Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

Torvalds is poking a finger in the soft underbelly of commercial software: the uncomfortable truth that “works” is often defined less by correctness than by customer perception. The line lands because it flips the engineer’s moral hierarchy. In the developer’s world, correctness is the bedrock; in the market’s world, the interface is the handshake, the packaging, the promise. He’s not merely praising UI. He’s accusing companies of treating usability as a substitute for integrity.

The subtext is classic Torvalds: prickly, anti-marketing, suspicious of polish that outpaces substance. Coming from the architect of Linux, it carries an implied contrast between open-source values (robustness, transparency, the right to inspect and fix) and corporate incentives (ship fast, sell confidence, reduce support costs). When he says correctness “seems to be secondary,” the cynicism is strategic. It’s a reminder that buyers rarely observe correctness directly; they observe friction. A program can be quietly wrong in ways that don’t announce themselves, while a clumsy interface feels wrong instantly.

The context is a long-running tension in tech culture: engineering excellence versus product storytelling. UI is where companies compete because it’s where users actually live. Torvalds’ jab suggests that commerce rewards legibility over truth, and that the industry’s success metrics often privilege the appearance of control over the reality of correctness. It’s a warning disguised as a quip: if you optimize for the surface, you can sell dysfunction beautifully.