For years, Linux users have speculated about what Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, actually uses as his daily development machine.
Now we know — because his screen went dark.
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One Black Screen, One Accidental Reveal
While working through the merge window for Linux 6.17, Linus hit a display regression that knocked out his main monitor.
This accident unintentionally gave the world a rare look at his desktop hardware in 2025.
The root cause? A bug in the AMDGPU driver’s handling of Display Stream Compression (DSC).
To keep the merge window moving, Linus rolled the patch back.
And in his message to the kernel mailing list, he casually dropped the line:
“I’m still on the same old boring Radeon RX 580.”
Wait, Linus Still Uses a RX 580?
That one sentence sparked a wave of chatter in the community.
See also: Mastering the Linux Command Line — Your Complete Free Training Guide
Why would the most important person in the Linux world still be using an 8-year-old GPU?
In consumer tech, 8 years is a lifetime.
But the RX 580 is a bit of an outlier — especially in the Linux world.
More importantly, Linus cares far more about open-source drivers, transparency, and long-term stability than raw performance.
And this isn’t new. Back in 2012, during a Q&A, he famously flipped off Nvidia and called them “the single worst company we’ve ever dealt with.”
Nvidia has since started opening parts of its driver stack, but Linus clearly still prefers AMD’s long-standing commitment to open-source principles.
The RX 580 may be old, but it still receives updates, handles his display pipeline, and — most importantly — gets out of the way while he works.
What About the Rest of His System?
After 15 years with Intel, he moved to AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper lineup — and hasn’t looked back.
The massive core count gives him blazing-fast kernel compile times, which is all he really needs.
Even with AMD’s new Threadripper 9970X and 9980X launching recently, Linus hasn’t felt the need to upgrade.
As long as the hardware doesn’t bottleneck kernel development, why change?
Old? Yes. Outdated? Not Really.
Linus doesn’t chase trends. He just needs a machine that builds kernels fast and doesn’t break.
The RX 580 may not be shiny or new, but it’s reliable, open, and still pulling its weight in 2025.
And if that’s good enough for Linus Torvalds — it might just be good enough for the rest of us too.
