this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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As someone who did study computer science and has worked in embedded processor space (so one of the people who's written assembly by hand he's talking about).
I've never understood it either. People take his word as law blindly and it's never made sense to me. Yes he has skill, but so do hundreds of others. Yes he's opinionated, that's certainly not a reason to hero worship him.
For ten+ years people have been pointing out he's basically a single point of failure for Linux and begging for a succession plan and he's been too stuck up his own ass to accept that he isn't the only one who cares about all this.
This has lead to some extreme cult following behind him for some reason.
Using an argument from authority to denounce someone in authority and their arguments? Cool. Might've worked if I hadn't seen you mention recently that we shouldn't use AI 'because Trump and his cronies do'.
I've translated assembler by hand and punched the hex codes into an EPROM programmer's keyboard. This would appear to make me qualified to say that he's not always right and, in most cases, fuck AI.
is Greg Kroah-Hartman not the succession plan?
As far as I know no. The plan is for the the top maintainers to gather and choose a successor. Though if you have more up to date information I'd love to see it. I could be behind the times on that.