35 years of Linux: the hobby that changed the world
Today, 25 August 2026, marks 35 years since a 21-year-old student in Helsinki posted to comp.os.minix:
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.
That message, signed Linus Benedict Torvalds, announced what we now call Linux. No one —not even him— imagined that this «hobby» would end up powering:
- 96 % of the world’s web servers
- Every Android smartphone (over 3 billion devices)
- 100 % of the TOP500 supercomputers
- The International Space Station, Mars rovers, and the critical infrastructure of banks, exchanges and governments
- VasakOS, our desktop on Arch Linux with Wayland and native Rust applications
From «just a hobby» to global infrastructure#
Torvalds’ genius wasn’t just writing a kernel, but choosing the GPLv2 and opening development to everyone. That decision made Linux the first truly global free-software project: thousands of developers from competing companies (Intel, AMD, Red Hat, Google, IBM, Samsung…) collaborate daily on the same code.
In 2026 the kernel exceeds 36 million lines and receives contributions from more than 2 000 developers per release cycle. Each version —now every 9-10 weeks— adds support for new hardware, filesystems, architectures and performance improvements that benefit the entire ecosystem.
Linux and VasakOS: the foundation we build on#
VasakOS is born on top of Arch Linux, which in turn lives on the Linux kernel. Our choice of Arch as a base is no accident:
- Rolling release: the new kernel reaches our users days after upstream publication, without six-month waits.
- Upstream first: we contribute patches to the kernel and subsystems (drm, input, usb…) instead of maintaining private forks.
- Native Wayland: the Wayfire compositor runs on DRM/KMS, the kernel’s modern graphics API, with no X11 layers in between.
- Hardware enablement: from GPU drivers to laptop sensors, it all comes from the kernel.
When you install VasakOS, you are installing Linux. The same kernel Google uses in its servers, NASA in its probes, and Steam Deck in your living room.
A «thank you» that doesn’t fit in a commit#
To Linus, to the subsystem maintainers (Greg KH, David Airlie, Christian Brauner, Ted Ts’o, Jens Axboe…), to the driver developers who make your Wi-Fi, GPU and printer work, to the security teams (KSPP, Kernel Self Protection Project) and to every person who ever reported a bug, tested an rc or wrote a line of documentation.
Without you, VasakOS would not exist.
What was your first contact with Linux? Tell us on Telegram or GitHub . And if you want to celebrate by contributing, our getting started guide is waiting.
