According to Its Foss, the Linux founder made the comments in a jokey PC-building video with Linus Tech Tips host Linus Sebastian, where the pair compared notes on reliability and Torvald’s well-known love of ECC memory. Sebastian teased him about it, and Torvalds responded with a take that will surprise anyone who grew up sniggering at Windows meltdowns.

Linux chief Linus Torvald said, “I am convinced that all the jokes about how unstable Windows is and blue screening, I guess it is not a blue screen anymore, a big percentage of those were not software bugs. A big percentage of those are hardware that is not reliable.”

Torvalds went further by pointing out that gamers who overclock their machines are practically begging for trouble because they push components beyond what they were designed to tolerate. The result is crashes that are blamed on Windows, even though the underlying cause lies in the silicon rather than the software.

His view is that the ECC kit makes a machine genuinely trustworthy since it can correct memory faults before they spiral. Without it, memory errors accumulate until the whole rig keels over and the user shouts at the operating system rather than at their cheap components.

Torvalds’ comments suggest the BSOD legend owes as much to flaky hardware and reckless tweaking as it does to Microsoft’s code. The bit of the video where he chats about it begins around 9 minutes 39 seconds in and shows a more relaxed, human Torvalds than his grumpy kernel-list persona.