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I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

We've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice, but they're very close to the machine and what we wanted was to empower regular users to build applications for Linux.

There's innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I'm proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren't in other operating systems.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot.

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.