Linux turns 34 years

August 25, 2025 marks 34 years since Helsinki student Linus Torvalds first announced on a forum that he was developing his own operating system in his free time. He was 21 at the time, and he only had a working version, but a few months later he presented a full-fledged product. Thus was born Linux – a project that began as a hobby and eventually became the foundation for entire industries.

Torvalds later said that he liked the Unix architecture, but the cost of the license was prohibitive for a student. He decided to write an analogue on his own. Almost at the same time, the GNU community was looking for a kernel for its system, and Linux turned out to be the same insufficient element. The first public version in 1991 contained only about ten thousand lines of code, today there are more than 34 million of them, and tens of thousands of developers around the world are working on the development of the kernel.

Linux is now everywhere, from smartphones and routers to supercomputers and the International Space Station. It powers Android, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the global phone market, nearly all cloud services, and the vast majority of web servers. Even on desktops, where it was previously a niche system, it now accounts for more than 4% of the global market and more than 5% in the US.