I first started using Linux in 1995 (I think it was kernel 1.2 or something), and this was being argued over (or at least discussed) even back then. The conclusion was that Leenus doesn’t care how you pronounce Leenux.

That was very enlightening, the Spanish pronunciation is actually more close to that than the English one, so I feel very validated as an Spanish speaker. Thank you. Also didn’t knew that he wasn’t from an English speaking country.

So his name is really Lin-us and not Line-us?

I’m Italian and I pronounce both "i"s in the same way. Why is English so strange?

Definitive proof: https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/english.wav

Correction: Even though he’s Finnish, his primary language is Swedish

“Hello, this is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce ‘Linux’ as ‘Linux’.”

So yeah, he pronounces ‘Linus’ like ‘LEE-noose’, and ‘Linux’ like ‘LEE-nooks’. (Roughly, anyway. It should get the point across for most English speakers, I’m not at a computer to do a more-correct IPA transcription right now.)

akshully

It’s “substitute user do”, and defaults to root

IIRC

It’s really confusing because “pseudo” pronounce the same way, means not real. So it’s like you only kind of have admin access but really there’s a lot of systems you can’t change. Except that’s not the case, and you have full access.

I have no source to back this up so maybe I came up with this in my own reality, but I thought it was related to, pseudo = pretended.

Ah, yeah, that fucked me up too few months ago, there are several videos on the subject. I think it’s a problem with words that are created as written first, and then got pronounced, in second place, like most tech lingo. As a non-native speaker those are always the hardest to speak correctly, and even english has no real consensus.

There is nothing to debate, Linux is just Linus with an x at the end and should be pronounced as such.

Though sometimes I wish Linus had claimed it was pronounced laynaxe just to fuck with people. Too bad we already know: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c39QPDTDdXU&pp=ygUpbXkgbmFtZSBpcyBsaW51cyB0b3J2YWxkcyBhbmQgaSBwcm9ub3VuY2U%3D

I started back with kernel 0.12 and called it Line-ucks. I still do and people look at me funny, but it’s an old habit and I’m an old dog.

When Linus released his audio file it was already etched into my brain the other way. I do remember being joking that I’m glad his name wasn’t Pinus (like the genus for pine trees) after hearing him say it.

It used to be Line-UI until programming jargon became woke and wanted “experiences” over “interfaces”

it’s jif. every argument for gif is wrong, and it sounds awkward af, like you got swiped by candlejack mid-wor

No, it’s pronounced Linux

I’ve always pronounced it as “Linux”. And then, one day I heard it from a native English speaker pronouncing it as “Linix”, and I still keep hearing that everywhere, but I just cannot fix my brain anymore. To me it always remains “Linux”.

I thought Linux was named after Linus Torvalds, its creator.

They do have different roots.

One is % sudo su –

And the other is Canadian directly. Ask his parents their nationality to find better roots.

“English is not a language, it’s three languages wearing a trench coat pretending to be one.”

For more fun, right about the time the printing press came into widespread use and English spelling became standardized, the language was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift.

“Linus” comes from Greek and means “flax.” Originally pronounced something like “lee-noose.” “Linux” is a combination of Linus’ name (the creator of Linux) and “Unix.”

That’s_ not the cause though, most if not all languages have been influenced by many others. And pronunciation, meaning of words etc drift over time in all of them as well.
Most countries have gone through the process of revising their orthography, changing spelling or even adopting different alphabets to have kind of consistent writing systems for their languages.
None of this has been done in the English language, it uses the most basic Latin alphabet which was made for a very different language (when even many Romance languages directly descending from Latin have adapted it with new letters or diacritics), for example English has a lot of vowel sounds that Latin hadn’t and it even went through something called ‘the great vowel shift’ when changes in some vowel sounds got them closer to others that were ‘pushed’, these pushed others causing a sort of shuffling in the (finite) vowel space, but spelling didn’t reflect most of this.
In fact I think that in some cases the spelling took the more ancient version that matched the pronunciation even less like ‘plumb’ (don’t quote me on this, its from the top of my head)

in spanish quizás

No, I pronounce them Lee-nukes and Lee-noose.

“Line-oh” like its French

Lie nucks

Bro… do people unironically say it the other way?

Actually, he didn’t even name it that way, though he did later dictate how it should be pronounced before demonstrating that pronunciation with a completely different pronunciation.

Ari Lemmke, Torvalds’ coworker at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that “Freax” was a good name, so he named the project “Linux” on the server without consulting Torvalds.[58] Later, however, Torvalds consented to “Linux”.

According to a newsgroup post by Torvalds,[11] the word “Linux” should be pronounced (/ˈlɪnʊks/ ⓘ LIN-uuks) with a short ‘i’ as in ‘print’ and ‘u’ as in ‘put’. To further demonstrate how the word “Linux” should be pronounced, he included an audio guide with the kernel source code.[59] However, in this recording, he pronounces Linux as /ˈlinʊks/ (LEEN-uuks) with a short but close front unrounded vowel, instead of a near-close near-front unrounded vowel as in his newsgroup post.

Interesting! Do you happen to know where the -UX suffix convention came from?