Geek who bad-mouth competitors to gain cheap popularity is not worth any respect.

That's cool and all... but how many Torvalds interviews do we have to have?

He is just trying to be funny in his own way. Don't take it personal, I find his comments cool and funny.

When Steve and Bill produce the tiniest fart you've got every single reporter covering it.

I kind of agree. That comment was out of line IMO. He lost a bit of my respect there...

That's cool and all... but how many Torvalds interviews do we have to have?

he always feels this need to bash others, in this case Ballmer

'I have a hard time really seeing what the heck Ballmer is doing. First the monkey dance, then the chair throwing. At some point he called Linux 'un-American', apparently because he doesn't like the competition. Then the cancer thing.

I think he tried to say that open source grows very aggressively and takes over (which is good - if you're into that whole expanding markets thing), but he wanted to put it in terms of something that grows out of control and is bad for what it is growing in. Thus: cancer. So I can certainly see the logic of choosing that word. '

Of course open source grows aggressively: what's not to like? Low cost, great quality, and a lack of being shackled to some commercial company that you can't really trust further than the fact that they'll happily continue to take your money. And yes, it does grow at the cost of Microsoft, but that's called competition. It doesn't make it 'cancer' any more than it ever made it 'un-American'.

Torvalds called it Linux (short for Linus' MINIX).

And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I'm a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don't want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be "overly technical" - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.

Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I've never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu. And before Debian people attack me - yeah, I know, I know, it's supposedly much simpler and easier to install these days. But it certainly didn't use to be, so I never had any reason to go for it.

Yes he created his own OS