People are overly sensitive. Linus was cool and very friendly and nice person most of the time on the mailing lists. Very very rarely he writes those furious replies, but honestly, it was very fun. I just don't understand why people are so much butt-hurt.

The little interaction I had with Linus was friendly and technical (the only direct contact I had with him was a short email conversation where I provided some details about tape SCSI APIs. If there was more I don't rememember it). Anyway, I followed the Linux mailing list from when it started and for many years, and I read everything (including all the patches up to around kernel 2.3.51, if memory serves). I never saw anything I reacted negatively too, from his side. Quite the opposite.

Can't edit.. that "too" in the last sentence should be "to" of course. Hopefully nobody got confused.

Linus strongly disagreed with your comment, and even took a leave of absence to fix the problem.

It's literally a different generation; and people appear to bruise a lot more easily at this point in time.

So yes, your first sentence answers your last one. :)

Devil's Devil's Advocate (God's Advocate?): his strictness, while perceived as some as aggressive/toxic, is the main reason why the Linux kernel code is high quality.

Contrast with many other open-source projects which allow the product to suffer rather than offending the contributors.

Yep, I remember comments like "You know Linux is good shit because Linus won't tolerate bad patches."

There was a "mailing list alpha male" culture back then which inspired a lot of people to join up. Maybe some people didn't like it, but in Linux's case, the cult of personality attracted a lot of followers.

Modern Linux dev is mostly a 8x5 job now, so that mercurial king stuff became really tired.