This week the Linux operating system turns 25

On August 25, 1991, the Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds published a message on the Internet in which he asked his fellow programmers for help in creating a new operating system. Then no one thought that after 25 years of Linux will be the most common of the free operating systems in the world. Operating systems based on Linux today are leaders in the markets of supercomputers, microcomputers, servers and smartphones. But it all started just as a hobby of one and only person.

"Hello to everyone who uses Minix! I'm doing a (free) operating system (this is just a hobby, it will not be big and professional like gnu) for clones 386 (486) AT, "Linus wrote at the Usenet comp.os.minix forum. With these words he initiated the largest project in his life. The very rare case when a hobby suddenly turns into your main job and you earn what you really like.

The Linux Foundation recently published a detailed report on its achievements in the last quarter of a century. Since 2005, when the operating system code was published on Git, more than 13,500 professionals from 1,300 different companies contributed to Linux. In the period from version 3.19 to 4.7, the operating system Torvalds received an average of 7.8 patches per hour. The largest sponsors of the project are such companies as Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, SUSE, IBM, Renesas, Google, AMD, Taxas Instuments and ARM.

"I'm very pleased with the desktop version of Linux. Of course, I wanted Linux to capture the world of desktop PCs, but it turned out to be very difficult to capture this area. I'm still working on this. It's been 25 years now. I can spend another 25 years on this. I will achieve my long siege, "Linus Torvalds said during his April speech at the Embedded Linux conference.

It remains to wish Linux developers great success in their endeavors. Monopoly is bad for any market, and the market for desktop operating systems, as you well understand, has now been undermined by Microsoft. Following it with a large gap is the Mac OS and only then - Linux. At once we will make a reservation, that in this case it is a question exclusively of desktop OS, instead of about mobile. In the mobile world ruled by the Android ball, which, unsurprisingly, is based on the Linux kernel.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/computers/na-etoj-nedele-operacionnoj-sisteme-linux-ispolnyaetsya-25-let.html.