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"I think Leopard is a much better system. On the other hand, OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for," Torvalds tells the Sydney Morning Herald. "Its file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary."

Torvalds also admitted to being unhappy with the huge marketing campaigns that now accompany the launch of operating

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systems.

"When you make a big deal about something like Vista or Leopard a lot of it's about things I don't consider to be the operating system. It's about the visual shell around it. An operating system should be completely invisible. To Microsoft and Apple it's a way to control the whole environment ... to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."

However, while Torvalds has some reservations about commercial operating systems he does believe the growing involvement of commercial companies in Linux has had a positive effect.

"The commercial companies are good at picking up areas that individual developers don't care about," he says. "Things like packaging, quality assurance, testing. An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing. Commercial companies... do a whole lot of good."