Reminds me of some interview of Linus, where they showed another photo of his workspace. Linus said the first thing people usually notice is the standing desk (he was a bit of a trendsetter). The second thing they notice is the wall colour. They use the paint in mental hospitals. It has a calming effect on the human mind. (Goodness knows Linus needs all the chill he can get.)
I love how just…normal…Linus is. Like…humble. Content.
Like, hey, I revolutionized the world with a pet project. Nbd.
When I was a kid I worshipped Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I’m glad I realized later that Linus and Woz are the real heroes.
Never meet your heroes. Have you ever seen the way he rages at people on the mailing list? Don’t get me wrong, he’s made some incredible technical contributions that I’m thankful for, but I have to push back against claims that he is a well-adjusted dude.
Bruh if everything I said to people was recorded and searchable, I’d seem like an unhinged egomaniac with anger issues too, but people can change, and get more mellow.
People need to understand we are all humans and stop idolizing-idealizing people, aren’t you all bored of celebrities/famous people abusing their status?
Counterpoint: Linus was all out in the open.
I wouldn’t want to see what Bill Gates is like behind closed doors…especially as a kid.
Another example being the developer of GrapheneOS. Unhinged, but works in our favor. Just don’t follow them on social media.
Richard Stallman is another example of someone you wouldn’t describe as hinged, but you are glad exists.
He’s had to adjust quite a bit I’d say he’s thoroughly and well adjusted.
Yeah, Linus today is nothing like Linus in the 90s/00s
You also have to remember that he made an OS as a hobby project and suddenly everyone wanted to mess with it. It was the Wild West of decentralized project management in those days, I don’t condone any of that unprofessional behavior but I’m also not in the least bit fucking surprised that he had very personal rage-out moments as unsolicited criticism poured in from around the world, constructive and well intentioned or not. That’s a lot of unexpected pressure.
He got better, which implies to me that he wants to be a good person; and that’s all we can really ask of anyone.
True that. Andrew Tanenbaum dissing on Linux in the early days just because it didn’t conform to his ideals of a microkernel is sufficiently uncomfortable to read, imo. It’s not like Linus kept anyone from making their own open source kernel.
To be fair, they insisted that they were on good speaking terms. Seen from that one occasion where some article claimed that Linux was copied from MINIX and Tanenbaum dissed the article, defending Torvalds.
Gates was a jerk. Jobs was a jerk that actually did make some positive impact on the world. Linus was a jerk who’s mellowed to a pretty normal state. Woz is a fucking tech Angel/God who just generally wants good things for people.
edit: I guess to be fair, Windows did harbor us for a long time when nothing else was ready, Jobs pushed competition and some semblance of privacy. and Linus’ code is just about everthing that exists now mostly for free.
I like Ken Thompson. He wanted to play a game on a computer that didn’t have an OS that supported it so he wrote Unix.
My local Microcenter has posters of notable computer pioneers up high in the back where you can see them from anywhere in the store. Each poster has the person’s name as well as a description of something they’re most known for. Bill Gates is there as well as Ken Thompson, Robert Kahn, Robert Metcalfe, Grace Hopper, Richard Stallman, etc. I always thought that was a nice touch. Even though it’s like the nerdiest of all stores, I suspect 90% of customers are probably Windows normies and just need a computer for work or to play games and wouldn’t recognize any of them with the exception of Gates. Even I don’t recognize some of the names, like Kahn (co-invented TCP/IP) and Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet).
Dude linuses anything but humble if you know anything about him he is one of the biggest dicks on the internet. Some of his reasoning is right but some of it is just him being a complete asshole.
He’s gotten a lot better. Turns out therapy works.
Does RMS fit in the picture here? The founder of the fsf and GNU.
That last shirt button:
Isn’t it a bit strange not to change your wallpaper to something different than the default Windows one?
First time I saw that picture, win11 was new, and having it running meant you had a rather recently built PC with a TPM module. So, an additional layer of a (satirical?) hardware flex that I don’t think goes well with, well, the worse Windows at the time.
since i have family and cant change it to prn,i keep it at default too. Honestly though, i barely see it. Theres always some ui over it.
The average tech bro doesn’t have the skill to maintain a single system long enough for customizations to matter.
Linus’ photo also showcases the default Linux experience
Maybe Linus also has that background.
But we wouldn’t know since his screen is off.
I actually really love the default wallpaper in KDE Plasma. It changes with every release. I have a friend who also uses Plasma, and before each release, we always joke that the new wallpaper is our most anticipated feature because we’re too lazy to change our wallpapers ourselves and simply wait for new releases to do it for us.
The default wallpaper is meant to be pleasing, and I guess it’s meant to appeal to the average person? I’ve known several people that don’t change their wallpapers or that use that automatic carousel thing with a different image every time you wake the device.
You just gotta be careful which automatic carousel you use…
https://www.techspot.com/news/105673-official-bing-wallpaper-app-does-nasty-malware-like.html
Hilarious btw
A person who actually uses the PC.
A random streamer.
Youtuber that has hyper “minimalistic productivity” setup, 10k subs, posts videos every week and has 3 digit views max:
Why does the tech bro have those huge lights shining in his face - livestreaming?
linus has an odd seemingly bad lighting setup too.
Camboy
Onlyfans after his business venture went down in flames.
looks at image with ten visible LED fans
I don’t have a problem with people decorating their computers however they want. They paid for it. It’s their computer. Everyone’s got their own aesthetic preferences.
However, the last build I did, I was getting a little exasperated with how increasingly-hard it is to just find desktop components that don’t have RGB lighting on them any more. I mean, to me, the desktop computer is a box that has a bunch of circuit boards in it. I’m generally not looking at my RAM sticks or motherboard segments, and don’t have a glass window on the side to admire it (it gets dust in there, and I’d rather have a sturdier case without glass). I could do without the extra light pollution in my life. Most stuff can be disabled, but it’s kind of obnoxious to be buying and figuring out how to disable hordes of little RGB LEDs.
I’d also add that where LEDs exist, they have multiplied over the decades not just in number, but also in brightness.
If I wanted to have my computer be a light show, which I don’t, I’d get a DMX512 controller for it, and real lighting effects hardware.
Maybe going for rack-mount hardware is an option. It’s something that I’ve thought about sporadically over the years, and it does have certain benefits, if you’re willing to give up portability. But rack-mount builds generally command a premium due to the market being less price-sensitive, and noise is often a more of a factor, since datacenters don’t care about keeping things quiet for employees.
Things like Noctua fans and motherboards aimed at enterprise use cases tend to not have the shiny distractions that average tech bros want.
You probably want to stick with ATX over rack mounted stuff as an individual, just means you have to search for function-over-form brands for peripherals and the motherboard.
Paraphrasing a tidbit of information from Northwest Repair, who’s a guy on YouTube that does board-level repairs on computer hardware:
Apparently, reprogramming the firmware config and changing the RGB light status on a DRAM module are both done through the same SPI bus. Consequently, every time you change the RGB lighting, it has a tiny chance of accidentally bricking the stick.
So not only is RGB an additional upfront cost that consumers might not want, it could even contribute to long-term costs by reducing the lifetime of some components.
I remember years ago there was a firmware source leak (or maybe the binary was analyzed or something) for gigabyte’s led controller firmware/drivers that basically just exposed the firmware programming bus to user land because that’s how they did lighting updates and the kernel mode driver just passed whatever the user mode driver gave it, which could include firmware updates to other hardware IDs.
It was at this point that I stopped running a lot of those hardware control utilities (and I suspect that might also be why I barely saw any issues with the Radeon 5700 XT that was a bit infamous for “its” issues that I think might have just been incompatibilities with 3rd party “helper” utilities or shit written by companies that had gotten to the “just ship it” stage of development).
Imagine if ransomware did a BYOVD and held your actual hardware ransom.
Shit like that should never have been signed by Microsoft, let alone made it through developer review at Gigabyte.
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Yet another secret? The best “gaming headphones” are just standard audio gear or music studio stuff.
every now and then I like going through and reading Linus’ commit messages for uemacs. It’s impressive that he’s still maintaining that thing on a near weekly basis.
Also he writes some of the longest commit messages known to man to the point where i’m like “I didn’t know you could write them that long”
That’s a nice standing desk tho.
But who can stand using one screen??
You don’t need multiple screens to code. You can split inside your editor if you need to look at two things, otherwise you just jump between things. Faster thank having to use multiple things
Yeah, I’m very much Team Lone Monitor. You can only see sufficient detail to work with text in a limited area in front of you. I can flip between desktops in sway faster than I can look from side to side. Honestly, my current monitor is already probably excessive in screen space for productivity stuff.
And the ergonomics are preferable if you’re using secondary monitors much. You ideally want the display in front of you:
https://worksmarthub.com/monitor-ergonomics/
If you only change four things today:
Adjust your chair height first.
Raise your monitor so the top is at or just below eye level.
Position it about an arm’s length away.
Centre it directly in front of you.
These principles align with ergonomic research on neutral posture and reduced upper‑limb load (Rempel et al., 2007).
I remember working on a dual monitor setup split in the middle back in the 1990s, and while it was never a huge issue, after a day of working, my neck was stiff from looking to the left.
Added bonus of a single-monitor setup: less power use, and you can work on a (more-portable) laptop without extra screens without breaking your workflow.
EDIT: Note that this is just talking productivity stuff. If you also play games or something on the machine, then having stuff in your peripheral vision can have value, just as in real life. VR rigs push that even further.
EDIT2: If someone does come up with some sort of software that makes useful use of peripheral vision for office stuff, someone will be selling VR products aimed specifically at this in short order. I remember in…the early 2000s maybe, when Intel was trying to convince businesses to buy 3D hardware, and had ads talking about how 3D chart viewing would increase productivity.
I think using tiling based windows is one of the things that makes it easier for single monitor. I use i3 and it’s way quicker to refer to something on another workspace compared to if I were to have them in separate monitors or stacked views. When using extra monitors i just have it open browser most of the time.
There’s “Linux Kernel Developer Workspaces” series on youtube. Spoiler: most of them look like dumpsters, even if discounting that it was over 10 years ago. I guess it takes certain type of trash goblin to work on linux kernel.
No, it just takes somebody who cares more about getting stuff done than maxxing performance.
than maxxing performance.
…or aesthetics.
He now has a fancier PC, courtesy of LTT.
Worst and best Linus I “know” in one picture. And I know one more Linus.
Do people really use those standup desks? Can you get work done that way?
I have one at the head office. I love how it’s adjustable, so I can stand up when I’ve been sitting for too long.
Plus when I’m doing something that involves more than just keyboard and mouse (sych as plugging electronics and hardware around me) it’s very convenient to be already standing.
Stardew Valley was created on a standing setup that wasn’t even a proper desk
Yes they are awesome; The kind that adjusts for sitting or stnading.
We had them at a company I worked at. You sit for a while ( like and hour or two) and then feel a bit uncomfortable so pull the level and slide to standing mode. Work an hour standing, then sit. It really helps you feel less fatigue, and is better for circulation and digestion.
Okay, but… a big HDPI monitor is so much easier on your eyes. Even if all you do is scale your font size way up so þat you have exactly þe same effective rows × columns of text, it’s still noticably cleaner and you can turn off anti-aliasing wiþout incurring jaggies.
He’s standing pretty close so maybe a huge monitor would be counter productive, but still. Þat looks like a bog standard business Dell and þey’re pretty basic displays. No high refresh, no higher luminosity, and probably just a basic 1080p. Splurge for a better monitor, at least. A quality keyboard makes a big difference, too, but I can’t see what he has þere. Doesn’t look ergonomic, anyway.
Dude. Use þ & ð correctly. It is moðer. Fucking. Annoying reading your text and having to back track because you use ðe wrong fucking letters.
You mean “ðat”… “Þat” sounds like “fat”
You don’t mean “þe” you mean “ðe”
It’s not “þey’re” it’s “ðey’re”
“wiþout” is correct
