21/03/2026
Drop your take below...
Linux was created as a desktop operating system. And yet.. that's the one place it never fully won. In this 2012 Aalto Talk, Linus Torvalds admits something that still frustrates him today: Linux dominates servers, infrastructure, supercomputers even phones but desktop adoption never reached the level he expected. He points to Android as proof that Linux did succeed at Scale.
At the time, Google was activating 900,000 Android devices every single day powered by the Linux kernel. That's not a small win. That's global dominance. But for Linus, it's bittersweet. Linux runs the world quietly... just not on most people's laptops.
And that contrast still "annoys the hell out of him." Sometimes the biggest victories don't look the way you imagined. Do you think Linux will ever win on the desktop or is its future permanently elsewhere?
