On 25 August 2026 Linux turned 35 years old. In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish student named Linus Torvalds posted to the group comp.os.minix a message that would make history:
Olá a todos que usam minix -
Estou fazendo um sistema operacional (livre) (é só um hobby,
não vai ser grande e profissional como o gnu) para clones
386(486) AT. [...]
“Just a hobby”. Thirty-five years later, that hobby runs on practically everything: from the planet's 500 largest supercomputers to the phone in your pocket. The full story of the person who started it all is in The history of Linus Torvalds — and the lineage that inspired him is in The history of UNIX.
And to celebrate in video, Jono Bacon summarizes the saga in 35 facts — from 1991 to today:
From 10 thousand to 40 million lines
The growth of kernel code tells the story better than any speech:
| Year | Version | Lines of code (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| 1991 | 0.01 | ~10 thousand |
| 1994 | 1.0 | ~176 thousand |
| 2001 | 2.4 | ~2,4 million |
| 2011 | 3.0 | ~14,6 million |
| 2020 | 5.8 | ~28 million |
| 2026 | 6.x / 7.x | ~40 million |
More impressive than the number is the pace: every cycle of about two months brings a new kernel version, with contributions from thousands of developers at hundreds of companies — competitors collaborating on the same code. It is the largest collaborative project in software history. To see this engine turning in practice, read our deep dive into what arrived in Linux kernel 7.3.
A 35-year timeline
- 25/ago/1991 — Linus announces the “hobby” on comp.os.minix
- 1992 — The kernel adopts the GPLv2, the decision that ensured open collaboration
- 1994 — Kernel 1.0; Debian, Red Hat, and Slackware would be born the following year
- 1996 — Tux, Larry Ewing's penguin, becomes the official mascot
- 2003 — Kernel 2.6, the foundation of a decade of corporate stability
- 2005 — Torvalds creates Git in ten days to version the kernel itself
- 2008 — Android, with the Linux kernel at its heart, reaches the market
- 2011 — Kernel 3.0 (more for the symbolism of 20 years than a technical break)
- 2015 — Kernel 4.0; Linux already dominates cloud, mobile, and supercomputing
- 2022 — Rust officially enters the kernel alongside C
- 2025–2026 — The 6.x and 7.x series; the kernel exceeds 40 million lines
Linux supports the internet
If you are reading this post, Linux served you along the way. No exaggeration:
- A vast majority of web servers worldwide run Linux — including this blog.
- 100% of the 500 largest supercomputers run Linux (since 2017, without exception).
- The overwhelming majority of workloads in the public cloud (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) run on Linux.
- Android, the planet's most widely used mobile system, has the Linux kernel at its heart.
- Routers, switches, CDNs, DNS, firewalls: the internet's invisible infrastructure is largely embedded Linux.
Want to see yours?
uname -a
cat /etc/os-release
uptime
And now, the AI era is Linux too
The AI revolution we are experiencing runs entirely on the penguin:
- Large language models are trained on Linux clusters with thousands of GPUs — the CUDA/ROCm stack, drivers, and orchestrators are Linux-first. Why this ecosystem matters so much is covered in the post AMD vs Nvidia and the CUDA moat.
- PyTorch, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, containers: the entire standard AI toolkit was born and lives on Linux.
- Running a local model today means appreciating this heritage: cutting-edge AI in the same old terminal — see Running local AI on Linux with Ollama.
It is no coincidence: the same openness that made Linux dominate servers — open source, global collaboration, technical meritocracy — is what allows AI to evolve at today's speed.
Happy birthday, Tux!
Thirty-five years ago it was “just a hobby” for a student. Today it is the foundation of the internet, cloud, mobile, and AI. If there is a lesson in this story, it is the same as always: bet on open source. And if you want to explore the ecosystem that grew around the kernel, the blog has a history series — from distributions such as Ian Murdock's Debian to projects that shaped the daily lives of Linux administrators.
$ echo "Feliz aniversário, Linux! 🐧"
Feliz aniversário, Linux! 🐧