I don't like Linus's approach because it takes the conversation away from "how did this break, let's investigate carefully" and steers it towards blaming an ind

I don't like Linus's approach because it takes the conversation away from "how did this break, let's investigate carefully" and steers it towards blaming an individual for making a mistake. As Mauro points out in the replies, the patch here was trying to fix an issue where one driver (uvcvideo) was returning error codes that didn't match what the majority of drivers were doing -- something that was also a bug and was also breaking userspace. The -ENOENT that Linus screams about is an internal driver error that accidentally was returned to userspace in one place. No core maintainer was refusing to fix userspace (read the thread!), they just wanted to understand the breakage in question since the patch was intended to fix something else! Software is hard and tricky. The correct response to managing this complexity shouldn't be calling someone an idiot for trying. A lot of the widely-celebrated "Linus burns" have important, nuanced discussion behind them that is thrown out the window when it's reduced to swears and anger.