Linux is 34 years old today
Today, 25 August 2025, the world celebrates 34 years since a 21-year-old student from Finland, Linus Torvalds, announced at a forum that he had been working on his own operating system as a hobby since April, had a working build and would have the final product ready in a few months. Over the years, his operating system has come a long way. Nowadays, Linux is found in everything: smartphones, Wi-Fi routers, smart refrigerators, supercomputers, the ISS space station - the list is endless.
As Torvalds later said in an interview, he really liked the Unix architecture, except for one thing: its licence cost thousands of dollars. As a student, he decided that it would be easier to write the same thing himself. Coincidentally, at the same time, the GNU project was looking for an operating system kernel. There were serious problems with this, because in the early 90s, operating systems were mostly either the property of research institutes (which would never give them to anyone) or commercial professional products with a high price tag.
If you're not too deep into the topic, here's an explanation so you don't get confused by these names:
GNU is an open source software project. It takes care of the development of not only operating systems, but also a large number of other programs.
Linux is an operating system, a kernel. By itself, the bare kernel has no graphical shell, it is a black screen with which you can communicate by typing commands. That's why it's compact and flexible - you can use it on a server, mobile phone, or Wi-Fi router. But if you need to, it won't be difficult to install a beautiful shell with windows and buttons to make it easy to click with the mouse. Depending on the pre-installed shell and the set of programs, there are different Linux distributions.
The path of Linux
The first public version of Linux 0.01 in September 1991 had 10,239 lines of code. Today, the kernel contains more than 34 million lines of code, and this number is only growing every day. The number of developers has also grown from one (Linus himself) to more than 25,000.
- Dominance in the supercomputing world: Linux runs all 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers. More than 90% of public clouds run on Linux. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and similar companies are on the list of customers.
- Smartphones: Android is also Linux, which is about 72% of the global smartphone market, with more than 1.5 billion new devices annually. In addition, there are several other mobile operating systems based on Linux - Moblin, Sailfish, etc.
- Servers: Linux runs 96.3 per cent of the world's top one million web servers - impressive numbers, right?
- IoT and embedded systems: More than 68% of IoT devices run on Linux; the embedded-Linux market is estimated to be worth around $5.3 billion.
- Even the desktop: The share of Linux in the desktop segment grew from 2.76% in 2022 to 4.1% in mid-2025. In the US, Linux's share is even higher at 5.03%.
- Developers love Linux: about 78.5% of developers worldwide use Linux as their primary or secondary system.
So, the system that started as a hobby has become one of the most popular in the world and its story is still being written.
Source: 9to5linux.com
