You know, though, his conduct nowadays isn&#x27;t really that bad; I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d be bothered by it in a workplace environment. He makes strong assertions, but not mean-spirited, and I think Linus has a lot of reasons to feel highly confident when he makes strong assertions when it comes to Linux.Of course, there are some moments, but almost everybody has their moments. When push comes to shove, Linus seems to handle the important things pretty well.

The guys is truly a beacon of fairness. Linux as a kernel will probably go downhill after we lose Linus.And I&#x27;m only 50% ironic&#x2F;joking.

That’s usually how people like that are. They hold others to high standards because they hold themselves to high standards.

Does he willingly take that treatment from others? I don&#x27;t really know, but that would be the actual test of congruence.

He named both git and Linux after himself.

One does not get a pass on being rude and hurtful to others by speaking about themselves negatively.The fundamental thing that people never seem to understand in the &quot;Linus is being an asshole&quot; vs &quot;I love Linus, he tells it like he is and to manage a project you have to be willing to do that!&quot; debate is that it is completely unnecessary to speak at all about someone&#x27;s person on a mailing list like lkml.&quot;This code sucks!&quot; - no. &quot;This code does not meet the linux kernel&#x27;s coding conventions, has race conditions, and this algorithm could likely be implemented in a far more performant way.&quot;&quot;You&#x27;re just WRONG&quot; - no. &quot;The position that you&#x27;re being forced to learn a new programming language is not correct. You have not been asked to write or even understand Rust.&quot;I think the people who think &#x27;you have to be that way to manage&#x2F;lead&#x27; have never been under a good manager or leader and I daresay that a lot of people in technical supervisory and management positions unfortunately grew up respecting Linus and thinking his behavior was how you &quot;get things done&quot;, not realizing that Linus&#x27;s behavior almost certainly kept a lot of people from risking contributing and if anything has hurt the Linux kernel project - and kept people from feeling they could safely point out problems in someone&#x27;s code becauseT&#x27;so is a great example; a huge ego. As a result, people simply have gone elsewhere to work on filesystems. The ext filesystem(s) were not terribly reliable or tolerant of real-world situations, is still not very performant, and has evolved at a glacial pace consistently lagging behind its peers.

&gt; But no. It&#x27;s just pure incompetence.While I don&#x27;t agree with how he conducts himself on the mailing lists; I respect he uses the same language when talking about himself.

For myself, I think it&#x27;s just as much how to word things properly to most effectively get your point across, as it is to be ready if your report has some kind of backlash or isn&#x27;t seen the way you meant it. You need to be mentally prepared to handle the response you get back, even if it&#x27;s no response at all after you spent many hours putting a report together and worrying about how to make it just right. Obviously this will change depending on how important what you&#x27;re reporting on is, and whether your work contributed to that report&#x27;s findings.

I find that can be true - but I also sometimes just forget to hit submit.

As I cross 40 years in this industry, I find that my procrastination often has subtle root causes. I assume others have the same experience.Currently, I&#x27;ve been putting off a long report for a few days and it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m trying to balance a number of conclusions, tones, etc. When I&#x27;m ready, I&#x27;m ready.

The article helpfully informs us this note was written by the man himself, Linux Torvalds.

&quot;f#ck off, it&#x27;s free&quot; is possibly an acceptable response if you&#x27;re also working for free. If maintaining that free software is your job that you are getting paid good money to do, you really should hold yourself to higher standards.

I assume he takes advice&#x2F;feedback i.e. the famous ESR post and the concerns from that contributor from intel and others to heart. Or at least has forced himself to learn how to do so.

He really has grown as a person. Ten years ago, there would have been no mention of it unless someone called it out, and the response to that would have boiled down to &quot;f#ck off, it&#x27;s free&quot;.... Which also would have been relatable, and valid if we&#x27;re being honest.

<pre><code> So it&#x27;s early Monday morning (well - early for me, I&#x27;m not really a morning person), and I&#x27;d love to have some good excuse for why I didn&#x27;t do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule.

 I&#x27;d like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed things.

 But no. It&#x27;s just pure incompetence.
 
 Because absolutely nothing last-minute happened yesterday, and I was just clearing up some unrelated things in order to be ready for the merge window. And in the process just entirely forgot to actually ever cut the release. D&#x27;oh.
</code></pre>
Relatable

That&#x27;s odd. Why would wine not accept improvements using fsync from Proton?

That is a question of source. If you read the article on GoL instead ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamingonlinux.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;linux-kernel-6-14-out-late-due-to-pure-incompetence-dont-get-too-excited-about-linux-gaming-boosts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamingonlinux.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;linux-kernel-6-14-out-...</a> ) you would have already read that:&gt; For Valve&#x27;s Proton however, don&#x27;t go expecting much here with ntsync. As Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais replied to a user on Bluesky to note:&gt; We already include fsync, which should be as fast or faster as ntsync. We developed ntsync as a general solution that&#x27;d be acceptable in upstream Wine, but there&#x27;s no urgency in including it in the Deck &#x2F; SteamOS kernel.

One exciting aspect of NTSYNC is that it could get into wine upstream. FSYNC is only available in Proton and not in upstream wine, mainly because it is not fully conformant, i.e. it doesn&#x27;t behave exactly like its Windows counterpart does. But NTSYNC doesn&#x27;t have this problem.

That can be simplified by the topic and presentation. Is the content trying to educate, be entertaining or both. Is the topic extremely niche then you will find like minded people with suggestions and discussions.

YouTube comments have lots of smart people in them, sometimes.

Hype is not about better performance but about upstream support. It&#x27;s valuable.

Must be some wrong circles. From what I&#x27;ve seen, it&#x27;s mostly well known that ntsync is comparable to existing solutions like esync &#x2F; fsync.

If you&#x27;ve been anywhere around linux gaming circles for the past 6-8ish months, you&#x27;ve seen nothing but people not understanding the benchmarks hype NTSYNC. Everyone trying to set appropriate expectations is pretty quickly silenced in whatever manner the platform allows (downvote, etc)

From a YouTube comment:&gt; please don&#x27;t hype NTSYNC. yes it has better compatibility than ESYNC and FSYNC, yes it&#x27;s marginally faster in selected title. The phoronix article reports benchmarks with WINESYNC vs NTSYNC, the gains are there only if you were not already running FSYNC (on by default in most titles running under proton).&gt; By overhyping features they ultimately end up underdelivering because people expect insane gains that were never there to begin with.Surely we can do better than YouTube comments?

Technically this is not a low-level primitive. NTSYNC isn&#x27;t added as a, say, system call like futex2[0] was. It&#x27;s instead added as a character devivce - which you can build your kernel without, and functions via ioctls.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.kernel.org&#x2F;userspace-api&#x2F;futex2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.kernel.org&#x2F;userspace-api&#x2F;futex2.html</a>

I don’t know if this answers your question directly: but the article points out that this is a module, not a primitive that’s in the kernel itself.The idea here is that wine&#x2F;proton can interact with this module directly if it’s loaded, or continue to use their wrappers around existing fsync if not.I expect that means a little less scrutiny since if it segs the user can choose to not load it and achieve a stable OS.

You&#x27;ve got a nice arc river in &quot;of &#x2F; getting &#x2F; to&quot;.Easier to find if you look slightly away from that part of the text.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;River_(typography)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;River_(typography)</a>

I&#x27;m super excited for this! But it makes me curious.What&#x27;s the process like for getting such a low-level primitive added to Linux? Especially a low-level primitive that 1) exist basically just to emulate behavior of a completely different kernel, and 2) is only needed for a subset of users to play games?I&#x27;m not complaining, just curious. I would assume a patch to add the above would be heavily scrutinized. Is it because the popularity of the Steam Deck &#x2F; proton?

yes, the only games that don&#x27;t work in Linux are the ones where Linux is explicitly banned by the developer.

Same here. Anything I try seems to just work. The only problem is anticheat but even those are starting to behave even when isolated and confined in containers.

Sometime around 2020-2021 I stopped checking if a video game will work in Linux. These days almost everything does with minimal friction. DXVK and Vulkan have been gamechangers.

Do note that these numbers are Upstream vanilla Wine vs Wine+NTSYNC and not Wine+fsync, which is more common and has comparable performance (if not sometimes better[0] according to a valve employee)[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;plagman.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lkp26xmco22k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;plagman.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lkp26xmco...</a>

If you’re wondering about hard numbers, the benefits for Wine look massive.From Jan 2024:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;Windows-NT-Sync-RFC-Linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;Windows-NT-Sync-RFC-Linux</a>

What OS are you running? I’m running Debian 12 Stable and can’t get nvtop to detect it. Searching I found this Reddit thread:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MiniPCs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1htxoi6&#x2F;beelink_mini_s13_intel_n150_linux_driver_issues&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MiniPCs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1htxoi6&#x2F;beelink_mi...</a>Did you add backports or recompile? I think N100 may be supported by stable but not N150.

What would be the meaning of that? I have a Beelink with N100 for more than a year and HW acceleration works already (I use it in Jellyfin), so I wonder what do you mean that &quot;intel gpu support&quot; would mean.

I also believe this kernel adds Intel GPU support for the N100 and N150 chips used in lots of mini PCs. I have a Beelink N150 rig running various Docker containers that I am curious to test some light AI workloads on.

I wonder if he reads every single line of code. Or even skims over them.

What you&#x27;re quoting Linus on is his commentary about the patches landing in the past week, which is supposed to be only bug fixes as the code stabilizes enough for a stable release to be made. New features would lane weeks earlier during the merge window. What&#x27;s newsworthy here is not anything that was merged recently, just the fact that this new functionality is now available from a stable release.If there was anything really significant from the past week&#x27;s changelog, it would likely have been reason to delay the stable release for at least another week.

&gt; Below is the shortlog for the last week. It&#x27;s nice and small - not only was there no last-minute issue yesterday, the whole last week was pretty calm. The patch is dominated by some amd gpu updates, and even those are pretty small. The rest is random small changes all over.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;lkml&#x2F;CAHk-=wg7TO09Si5tTPyhdrLLvyYtVmCf+GGN4kVJ0=Xk=5TE3g@mail.gmail.com&#x2F;T&#x2F;#u" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;lkml&#x2F;CAHk-=wg7TO09Si5tTPyhdrLLvyYtVm...</a>Funny that Linus himself doesn&#x27;t consider much in the release noteworthy besides the GPU stuff, yet the submission article goes on about &quot;leaps&quot;, &quot;big news&quot; and &quot;major step&quot;.

Not a single word about missing bcachefs fixes? Or are they now in?Or the upcoming breaking GPIO changes. That will be a huge minefield

zdnet... now that&#x27;s a familiar name I haven&#x27;t seen in a while

&quot;...a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, ...&quot;[1][1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;doc&#x2F;cs&#x2F;security&#x2F;2001-12-02-treginaldgibbons-isyoursonacomputerhacker.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;doc&#x2F;cs&#x2F;security&#x2F;2001-12-02-treginaldgibbon...</a>

The genious and madman behind the Linus Operating System.

Gell-Mann amnesia [1] is an interesting thing to think about here. But IMO the real problem is that editing for most journalism websites is done very very poorly, if at all.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect</a>

tl;dr: better windows-like filesystem driver for Wine, better AMD GPU drivers, more Rust implementations, support for Snapdragon 8 Elite, fixed vulnerabilities on RISC-V, better btrfs

Yeah, I know multiple people running Linux at home and Windows compatibility us a critical feature for them. For the people I know not in tech about half would switch if Linux got up to par in:1. Ability to play any video game2. Compatibility with hardware (e.g. one of my friends is booting windows temporarily as his graphics card has an issue on Linux)3. Usability&#x2F;looks. This is subjective but for people used to Windows for the last couple decades people often find Linux more difficult to use and honestly uglier (Linux is customizable but most people I know are not confident enough to go far from the defaults).This is just my friends, some of whom are engineers and some are normal people when it comes to technical ability, but currently a lot of them want to like Linux but have specific requirements holding them back.

Well, one of the biggest drivers of consumer Linux adoption in recent years has been the Steam Deck, and compatibility with Steam games. The article explicitly calls out how this improves performance for this use case. I think your opinion is an unpopular one.

&quot;On June 8, 2016, a standard FreeBSD 10.3 image was published into the Azure Marketplace. Microsoft published the image working as part of the FreeBSD community and in collaboration with the FreeBSD Foundation. This was a milestone
representing the culmination of several years of Microsoft collaboration with the FreeBSD community. FreeBSD is leveraged as the base OS for a number of virtual appliances running in Azure, and so Microsoft has a natural interest in making sure it runs well.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freebsdfoundation.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;Running-FreeBSD-Azure.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freebsdfoundation.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;Run...</a>

I think the best hope for native Linux gaming at this point is that the Steam deck and Proton in general becomes so popular it makes it worth it to consider native Linux too.

Your points are factually incorrect in several ways. But if I steelman your argument, Linux driving Windows compatibility for gaming could be bad for several reasons:- adoption of NTSYNC may distort the technical roadmap of Linux. That&#x27;s arguable, it comes down to technical details.- we should ask game vendors to support Linux, not enable them to not support Linux. Unfortunately that ship has sailed and we already know that Linux gaming is not a market they care about.- Windows and Microsoft are bad and Linux is good. That&#x27;s an emotional argument. When MS was truly anti-Linux, this association would rightly trigger suspicion. But MS is not behind this effort.Not sure what is left.

You know, Gates and Nadella wear pants, so maybe we should all go pantiless because of that, just so we don&#x27;t emulate them?I don&#x27;t see how improving compatibility is a bad thing in itself, unless it breaks native functionality, which it doesn&#x27;t.

Do you think MS still wants to be in the consumer OS market?It&#x27;s low revenue, fairly high expense, and the relevance of &quot;which operating system do you use&quot; is going down rapidly (see linux gaming getting good with MS&#x27;s help). Businesses.. sure they&#x27;ll keep using windows and paying for it, since they already have a huge amount of legacy systems&#x2F;software and IT procedures&#x2F;institutional knowledge - like IBM still doing mainframes - but consumers don&#x27;t seem to care about that.Most people basically seem to use their computer to run a browser, maybe some games, and maybe some office suite stuff, OS doesn&#x27;t matter too much anymore.

Honestly I don&#x27;t see any evidence that Microsoft wants anything. Every little fiefdom within Microsoft wants their own thing and no one cares about what is good for the company as a whole. There is at least one team that just wants to sell as many games as possible, and are no doubt looking at SteamOS as potential platform to target.

It&#x27;s not as if they&#x27;re the main stakeholder of Windows games on Windows anyway.

Microsoft doesn&#x27;t give a hoot what platform you use Gamepass on.

You think Microsoft wants Windows games to perform better on Linux?

What&#x27;s even more amazing is how many Large Corporations use FreeBSD, but don&#x27;t contribute to it.

You are going to be amazed when you find out how many Large Corporations contribute to FreeBSD.

&gt; To me, anything that emulates windows primitives is a bad thing.To me, dogma is a bad thing.&gt; these changes being pushed by MicrosoftI don&#x27;t think Microsoft has anything to do with NTSYNC. Its goal is to make running Windows games on Linux easier.

I hate to break it to you, but Linux has always had a very significant amount of development done by and for various corporate interests. There are whole companies that exist solely to commercialize Linux.

&gt;&gt; Lets hope the BSDs can continue staying independent of Large Corporations.If that&#x27;s a concern they really shouldn&#x27;t use the BSD license. Imagine what will happen if the BSDs become popular.

Microsoft did not push these changes. Valve (and places like Collabora) did, because it meaningfully improves performance for emulated Windows games. You should probably at least get the basics of your story straight if you&#x27;re going to scare yourself silly over something you don&#x27;t understand.

Windows did the same thing, in Windows Vista they added some Linux style synchronization primitives, for example condition variables.

&gt; Lets hope the BSDs can continue staying independent of Large Corporations.I have some bad news for you on what MacOS and iOS are originally based on.

Not really, Sony and Apple are good examples of how BSDs would have looked like if the AT&amp;T lawsuit never happened, and UNIX vendors would keep using BSD on their UNIX flavours, also most likely no one would have cared for Linux if it wasn&#x27;t for that lawsuit.

Without providing examples, like no giant lock (mostly gone on Linux, now), IOCP, less monolithic kernel, inherit async I&#x2F;O in the kernel, et. al., your assertion going to be lost on those who see &quot;Windows == bad&quot;, which it certainly is closer to the surface.

NT is more advanced than Unix. It&#x27;s a good thing for Linux to be adopting these decade old ideas.

I am still on 5.15, I will need to remember to blacklist it. But that does not address the fact Microsoft is slowly taking control of Linux.

Is initcall_blacklist not enough of an option for you?

yes, let keep BSD corporation free, business free, and user free.

&gt;This driver is designed to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitivesTo me, anything that emulates windows primitives is a bad thing. Again these changes being pushed by Microsoft make me glad the BSDs exist.Lets hope the BSDs can continue staying independent of Large Corporations.

Linux kernel 6.14 is a big leap forward in performance and Windows compatibility