The "bad taste" program of Linus performs two comparisons if it want to remove the first entry of the list. The "good taste" program of Linus, like your program perform only the needed number of comparisons.

For me, your program is similar to the one of Linus where you have unrolled the first iteration of the loop in order to avoid pointer syntax difficulties. Your program makes it also trivial to fix what you called the elephant. I think Linus has omit it for simplicity of example.

I like your program slightly better than the one of Linus because the syntax is less tricky, but I think the point of Linus was only the superfluous comparison in the "bad" one.