I have never had a good impression about Linus, mostly after reading about his debate with professor Tannenbaun, on which he demonstrated not only his ignorance about modern operating systems design (even when this might sound as anathema to Linux fans), but also his arrogance and lack of self-criticism (let's face it, Linux is NOT innovative at all and share the same conceptual and architectural deficits than Unix)
However, some recent facts are changing my overall impression about Linus. Firs, he impressed me for the way he managed an aparently endless discussion about design decisions among kernel developers. This short except is a gem: "get on with your lives. Realize that there is no 'perfect' value for HZ". I've been myself several times in such discussions and therefore can appreciate both the need and the efficacy of his comments.
Second, he has recently confronted the developers of GNOME to tell them the awful true: user interfaces in Linux sucks and they are not able to fix them because they think end users are stupid and don¡t deserve to be considered. Will them listen? Hardly.
Finally, I read Linus' responses to a proposal to include new functionality into the kernel called syslets. His arguments are really clear and shown a deep understanding of the complexities of designing good programming interfaces, which he summarizes as " think simplicity of use along with transparency, is so important . . . It's just that I think complex interfaces that people largely won't even use is a big mistake. We should concentrate on usability first, and some excessive cleverness really isn't a big advantage."
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