I think whoever recieved this would be completely fine to report Linus to HR or something. The fact somebody thought to circulate it is suggestive that it crossed a line. I do appreciate he does seem to really care about the kernel. He could maybe tone down the hysterics a little.
I think if there’s a lesson here its “Never hit send while you’re angry” always wait until your hormones to subside before sending an email because emails are records and people don’t have good judgement while angry, so an email sent in anger is just a record of your poor judgement.
Does the Linux Foundation even have HR? Even if they did, does an employee of a separate company even have the ability to make a complaint about Linus with them?
For the first part, no clue, but for the second, absolutely
Just because you work for someone else doesn’t give them the right to treat you badly and that sort of behavior can and should be reported to a person’s employer.
I think whoever recieved this would be completely fine to report Linus to HR or something.
As unnecessary as the tone was, if your first reaction to such a form of address is to run to HR, you’re contributing to a toxic workplace. The first and foremost way to address etiquette problems (I am not including criminal behavior in this) is to talk directly to the person who offended you. Everyone has a bad day once in a while, and some people may even shout. If the first reaction is to get them into legal trouble with the employer, most people will rightfully avoid you like you just stepped into dogshit.
If this kind of behavior - despite having addressed it face to face - keeps occurring, that’s a different issue, then HR may be necessary.
An individual misbehaving does not constitute a toxic workplace. If you can’t tell people that you think their tone is inappropriate, then take it to your manager, but going straight to HR is about the dumbest way to deal with this. Some people don’t even realize they overstepped but might be able to empathize once informed.
Oh yeah, when your boss has anger issues and curses you in email, you really want to politely talk to him and ask him to stop. That will show them that you’re a little spineless sucker and can be shat on indefinitely.
Yes, even to your boss you can say that you feel something could have been communicated in a more friendly way. “Anger issues” implies the repeated occurrence for which I already stated before that is a different situation.
The term is “hostile work environment”. HR doesn’t just respond because of strict liability. Just one occurance of something like this can lead to an otherwise solid worker to spiral from discomfort of the situation, both feeling like a prisoner at their job and producing far less value for their employers.
The latter is why HR cares, but the former is why it’s OKay to go straight to HR. If HR is well-trained, things like this shouldn’t escalate just because you went to HR. They should be able to diffuse it productively.
You have obviously never dealt with a real-world scenario. Going straight to HR for someone being verbally(!) out of line, without even using insults, means you are the bigger problem.
Actually, I’ve watched two GREAT workers and good people end up losing their jobs because a easily resolved situation turned toxic. The person who felt uncomfortable tried to take care of it 1-on-1 but had too passive aggressive a nature to really be clear when she confronted the guy.
So 6 months or a year later, she was on the verge of quitting and went to HR. He was terminated because it had gone too far. She left soon after because she still wasn’t comfortable at work after the cause of that ended.
…look. I “obviously never dealt” with anything because nobody is allowed differing opinions here, but I have 20+ years experience at businesses where the existence or lack of good HR has been a deciding factor of the work-culture and comfort level of team members. I work 1-on-1 with my company’s Directors of HR on a regular basis to make sure my team is happy and because I am involved with other teams at my job who have their own interpersonal conflicts. One of HR’s responsibilities in a good company is to involve themselves in interpersonal conflicts BEFORE decisive action has to be taken.
The problem is that face-to-face confrontations without a mediator don’t always end well. And I would rather not have HR decide “we have to fire our Rockstar senior dev or this random guy”. But if you address it earlier, HR deals with it earlier (yes, because the paper trail m eans HR can’t just fire “this random guy” later over the Rockstar senior dev). It’s win-win for all parties INCLUDING the Linus Torvalds in this explanation.
But I’ve “obviously never dealt with a real-world scenario” and my experience doesn’t count. So you can ignore everything I said.
You are under the very relevant misassumption that HR is less likely to be handling a situation inappropriately than two people speaking with each other directly. I stand by my original comment. A simple verbal overstep, on the first occurrence, should definitely be addressed without involving HR
Hard disagree. This letter is what happens when direct communications have failed.
Realistically, somebody near Linus probably told him to chill out and that he’s damaging his own reputation and his project’s by sending out this temper tantrum bullshit. In no world would the target of this letter be the person who successfully sits him down and lectures him on not being an asshole.
But honestly if he had a habit of sending out this kind of stuff it would be a liability/legal problem.
This is far from the first (or last) time he wrote something like this. This was just a regular thing in the kernel world for a long time (until Linus matured a little).
Whether or not it was a good thing is up for debate I think. Yeah, it’s very rude and unprofessional (and discourages new contributors who don’t want to risk getting chewed out), but considering the importance of the Linux kernel, it’s good to know the lead maintainer is doing too much of the right thing than not enough (i.e. being lax with bad code in order to be respectful). I’m fine knowing that a few tech workers got their egos smashed if it gives me confidence that the code powering civilization is high quality.
I used to use stock Vim but recently I’ve started using Helix which is like a more user friendly version of vim (copying to clipboard is easy) and I’m loving it!
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I cannot move to Linux despite desperately wanting too. I am a VR developer and right now you do not have any open source game engine options that support VR and due to the SDKs I work with, I am tied to Windows right now. Given that spatial computing is the next platform, I really hope Linux options develop but it is not looking likely.
Reminds me of an interview i was in. I was like, this isn’t even in my job description… 7 interviews later. Come to find out, they were HAND DEPLOYING Linux servers to try to scale for double of their user base. I feel like I dodged a bullet.
So when I was in the interview, you know, typically you answer questions, right? I mean there’s some back and forth, but typically you’re on the end of the stick.
It was Zello. They wanted someone to continue manual deployment. Are you fucking kidding me? Read the reviews. They are all consistent with a good product and an outdated infrastructure team.
I plan to Continue Refusing To Daily Drive Linux again this year in my standard drive to push Linux, Linux Developers, Managers and Contributors to be more friendly for end users. You have to be better than Windows, and we know you people can achieve it if more can and do contribute. Make Contributing Easy and they will Contribute.
Maybe I’ll spin up a Matrix Homeserver with Beeper bridges to self-host that…if that becomes a necessity. Getting to know how to use and administrate Linux efficiently is always a good thing to learn, even if it’s not easy still, and even if the bad old days were even worse.
The Linux for Windows subsystem is a nice to have that makes learning a little less troublesome.
Ideally, you should use Pamac (if you’re doing CLI), not Pacman, to update Manjaro. Haven’t used Manjaro in a while, but this is gospel most of the time.
Seriously. I used Manjaro for a short period about 5 or 6 years ago but ran into so many issues with it. Vanilla Arch on the other hand is very forgiving in my experience. I have a second desktop PC with Arch installed and I only update that machine once every couple of months when I actually need to use it. In my four years of doing that I never had an update break my system.
I’ve used and come back to Arch for nearly 8 years now and Manjaro has always been a broken distribution and genuinely gives Arch a bad rep.
Arch has always been a very stable daily driver for me, never breaking and never having issues with it. I’m always confused on what people are doing when they have issues with their entire distro breaking, especially since you pick all your packages and such anyways.
I’ve had a few breaking changes in 10 years of dailying Arch across multiple devices.
Most egregiously one time a PAM update included a new PAM config… which got applied as .pacnew, but the new PAM config was critical and I could not login with a cryptic error message.
That probably took me a solid hour to figure out, because config file conflicts is probably pacman’s weakest point. At least apt starts conflict resolution by default.
I don’t think in this specific case it does, though. I had similar problems with a completely different distribution. I’m convinced that it’s an upstream Qt or KDE issue where broken caches or changed cache formats don’t get automatically invalidated and rebuild. In the case I vividly remember some lower level graphics library was updated and everything seemed to run fine but for some (and only some) users it resulted in Qt or some KDE component not being able to parse the cache any longer. After some research (under Gnome) I wrote a small script that quit Plasma and KWin, deleted all the caches (icon, font, …) and then launched KWin and Plasma again. Worked fine and came handy on a couple of further occasions.
bram was a chad, mate. I once opened vim without any file(just plain vi) and saw help poor children in Uganda. read whole uganda.txt file and then saw how his organisation is fully involved in getting material benefits to the ground. further went down the rabbithole and saw his org’s photos in uganda.
made me really appreciate the man.
explanation for the command ci": c: change. analogous to delete(d) followed by insert(i) i: inside ": the double quote
so, it’s basically change inside double quote(easier to remember as it sounds exactly what it does).
you can similarly do di((delete inside parenthesis).
an inferior alternative on vscodium would be shift + alt + right/left arrow
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