This was posted by Nixie Pixel on her FB page (I guess many of you already know her).

The humor of the Linux programmers/hackers is one of the many things I like about Linux, as well as the sort of subculture around the OS.

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Years ago I worked on Datapoint equipment running hospitality software.

On using the command to get into "Maintenance mode" it would say: "Instruct me, o wizard!".

Humorless management happened to notice that one day and actually complained to the software company about how "unprofessional" they were.

Its that same kind of management that gets annoyed when you name your systems for anything other than purpose. They never accept the idea that systems change purpose over time. Not as big a deal these days but it used to be attempting to change a UNIX server's hostname or uname caused things to break.

At one job we were naming systems for Star Trek star ships. I couldn't think of one we hadn't used when building a server so I named it "borgcube". Shortly after that management decided we should use purpose names. To be fair most of my fellow admins hated that particular name as well.

Totally appropriate purpose name since part of a server's job is to assimilate Data...

thankfully, linux error messages often show some degree of humour; often even the command/software names themselves.
i always liked that, particularly that it doesn't have to be "professional" to be good.

more linux humour:
https://www.sudosatirical.com/
it's precious! sometimes the articles don't seem to be so very funny; it's in the details.
in the most recent one (Magnus is the main developer of Schizo Linux):
"Community sentiment has been at an all-time high, with 6 out of Magnus’ 8 online personalities feeling good about the decision."

or this

Not sure exactly how to interpret it; probably as a kind of mockery to the most purist Linux users. It made me chuckle anyway. By the way, I wouldn't call a dog "Linux"; you wouldn't know what kind of weird effect it may have on the dog .

Or inappropriate if you don't like power surges. A server on which resistance is futile might get fried quickly.

This is an old favourite of mine
https://xkcd.com/456/

Apparently there used to be an error message that said "Your printer is on fire!".

I like the jokes in the names of the programs. For example "less" tips a hat to the minimalist architect Mies van der Rohe, who used to say "Less is more".

more
pine - Pine Is Not Elm
nano - Nano's ANOther editor

so many software names are a play on words.
especially the package managers:
etc.
archlinux forums even have a good name - bad name thread.

Well, at least that situation is not that bad. I used to had a friend who used Linux and had no idea how to use the command line or how the system works, so everytime he had a problem, he would do web searches and randomly executed commands without having a clue what he was doing. I had to fix his messes almost every week (which sometimes involved reinstalling the whole OS). I finally ended up telling him I was not going to keep cleaning up his messes (I have barely seen him since).

^ that's how i started, too - except there was no-one to clean up my mess!

Well, I suppose you learnt something from it at least. I doubt my friend has learnt anything from his messes (or from Linux in general).

What about yacc (Yet Another Compiler Compiler), which became Bison (Yak?).

Suse's control centre is called yast (Yet Another Setup Tool).

By the way, it's an interesting experience to grep for the F-word in the kernel source tree. You'll find a lot of hits. Linus may be a genius but he's no saint! His other major creation, git, takes its name from a British word for a complaining old codger.

The web-browser NetPositive famously had haiku error messages like, for an unavailable site,
Cables have been cut
Southwest of Northeast somewhere
We are not amused.

Here are a few more good error messages:
https://www.intertech.com/Blog/funny...rror-messages/
#9 is surely a classic.