Some of the other comments here have mentioned, but it bears repeating: this is not the "normal" Linus. He doesn't rant 100% of the time, but when he does, you had better pay attention because it must be something very important.
I don't understand this justification. If someone I worked with had a habit of "occasionally" insulting people, they should be fired. Just because we can't fire Linus doesn't mean what he does is okay.
Some people are in the 99.99th percentile of being irritating and proposing bad ideas, such that virtually nobody on earth has enough diplomacy to stifle their temper when having to deal with them for extended periods.
Most people are never forced to deal with enough people, to regularly be forced into extended contact with this particular kind of person. The kind of person who is forced to deal with enough people that they are likely to inevitably, eventually have to work with such people, is what we usually refer to as "a politician." But that's not quite accurate.
See, elected politicians learn to hide their distaste for such people, and that's how we get our sense of what it means to "act like a politician." But founders, kings, and other such benevolent-dictator-for-life are still politicians—they have to hold court taking the full spectrum of opinions from the brilliant to the idiotic—but they don't usually bother to hide this distaste.
We have no equivalent word for someone forced to do what a politician does, but without the same incentives to put on a face and pretend they aren't hating some parts of their job.
No, just the opposite: we fire (i.e. not re-elect) people with power for being assholes whenever we can, even if they’re perefect at their jobs otherwise and their attitude isn’t actually hurting anybody (including the people they are asshholes toward—usually those people got to where they were in life, proposing horrible ideas like they do over and over and over again, by being completely immune and oblivious to criticism.)
Hypothesis: governments and other such bodies could be a lot better-run if we just had to choose the least charismatic/diplomatic qualified person possible, because then that lack of charisma would prevent them from swaying us with anything besides facts; and then, later, nothing they could do could make anyone like them any less than they already do, so they wouldn’t have to worry about maintaining their image getting in the way of doing their job.
Some of the other comments here have mentioned, but it bears repeating: this is not the "normal" Linus. He doesn't rant 100% of the time, but when he does, you had better pay attention because it must be something very important.