t get me wrong. It’s a horribly, horribly bad one. You’d never use this in real life, right? But I enjoy designing these things. And I actually solder these small pieces myself. I built this at home.”

“Oh, these do help you see better. But do these make me look smarter?”

“I can’t tell them apart.”

“Do I look like the smart Linus now?”

“No.”

“Now, tell me this. Is there footage of you using this and showing what it sounds like?”

“Oh, hell no. That’s never going to happen. I don’t actually play guitar.”

“Oh, there you have it. Soon to be available from Linus Torvalds’s guitar accessories.com.”

“This is like the LTT store except bad quality.”

“Oh, did we get him some stuff? Does he have a care package? By the way, there’s no pressure to take any of the stuff from the store. If you don’t like it, you just say you don’t like it and we’ll work hard. We’ll make something better for you later. And this is not an endorsement in any way. It’s just a gift. He doesn’t have to say anything nice. In fact, you don’t even have to look at it right now.”

“No, it looks like a perfectly cromulent bag.”

“Now, that is a reference.”

“That’s an endorsement. That is a reference that I personally appreciate very much.”

The next thing we’re going to need is some storage. Last time around, you went with a giant 4-terabyte storage drive and ended up using like a few hundred megs out of it.

“Yeah.”

“So, I wanted to ask, okay, why is that? Do you have like a NAS that you use for archival storage or what’s your data storage approach?”

“Right. No, my data storage approach is I upload it on the internet and if it’s worth saving, somebody else will save it for me.”

“Clearly, you specifically requested that we have a reference to either Highlander or Mad Max in the intro. So, you must enjoy films, but you don’t back up anything yourself.”

“No. No. And I mean, everybody does video streaming these days.”

“Of course,”

“Nobody does.”

“Nobody downloads Linux ISOs. I mean… even a Linux ISO is whatever, a few hundred megs. How many of those do you have on your computer right now?”

“Well, let me… depending on the way you mean it. So ‘Linux ISOs’ is a slang for pirated media.”

“Oh, see I am so naive in some ways.”

“I tried to get him to do the ‘excuse me, I’d like to interject for a moment,’ but he didn’t get the reference or didn’t think it was funny or something. I tried, you guys.”

If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen so far, we have a ton of exclusives over on Floatplane, including some behind the scenes and even some staff hanging out with Linus to ask him some questions. Go check it out at lmg.gg/floatplane.

“I mean, I’d like to interject for a moment, though. Our community submitted some questions and you were just talking both about Linux and Git and they want to know: out of your two most famous brainchildren, which one are you most proud of?”

“Oh, Linux by far. I don’t think people understand how little I did for Git. I did just the basic initial design and hey, I’m proud of that. I think Git does things really well and the design is good and so much better than anything that came before it… only a little bit proud of… There is pride there, don’t get me wrong. But at the same time, I worked on Git for 6 months and the moment I found somebody who I felt could take it over, I threw it over the fence and said ‘you go right’ and Junio has done an admirable job and he’s been working on it for 20 years. I didn’t work on it for 20 years. To me it was something I needed for Linux and Linux is my child.”

“So that’s like having a second child so that you could enhance your first child.”

“I worry about your children.”

“With spare parts maybe.”

“Then why did you have three, Linus?”

“Literally, I started Git… I never wanted to do source control management. I felt it was almost as boring as databases. I never want to do databases.”

“I mean, in the same way I don’t think you ever really wanted to make an operating system though, did you?”

“No. Operating systems are really interesting. All my computing life I’ve done things close to hardware. I’m not a hardware person per se, but I love exploring the interface between software and hardware. And I mean when I started that’s the only way you could do things. I mean, you got a home PC in ‘81 or whatever it was, my first one. And there were no abstraction layers. If you wrote anything, you wrote it to the hardware. You made it make sounds. You made it print stuff to the screen.”

“There is a line in here where you say that if someone else had done it right, you wouldn’t have felt the need to create Linux. Do you still feel that way?”

“Yes. Yes. I mean, I’m perfectly happy being lazy, and if somebody else does something better than I, why would I try to recreate that? I needed an operating system and that’s why I started doing it. But if it hadn’t been an operating system, it would probably have been something else close to hardware.”

“Right. Speaking of hardware, maybe we should build a computer here for a second.”

“Oh, our cooler. You’ve talked about this very briefly already, but to you, and this is another Linux thing in common… I love using computers. I hate hearing them.”

“Oh, yeah.”

So, we got you an NH-U12S TR5-SP6.

“What a catchy name.”

“I know. They really have nailed down the engineering way of naming things. These guys are pure engineering all day, every day.”

“This may be very similar to what I have… Yep, that looks kind of similar. I mean it’s a heat sink. They all look the same.”

“It’s a perfectly cromulent wheel. We didn’t feel the need to reinvent it.”

While I’m installing this, you have said ‘no, never’ with regards to water cooling.

“I mean, I… that sounds stronger than I would have gone. I’m not interested in water cooling mainly because I feel it has the potential to be both less reliable than regular air cooling and… people have issues with it gurgling which I find to be a more annoying sound than like a nice big fan that just has a background whooshing sound.”

“That is very fair. How about the next time we do this?”

“Yep. I mean, you can prove me wrong.”

“I’ll try you out.”

“I’ll try you out. Because what’s nice about water cooling is because you can get so much more surface area, you can run the fans barely spinning at all and some of the pumps are really nice and there’s accessories that you can get to hook them up in tandem. So, you get redundancy.”

“It’s like ECC, but you don’t get the redundancy for things growing in your cooling fluids and stuff like that.”

“He does watch our videos.”

“I’ve seen people with green stuff in there or leaking on your entire server rack.”

“That’s bad, too.”

“Listen, his whole server rack just covered.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah. All right.”

“I’m still trying to convince you.”

“Yeah, we’re trying to get him back.”

“Yeah. Way to go, Elijah.”

“Yeah, I assume this is a special see-through LTT tech screwdriver.”

“You better believe it. What do you think?”

“I just like seeing inside technology and stuff.”

“Oh, nice strategy.”

“Our community wanted to know what you do to relax.”

“I read less than I used to, but that’s still what I do these days. I mean, this is part of it. I just design pointless stuff. There’s no pressure there. I actually don’t think I have a very stressful life.”

“How much of that do you think is attitude though? Because you do bring up that as the user base grew, you did feel more pressure, right?”

“I mean, part of it is we have, I wouldn’t say perfected, but almost perfected the workflow. We’ve used the same workflow for the kernel now for 20 years. And it’s not just Git, it’s the whole release schedule. It’s everything around it. And that means that when you know what’s going on and you kind of… it’s a predictable workflow. It’s no big surprises. That’s not stressful. And technical problems are not stressful either because technology you can fix, right? And we’re good at that. The main source of stress for me tends to be people. People… I mean I’m not a people person famously, right? Nvidia, you… And people are strange and you can’t fix people.”

“I think we’re ready for the case. In which case…”

“Wow,”

“That was terrible. Don’t even give me a reaction for that. I deserve nothing. Elijah, I want to hit us with one of our other community questions.”

“If you could start Linux development all over again, what would you do differently?”

“So, there’s two answers to that. One is now that I know how hard it is, I would never have gotten started in the first place, right? You need to have a certain amount of naivete to do something this big. The flip side of that answer is I would not do a thing differently because it worked so well and it’s been such an enjoyable experience. I’ve been very lucky in my life. I was at a startup for seven years and I never felt that I was the smartest person in the room and I never want to feel that. Right.”

“Right.”

“You want to be surrounded by people more competent than you were. Right. Because otherwise what’s the point?”

“What brought you here?”

“Well, sometimes it makes you feel good to be the smartest person in the room.”

“That’s a burn on you, too.”

“I’m still hysterical.”

“The license choice. I still stand by 100%. I love the GPL version two. I think it was the right license and it still is the right license.”

Now, this isn’t one of our planned questions, but have you ever thought about how much people have profited from Linux? Do you have any idea?

“No, but I have said that I feel very good about the fact that I now have two different projects that I started that both created billion-dollar companies.”

“I think ‘billion’ is an understatement.”

“Yes. But I mean, clearly people built billion-dollar companies on top of both of my big projects. And some people ask me, ‘Doesn’t that make you feel bad?’ And I’m like, ‘No, you’re not getting it. That makes me feel really good because that means that what I did was worthwhile and meaningful, right?’”

Does it weird you out a little bit that the largest entity known for Git at this point, more broadly in terms of the user base, is owned by Microsoft?

“It’s strange in a historical context, right? But it’s kind of funny at the same time, right? And what I find even funnier is that, so it turns out these days I think Microsoft makes more money off their cloud than they do off like Windows, which is like what I grew up with them being known, the Windows behemoth. And it turns out the majority of the Microsoft cloud runs Linux. So we’re friends, right? The rivalry… took some more time, but that went away, too. And I’m very happy with that.”

“I mean, I think that depends who you ask. Now that Linux is coming in a big way for gaming, there are certainly people at Microsoft, particularly in the Xbox division, who are feeling pretty combative and defensive about that. I can tell you that much.”

“Yeah, I’m obviously not a gamer, so I don’t see that part. But you did make some games.”

“Oh, very bad ones. Yes. No. But I mean, if you’re a teenager and you’re into computers, you will make a game. I mean, that’s what you do.”

“What? Didn’t you make one, Linus?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Well, if you’re competent and a teenager and into computers, you make a game.”

“There are different kinds of competency. I met a girl when I was a teenager.”

“That’s fair enough.”

Now, you were pretty surprised to see that we had like a product lineup and that is a larger part of our business these days. But I just pulled this out to open up a box and I thought you might like it. This is actually made by another creator team, Evan and Katelyn. Slide up. There you go. And then slide it back.

“Oh yeah.”

“Isn’t that cute?”

“I actually know who you were talking about because… I may not watch yours… What the heck? Like every other YouTuber you mentioned, I know them.”

“How is that even possible? We share a name.”

“I now I’ve seen your videos, too. But you’re talking about the guys or the couple who does like they do that pumpkin thing every year. That’s where I know them from.”

“Yeah.”

“So, this is their product.”

“You could stab somebody with this and you’d have fun doing it.”

“Would you prefer that or the samurai sword?”

“It would take longer. Yeah. What is that?”

“It’s a very cool thing for me to see others in the creator space kind of parlaying what they learn, sort of doing things with… I see and I know it’s owned by Google, but I see YouTube as almost like an opening up of knowledge in the same way that open source is that just was not available before and it’s just it’s very cool to me to see people taking the knowledge they gain from this giant repository and just creating things. It’s… Yeah. So, I wanted to shout them out ‘cause I haven’t actually talked about this yet. I bought one. They offered to give me one. I said, ‘You know what? That’s so cool. I can’t take it from you. I’ll buy one.’”

I guess this goes in here now. Elijah, do you want to hit us with another community question?

“Was there ever a moment that you got so close to just walking away and being done with developing Linux?”

“No. No. I mean, there’s been many, many, many moments where I walk away and I just say that, hey, I’m fed up. It might be some technical problem that I just been hitting my head against the wall or it might be like just somebody who annoys me and I’ll walk away and I’ll take a long warm bath and read a book because I’m like, I need to relax. I need to just walk away from this. But it’s always with the knowledge that hey, tomorrow morning I’ll be there fresh as roses.”

“Okay, we’re going to go a little deeper now. I do think that when you do things that are consequential, the other things can start to feel inconsequential and therefore boring. Do you feel that if you reach the stage where you’re not, you don’t feel needed with Linux, that it’ll be very difficult?”

“I hope not. I mean, I definitely don’t want to be the guy who holds on to something. And I’ve always said that if somebody better comes along, I’ll step aside. And I really hope that’s true.”

Okay. Well, I wired up your bottom fans, and maybe now is a good time for us to talk about your case. So, the Fractal Torrent was chosen because it has two gigantor fans in the front. Scandinavian design. That’s sort of what they’re…

“I’m hoping… I see there’s a mesh there. So there’s a mesh, dust will not go in.”

Oh, this is not on our scheduled questions, but cats or dogs?

“Both. I don’t count cats and dogs even as pets. They become family members. Dogs maybe even more so than cats, even though I started out with cats. But then you have pets like rats and gerbils and fish. Oh, fish aren’t even pets. Fish are pests. I don’t understand people who do aquariums.”

“But we’re not judging.”

“No, I mean… no, it’s not you. It’s not a Linus thing to be judgmental.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Sorry.”

“No, we’ve had everything. Rats were great.”

“I’ve heard they’re awesome.”

“They are. I mean, we… the biggest problem with the rats was that they only live for three years, and that broke my daughter’s heart, and she said, ‘Never again,’ because they don’t live long enough.”

“And they like, they bond and they’re so social.”

“They are very social. They’re fun. They’re nice creatures.”

“Did you know that Alberta, Canada, is the only place on Earth other than I believe the Antarctic continent where there are no rats?”

“I think Canadians might be overly proud of this because maybe it’s because even rats don’t want to live.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Sorry. Yeah, you need to cut that out.”

“Oh, no. That’s hilarious. I love it. I love it.”

“See, what I was teeing myself up for was they were eradicated, but his was better.”

Okay, I think our next order of business is power. We went very overkill.

“Okay, I see that. 1600 watts.”

That is the Prime TX-1600.

“Basically, it’s a big box and it’s gonna fit there.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Oh, yeah. That’ll be fine.”

And what we liked about this was you like reliability.

“Yes.”

12-year warranty. And we both like silence and because it’s so efficient and rated for so much power, that fan is unlikely to ever even spin.

“Very good. You know, power supplies matter. They may not be the sexiest part of a computer, but they do matter.”

“That’s what I tell my wife about my power supply.”

“Wow.”

I’m going to switch spots with you. I’m going to… Whoa. Which one’s which now? Okay. Okay. I couldn’t get him to do the ‘I’d like to interject,’ but can you just stand there for a second and then just point at me?

“Oh, you’re going to dub over this.”

“No, no, no, no, no. This is for the Spider-Man meme.”

“I don’t do social media, so I don’t do the memes.”

“The Spider-Mans point at each other, and they’re both Spider-Man. Don’t worry about it. It’ll be great.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m trying to actually build it. Elijah, save me. Hit me with a couple of rapid-fire questions.”

“Is it pronounced GIF or GIF?”

“Oh, it’s GIF. No.”

“YES. YES.”

“NO, I’m kidding. It’s GIF.”

“I actually got this question. Not this question, but somebody sent me an email asking me if Git is with a hard G or a soft G like GIF. And I was like, don’t even make that joke.”

Okay. Hit us with another one, Elijah.

“You were talking about it earlier, walking away from Linux briefly. Well, what happens to Linux if you just die?”

“Wow, what a weird way to ask that.”

“That’s what the community wanted to know.”

“The traditional question is actually if you get hit by a bus.”

“Oh,”

“The implication is that I die. But okay, can we redo the take then?”

“No, no, you’re stuck with it now. You asked Linus Torvalds that question.”

“I… You have to live with that.”

“No, the community.”

“Unless you just die.”

“Well, wait. You know what? We have such a healthy development community, it’s ridiculous. Most other open-source projects have like a couple of people involved. If it’s a healthy community, they might have tens. We have a thousand people involved in every single release. And we do releases every nine… months, every nine weeks. If I fall down and die or my plane crashes on the way back home from…”

“Oh, I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

“That would kill my reputation completely.”

“Well, but then you can do the intro with the swords and make it really impressive, right?”

“Oh, lordy.”

“There it can be only one, and I killed the other one. On the internet, nobody has good taste, so it would become a meme, I’m sure.”

“Is this you approving that we can do that then?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. If I’m dead, I won’t care.”

“Okay, speaking of you’re dead and won’t be able to, I guess, consent to it…”

“What, necrophilia? No.”

“No, no, that’s not where I was going.”

“JESUS.”

“THAT’S NOT WHERE I was going. I was going to go into the topic about AI and generative AI. Is it a bubble or is it a computing revolution?”

“I mean it’s clearly both, right? It’s clearly a bubble and at the same time it’s very interesting and I think it will change society and I think it will change how most skilled jobs get done. At the same time I don’t think it’s as revolutionary as people make it out to be.”

I want to specifically talk about AI with respect to coding and particularly ‘vibe coding’. What are your thoughts on an AI model being trained on the work of real people? Like in the artistic community, rightfully angry that the AI never would have been able to do anything without the large-scale theft of work. So what is your take on on that?

“I’m like, that’s reality. Deal with it. That genie is out of the bottle. You’re not getting it back. And you’re not getting it back whether you are a photographer who’s out of work. Those things are gone, right? Because you can fake pictures so much better now, or you’re a programmer that has to learn to deal with a new reality. I think actually on the programming side, we’re in a fairly good spot. I really think that AI will be a tool and it will make people more productive. I think that vibe coding is great for getting into programming. I think it’s going to be a horrible thing to maintain. Right.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Right. So I don’t think programmers go away. You still want to have the people who know how to maintain the end result. I’m a huge believer in AI. I’m not a huge believer in the whole things going on around AI. I find the marketing and the market to be sick and twisted and there is going to be a crash and it’s going to be ugly.”

“Not financial advice.”

“No, no, no. No financial advice.”

“Speaking of companies that are growing exponentially, we opted not for one of their GPUs.”

“Wow, what a segue again.”

“This, to be fair, I have to say I famously was not a huge fan of Nvidia.”

“Mhm. Yes, that was a thing.”

“The AI thing has actually made things so much better because it turns out Nvidia cares about… well, where the money comes.”

“Turns out, it turns out that is always the case.”

“That was a big surprise for us.”

“But what you didn’t choose was the classic Linux-… which is a Radeon card. You specifically requested an Intel Arc, which is going to raise at least a few eyebrows into a shape like an Ark.”

“Thanks, Elijah. You know what? Let’s keep you. Let’s put you on the boat with two of everything.”

“OH, THE ARK. YEAH, LET’S GO.”

“WOW. It never ends.”

“According to Wikipedia, back in 2006, a little outdated, it was estimated that your code was about 2% of the Linux kernel.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“If you had to guess now, or if you know, what percentage would you say it is today?”

“The first version of Linux was like 10,000 lines. I’m sure I’ve written code since then, but there’s been thousands of people involved. And what I do these days is I don’t write code. Sometimes I write code snippets and send them out as emails and saying something like this in the hopes that somebody else will then write the final tested code and send it back to me.”

“Hey, that’s another thing Linuses do is send crappy incomplete emails for other people to do the work.”

“Yeah. No, that’s that’s my life. Lines of code is not something you should ever attribute any importance to.”

“Yeah. So like when we have 5 million lines of code for hardware descriptions, they’re actually generated from the literal hardware descriptions that AMD uses to do their…”

“What’s more important is your lines of codes and we have one of those.”

“The puns. The puns, they keep on coming.”

There was a recent thing from a major tech company where developers were asked to say how many lines of code they wrote and if it wasn’t enough they were terminated. And there was someone here that was extremely upset about that approach to measuring productivity because…

“Oh yeah. Now you shouldn’t even be upset at that point. That’s just incompetence. Anybody who thinks that’s a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company.”

“You do know who you just said that about, right?”

“No.”

“Oh. He was a prominent figure in the improved efficiency of the U.S. government recently.”

“Oh, apparently I was spot on.”

“Is this up to your standards? If I just kind of get these strapped down here, then are we good? Is it Scandinavian enough?”

“I have somebody to blame. If somebody ever makes fun of my machine, I like… I had nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, well that’s a lot of pressure.”

“It was Linus’s fault.”

“Yeah. Nice. Damn, that didn’t work.”

“You were traveling just before this trip. How often do you get to travel for your line of work or have to?”

“Um, yeah. Whoever wrote that question doesn’t realize that it’s not get to travel, it’s a pain. One year fairly early on I was counting the days I was away from home and I was away more than half the year and that’s also the year I decided never again and this was literally… this must have been 30 years ago, this was when I was still living in Finland. I don’t enjoy traveling for work. These days at least I travel in business class so that if I do the long overseas ones I lay flat and try to sleep through flights. That makes it bearable, but it doesn’t make it fun. I don’t tend to enjoy big cities. I mean, some of them are interesting. I still enjoy going to Tokyo for some… I don’t know why. Tokyo is one of those cities that even as a big city is actually…”

“It’s got so much character. Yes, it does things differently.”

“So, this question was supposed to transition us into saying thank you so much for coming up here to the big city of Vancouver.”

“Well, no, but I was blown away when we arranged for this and I was ready to move heaven and earth and bring everything to you and you were just like, ‘Oh, yeah. Well, no. I mean, I guess I’ll just come up to you guys.’ That…”

“I mean, but it makes so much more sense. And honestly, I, as I told Fake Linus here, I actually enjoy doing something different. He compared this experience to a pre-Academy Awards dinner gala thing as well as flying in a fighter jet.”

“Well, I didn’t compare this to that.”

“You mentioned those things in the same sentence.”

“Yes.”

“No, it is one of the things I have enjoyed as part of Linux has been that I’ve been able to do things that most people don’t get to do, right? And most people don’t get to come and have fake Linus build a computer for them.”

“That’s right.”

“So, this is actually fun.”

“Please don’t sound like you have a gun to your head off camera.”

“No, no, no, no, no. I love it. I love it. Honestly, that would be… if we weren’t, if we didn’t still have a lot to do, that would be like the best final line of the video.”

“This was fun.”

“Fun.”

“This is one people wanted. Linus or Linus?”

“So if you speak Swedish to me, it’s Linus.”

“Oh, okay. I don’t even know what they do.”

“First, dude.”

“Oh, no. I did it. Oh, and he’s going to leave.”

“That’s okay. The video can be building 65% of a computer with Linus.”

“When I moved to the US and started speaking English, I started saying ‘Linus’. Even coming over here and interacting with English-speaking people, most of them don’t know how to pronounce our name anyway. So if you have to correct them anyway… Oh, but I don’t want to correct them. Like I don’t go by ‘Torvalds’ because nobody can pronounce Torvalds.”

“Don’t even try. Right.”

“But after I spoke such fluent Swedish before coming into this, did you know anything or did you search anything about my personal Linux hijinks that I’ve experienced?”

“Why are the two columns open source and installed? So, I consciously did not search after. I mean, I’ve heard of you. Don’t I mean, I made fun of the fact that I knew all the other YouTubers, but yes, I knew of you and I’d seen videos of you, but at the same time, I did not want to come in here having researched the hardware or researched you.”

“I have accidentally deleted my entire GUI without realizing what I was doing.”

“Hey, that was something.”

“I’ve done that.”

“And I have to type ‘yes, do as I say’ in order to install it. And maybe it will install and launch. Now, what is the point of having a… Oh, I managed to completely brick an install trying to do something as simple as install Steam.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve done nothing with this other than install that hard info thing.”

“How did this line up with your expectations for today?”

“I didn’t really have a lot of expectations. I’m not saying the expectations were low. I’m saying they were non-existent. It’s like I didn’t know what to expect, right? You’re a groundbreaking YouTuber. That’s what the message here is. You are changing the world.”

“That’s a great sound bite. Let’s just do the whole video with just that. See?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So, 15 seconds. So, this is basically on you now because if you give a reporter a sound bite like that, obviously they’re going to cut all the rest of the part where they say they had literally zero expectations of you.”

“Maybe that’s why there’s so little video of me because people decided, ‘Yep, we’re better off without this.’”

“Do you want to do the honors? Here we go.”

“Don’t miss it. You missed it. There’s a fan rubbing. Elijah, you closed the side panel, sir.”

“I cursed it when I closed the side panel. I knew it.”

“That’s that gentle whooshing sound you asked for. Right.”

“That’s… Yeah. No, it’s like a cat purring in your lap.”

When we tested it, it was not making that sound. So, I am blaming you building it.

“Wait, I see it.”

“It is the fan.”

“It fell out of the little cable management groove.”

We got this. Everything is fine. Everything is saved. 64 gigs of RAM all showing up. That’s a good sign. That means all of our pads are contacting the pins in the motherboard socket. They are okay.

“Try with the XMP profile enabled. Just try it. See you.”

Living on the wild side. Hit us with a rapid-fire question.

“This one on our Reddit got almost 100 up votes. What do you prefer, Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo Switch?”

“We don’t have an Xbox. We do have a PlayStation. I don’t think it’s been turned on in a year because it gets turned on for Christmas when the kids come back to town and they play whatever. They play Little Big Planet and something else. We had a Nintendo. I think we had the Wii U. The odd one, right? The one that… Yeah, that’d be the Wii U.”

“Yeah. And to be fair, I’ve played games, too. I… What’s the ‘Shoot the Dinosaurs’ game?”

“Horizon. Horizon Zero Dawn.”

“Yeah, I actually like that a lot.”

“Here’s something cool. Horizon Zero Dawn was the first game I played all the way through on Linux.”

“Oh, it works on Linux now.”

“Sure does.”

“Okay. Yeah, we’re… Let’s go.”

“Nobody does the test the media. That takes forever.”

“These are the real tech tips. The real Linus tech tips right here. Let’s go. Do you want to install Fedora?”

“Fedora is still your distribution.”

“No, I mean I can do the heavy lifting and press that button. Thank you.”

“Well, I would hate to, you know, step on your Linux.”

“This is presumably a newer version than whatever I installed last time.”

“Why Fedora?”

“They’re being very closely aligned to kernel developers. They made things easier. Like, Ubuntu very much wanted to be like a consumer-oriented thing and in the process when I tried it many, many years ago they literally made it hard for me to upgrade the kernel because that was not their target audience. So I said yeah this is not for me clearly by design. And at the same time, there are the really tech-oriented ones where… by the way.”

“By the way,”

“Yeah,”

“Really,”

“It’s a meme.”

“Oh,”

“They’ll get it. They’ll get it.”

“I don’t… where you compile your own everything. You compile your own distribution. And again, that was not geared for me because I don’t care about anything else than the kernel. So, the only thing I want to compile is my own kernel. So, I want a distribution that just installs and just works and the only thing I will replace is actually the kernel.”

“Follow-up question to that then that was on the Reddit was, do you think that the advantage of having a million different distributions out there is also a disadvantage for Linux because there’s so many options out there, right?”

“I mean, I think the fragmentation has been a huge disadvantage over the years. If you’re a commercial software developer, you don’t have one target, you have multiple targets. And it’s clearly held things back. At the same time, I mean, having the wild wild west kind of thing has its own advantages. And I think the open-source community has worked very well in this environment. It just hasn’t worked for everybody. I think all the major distros are very aware that it’s a problem and they would want to have a more unified distribution, but at the same time they all want that unified distribution to be their unified distribution. So…”

“Anytime the topic of ‘I want to set up a Linux computer’ comes up, ‘what should I pick?’ and I don’t think you could find two people that will ever give the same answer.”

“Immediate flame war.”

“Immediately becomes an argument.”

“I think it’s part of the open-source history, too.”

“We’ve had flame wars over editors. Those kind of died out. You have to have something that you believe passionately.”

“So now that you’ve said Fedora though, this is the only one that anyone’s ever allowed to install again. Right.”

“Right. Right. Now when I’m emperor and king of the world, it will be Fedora.”

That will be… Should we figure out this install thing?

“We can try flashing another drive if you want. I do think that maybe that is… make updating… I just can’t tell if it’s moving.”

“So then what I’ll let you do is…”

“Yeah. Do you want to show us how it’s done here?”

“Please.”

“It’s your operating system.”

“By all means.”

“This has never been more true than right now in this moment.”

“Well, let’s… 43 live ISO sounds about right.”

“I also don’t know how to flash that image under Windows. So, you’re on your own there. I did the hard lifting here by pressing the download button?”

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

“What’s your number one tech tip that you give people?”

“I don’t give people tech tips because I mean I sit in my office reading email and if somebody asks me over email for tech tips, I won’t answer that. I mean that’s not the kind of questions.”

“I think they’re emailing the wrong guy.”

“Yeah, you can forward it to me if you want.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Stall Fedora. Boom. Oh, he’s crazy like a fox.”

“Wow. To be fair, the other Linus did touch it in between. So, I think that cured it.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, do you encrypt your drive?”

“I will encrypt, but not this time around.”

“Got it. Right. I should keep this drive ‘cause then I might have a Linux install that isn’t cursed.”

I can’t believe it took me this long to work up the courage to ask. I can’t believe you responded in like 15 minutes or whatever it was.

“Well, that’s actually a rule for me. I either respond almost immediately or you won’t get a response at all. I don’t leave stuff in my compost pile of a mailbox.”

“That’s something you guys don’t have in common.”

“No, I use my inbox as like a never-ending garbage to-do list.”

“I actually like that a lot.”

“Okay, good.”

“How do you do it? Location services on or off?”

“I’m okay. So my approach to privacy has been that I’m so public that the more I can poison that well, the better off I am. Don’t try to be worried about something. Just give it all out and be so uninteresting that nobody cares.”

“What would be some of the first things that you would set up?”

“I have my own background which is not quite as cartoonish as this. It’s just a photo I took, a nighttime photo. Is there any chance that we could get that background to share with people? Oh, you don’t have to. There’s no pressure or anything, but…”

“I probably have it on my phone. I can send it to somebody.”

“And then if anyone wants to get the official Linus desktop wallpaper…”

“Do you have Android phones so that you get full resolution photos?”

“You got to believe it.”

“So that was one of the questions was iPhone or Android. And is there like a… because it’s, you know, has Linux as its backbone… philosophical approach to choosing? Now obviously part of it…”

“Yeah. No, part of it is also I got free phones for a while for… I mean people send me stuff.”

“That’s something we have in common.”

“Yeah. So and Apple never sent me a free phone for some strange reason.”

“We have that in common too. Apple doesn’t like me.”

“Okay.”

We had one final question for you.

“Has mainstream acceptance of Linux become more important to you or is it enough that everyone’s using it whether they know it or not?”

“I actually don’t even care the whole ‘enough that they use it’. I don’t care. I care deeply about users in the sense that a project that doesn’t have users is pointless. Right. So users do give any project, and my projects in particular, meaning in that sense. But at the same time, if you don’t use Linux, that’s again your bad choice. I don’t… it’s not on me. As long as there are enough users that what I do is meaningful and not just some mental masturbation, I’m fine.”

“And you know what? I won’t feel bad if you don’t use this product or service from our sponsor.”

“Wake them up. This has got all the apps you need.”

“No. No. There will be no songs of Odo, the all-in-one business app subscription. Tell me, where are the others? We have ways of making you talk. Sing.”

“No. I Wait. No. How are you doing that?”

“Time for this song bird to fly.”

“Wait. NO.”

“Who’s got all your business apps? Save money and time. Got to plug the gaps. I’m talking about sales, inventory, and scheduling and a million other benefits that Odo brings. So if you think about time you’ll spend dreaming of when subscription hell will end, realize that there’s one way through and all-in-one solution. Yes, it’s true. Listen when I say that all you got to do is Odo.”

This was amazing. This vastly exceeded my expectations. This was so cool. Thank you so much on behalf of me, my team, the audience. I think you guys, leave some love down in the comments below. Please.

“I mean, this was odd for me. I’ve enjoyed it. Let’s hope I enjoy it after I read the comments, too.”

“Yeah, be nice.”

“Be nice, you guys.”

“I do have to say, I mean, one of the things having done this for 35 plus years, you learn to have a thick skin. I probably had a thick skin to begin with, but you get… I get a lot of hate, too. I mean, you said I’m universally loved. No.”

“Well, what I meant is throughout the universe, there are people that love you.”

“Yeah. Not that all of them do. If you search the whole universe, you are bound to find”