Why Linus Torvalds would rather code than make money

That's not how it is. And it's not even so with a browser.

Most of the time, I have everything in one browser window with tabs, but if I have two browsers open, I have them open for a frigging reason, and they're not one browser, they're two browsers.

LXF: You can turn them off with an extension, but we've read your rant about them and broken upgrades. You could work around it by having Opera, Chrome and Firefox windows open all at once.

LT: Yeah, you can solve it by using different applications, but otherwise it makes no sense at all.

And why would I want to use Firefox and Chrome separately just to get Alt+tab to work right?

And why did you do that again? They never have a reason - there's no sane reason for that except Mac OS does that, and they never used to do the whole multitasking thing, they only have one task bar.

LXF: Have you heard about the Raspberry Pi? At least in the UK, it's really captured everyone's imagination.

LT: It's slightly too slow for what I'd like to do.

The thing can actually output on to a real monitor, but then apparently it can't play YouTube, etc, and if it can't make things like that smooth, then it's a bit too slow.

LXF: The problem is it requires some firmware which isn't open source.

LT: Plus it's like two to three years old, the SoC on that board, to keep the price down.

I think it's a compelling idea.

I really like the notion of having hardware that's so cheap you can basically give it out to kids, and 99% will never use it for anything, because they'd rather play; but if you give everybody the possibility of maybe noticing that it's cool to hack on things like that, I think it's great.

I suspect that the next generation is going to be sufficiently better that you can do some things with it.

LXF: We do a podcast and have this thing called an open ballot. One of things we asked recently is: "If you were Linus Torvalds, what would you change about Linux?"

LT: I wouldn't change a thing.