Linux creator Linus Torvalds made a different kind of appearance recently, on a YouTube show hosted by Canadian tech enthusiast Linus Sebastian. Called Linus Tech Tips — and filmed in Vancouver — the show found Torvalds swapping his usual routine for a casual and unscripted conversation for the channel’s 16.7 million subscribers.“It was fun to see you in a very different kind of conversation,” Torvalds heard later from Dirk Hohndel, his long-time interviewer at Open Source Summit appearances (and the head of Verizon’s open source program office). On the stage in Tokyo, Hohndel pointed out that Torvalds also drew more than 10 times as many viewers as their usual interviews. Sebastian’s interview is now up to 4.5 million views…But more importantly, Torvalds gave viewers a surprisingly fresh perspective on how Linux gets built — along with some genuinely new insights into the mind of the man who’s led the Linux project since 1991.Fun With ‘Frankenboxes’Podcast host Linus Sebastian promised they’d spend the show building the perfect Linux PC — for the man who’d created Linux. In a 2020 interview with ZDNet, Torvalds had said he likes to build his own “frankenboxes,” even identifying his preferred hardware. So the two Linuses built a PC using a 24-core, 48-thread AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9960X CPU.But right from the beginning, this led to an interesting observation. With millions relying on his work, Torvalds said he can’t have his hardware making him think the OS has bugs. “I’m convinced that all the jokes about how unstable Windows is and blue screening… a big percentage of those were not actually software bugs. A big percentage of those are hardware being not reliable.”Along the way, Torvalds improvised some clever answers — like when asked how he handles data storage. “I upload it on the internet, and if it’s worth saving, somebody else will save it for me.”But there were also some thoughtful reflections on Sebastian’s show. When asked what he does to relax, Torvalds answered, “I actually don’t think I have a very stressful life.” And that’s partly because, after 20 years, Linux now has an almost-perfect workflow. “And it’s not just Git, it’s the whole release schedule, it’s everything around it.” With a predictable workflow, “You know what’s going on, and… It’s no big surprises. That’s not stressful.”For a moment, viewers caught a true glimmer of the zen of Torvalds. “Technical problems are not stressful either, because technology you can fix. Right? And we’re good at that.“The main source of stress for me tends to be people… I mean, I’m not a people person — famously, right? And people are strange, and you can’t fix people.”Microsoft and Lessons LearnedTorvalds also found himself answering the kind of spontaneous questions on Sebastian’s show you only get in informal settings — like “Does it weird you out a little bit that the largest entity known for Git… is owned by Microsoft?”“It’s strange, in a historical context — but it’s kind of funny at the same time,” Torvalds said. Microsoft now makes more money from their cloud services than they do from Windows, and “the majority of the Microsoft cloud runs Linux! So we’re friends… The rivalry took some more time, but that went away, too. And I’m very happy with that.”So would he do anything differently if he was starting Linux development today? Torvalds says there’s two answers. “Now that I know how hard it is, I would never have gotten started in the first place, right? You need to have a certain amount of naivete to do something this big.”But his second answer is “I would not do a thing differently. Because it worked so well and it’s been such an enjoyable experience. I’ve been very lucky in my life.”And he still stands by his choice to use the GPL vs license. “I think it was the right license and it still is the right license.”Having FunTorvalds was clearly having fun. At one point he even showed off his home-built guitar effects pedal (See photo above).On the stage in Korea, Torvalds had joked that “My real job is working with hundreds of billions of transistors — and my pet hobby is working with three.”And the casual setting seemed to provoke an oddly candid discussion:Torvalds said he enjoyed the 2017 “shoot the dinosaurs” game Horizon Zero Dawn.There’s a PlayStation in the Torvalds household, but it’s only turned on once a year when his kids return home for Christmas.Cats or dogs? “Both. I don’t count cats and dogs even as pets. They they become family members.”Torvalds pronounces GIF with a hard “g”, not the software “j” sound.And while the Scandinavian pronunciation for his first name is LEE-nus, “When I moved to the U.S. and started speaking English, I started saying Linus.” He doesn’t want to correct people and has long since given up on expecting an authentic Scandinavian pronunciation for Torvalds. “Don’t even try.”As the interview rolled along, Torvalds gave a reassuringly confident answer to the perennial what-if-you-got-hit-by-a-bus question… “We have such a healthy development community, it’s ridiculous. Most other open- source projects have like a couple of people involved — if it’s a healthy community, they might have tens. We have a thousand people involved in every single release.”And as Torvalds performed the final click for their installation of Fedora, the two joked about Fedora’s default welcome screen as it came up for Linus Torvalds: “It’s Your Operating System.”Torvalds on AIBut their conversation also touched on one of the programming community’s biggest questions. Is AI a bubble or a computing revolution?“It’s clearly both…” Torvalds answered. “It’s clearly a bubble, and at the same time it’s very interesting and I think it will change society, and I think it will change how most skilled jobs get done. At the same time, I don’t think it’s as revolutionary as people make it out to be.” While AI spooks some programmers, Torvalds believes AI “will be a tool, and it will make people more productive. I think that vibe coding is great for getting into programming. I think it’s going to be a horrible thing to maintain… So I don’t think programmers go away. You still want to have the people who know how to maintain the end result.It’s a question that hands over the industry — and it’s a theme he returned to at Tokyo’s Open Source Summit last monthAsked if he could envision AI tools making the work easier, Torvalds noted in that discussion that Linux already has “tons of tools for checking in code.” In fact, at the maintainer summit he’d been attending in Tokyo, “one of the bigger subjects we will be discussing is expanding our tooling… and our policies when it comes to using AI for tooling.”While he hates the hype around AI, at the same time “I’m a huge believer in AI as a tool… We have projects going on already to do code reviews… This has been talked about for a long time. It’s actually getting to the point where I see examples of people who do AI review, and some of them are so promising that I’m a huge believer, and I think next year it will hopefully be a fairly integral part of our flow…”“We have not been using it a lot to help Linux kernel development. But that is definitely coming.”After a lifetime lived in code — there’s typically about 12,000 commits for a single merge window, spread across hundreds of pull requests — Torvalds has seen technologies come again. And while he’s genuinely enthusiastic about the possibility of new gains, still he believes that in the history of programming, it was compilers that brought the biggest speed-up in productivity. So while AI may prove useful, “It’s still just a tool.”“That’s my opinion. And hey, if in ten years robots will have taken over and killed us all? I was wrong. My bad.”The post Linus Torvalds Gets Candid About Windows, Workflows, and AI appeared first on The New Stack.