Linus Torvalds is back at the helm of Linux

Linus Torvalds is back in charge of Linux, following a self-imposed break from his duties pertaining to the open source operating system.

His temporary replacement, Greg Kroah-Hartman, announced the return of Torvalds in a post which detailed the release of Linux kernel 4.19, and the various tweaks and adjustments therein.

As Betanews spotted, Kroah-Hartman wrote: “Linus, I'm handing the kernel tree back to you. You can have the joy of dealing with the merge window.”

The release notes clarify that this wasn’t the largest kernel release going by the number of commits, but that it was larger than the past three releases, and a trickle of ‘good bug fixes’ came in during the past week, which showed that waiting an extra week was a sensible choice.

Unprofessional environment

As mentioned, in a move that surprised everyone in September, Torvalds – who is the creator of Linux – announced that he was taking a break due to his ‘unprofessional’ behavior.

At the time, recent delays to pushing forward with Linux were causing bad feelings within the operating system’s community, and Torvalds responses didn’t help. At the time he admitted: “I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.”

We’ve yet to hear from Torvalds, but it will certainly be interesting to find out what he has to say for himself in due course, and whether we do indeed see more measured responses from the leader of Linux.