On the 25th of August 1991, Finnish student Linus B. Torvalds sent a message on the Newsgroup for Minix, an educational Unix clone written by Professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum:

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

- Linus Torvalds

In the next few months, a small community started to form around the little toy Linux was at the time. At the beginning released under a custom license (without commercial use permission), Linux was released under the GNU General Public License. And this action literally changed history.

The Linux project started to grow together with the explosion of Internet, and thousands of developers focused their effort on improving the Linux kernel and the GNU system. This was caused by various events:

When the dust started to settle in 1994, GNU/Linux had amassed a sizeable community around it. The first pre-packaged distributions (in short, distro) of it started to appear, making easier and easier to install and use the system. The most influential distros appear in this time: Slackware and Debian (which has since become the largest community distro) in 1993, Red Hat and SUSE (the first commercial distros) in 1994. In the next decade, commercial Unix vendors will start to contribute to Linux and slowly stop keeping developing their in-house Unix systems. Even Microsoft will start to be afraid of Linux, with the famous Halloween documents where Microsoft management discusses possible strategies to counteract the rise of Linux in the server space. Nowadays, Linux is the de-facto standard on servers, from small webhosts to national super-computers and everything in between.

Fast-forward to 2008, Google announced Android, an answer to the iPhone (although originally developed as a Blackberry — remember those? — alternative). Android is a Linux kernel with a custom, Java-based userland. It will quickly take over the smartphone world (except for the Apple iPhone island with iOS), causing (together with iOS) the disappeared of Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Symbian and the plethora of custom phone systems.

Nowadays, Linux is slowing growing on desktop computing as well, mostly thanks to commercial offerings like Google ChromeOS (for simple web-based computing) and Valve Steam Deck (for portable gaming). Still a huge mountain to climb but considering that most of today computing happens on servers and smartphones, it is fair to say the Linux is the most used system on the planet.