Journal •
1991 2026
Linux began as one student’s side project and grew into the foundation of the modern Internet. Follow its story from Linus Torvalds’ first announcement in 1991 through GNU, the kernel releases, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu and Android to containers, cloud computing and today’s infrastructure — a timeline of the people, ideas and communities that built Linux.
- Events
- 81
Play the Interactive Timeline
Every event, narrated, one step at a time
- March 10 Linus Torvalds buys the Intel 386 PC he will develop Linux on
- April 3 The Legal Battle That Changed OS History: AT&T Sues BSD in 1991
- July 3 Linus Torvalds posts his first request for the POSIX standard on comp.os.minix
- August 25 Linus Torvalds announces his hobby OS on comp.os.minix
- September 17 Linux 0.01 is uploaded to the FUNET FTP server, the kernel's technical birthday
- October 5 Linux 0.02, the first publicly announced release able to run Bash and GCC, ships
- November Linux 0.10 ships, able to compile itself
- January 5 Linux 0.12 ships and the kernel is relicensed under the GNU GPL
- January 29 Andrew Tanenbaum publishes "Linux is Obsolete", igniting the microkernel debate
- July Slackware Linux 1.0, the oldest continuously maintained distribution, is released
- August 16 Ian Murdock announces the Debian project
- March S.u.S.E. Linux 1.0, a German Slackware-derived distribution, is released
- March 14 Linux kernel 1.0 is released
- October 31 The first public Red Hat Linux release, beta 0.9 — the "Halloween" release — ships
- May 13 Red Hat Linux 1.0 is released
- May Linus Torvalds approves Tux the penguin as Linux's official mascot
- June 9 Linux 2.0 ships with symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support
- October 14 Matthias Ettrich announces the KDE project
- July 5 Debian adopts its Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines
- August 15 The GNOME project is announced
- February 3 How the Open Source Movement Began on February 3, 1998
- March 5 Eric Raymond publishes "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
- July 12 KDE 1.0 is released
- January 25 Linux 2.2.0 ships with an improved network stack and hardware support
- February 18 IBM announces Linux support alongside Red Hat
- March 3 GNOME 1.0, a fully free desktop environment, is released
- March 9 Debian 2.1 "Slink" introduces APT
- August 11 Red Hat goes public on NASDAQ
- August 10 The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is founded
- October 31 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the first enterprise Linux distribution, ships for IBM S/390
- December IBM announces a $1 billion investment in Linux
- January 4 Linux 2.4.0 ships with USB, PCMCIA, and ext3 support
- March 11 Judd Vinet releases Arch Linux 0.1
- March 26 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, the first release to carry the RHEL name, ships
- March 6 SCO sues IBM for $1 billion over Unix code in Linux
- September Red Hat announces it will discontinue Red Hat Linux, splitting into Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- November 6 Fedora Core 1 is released
- December 17 Linux 2.6.0 ships with the O(1) scheduler, NPTL, and ALSA
- March 5 Canonical, publisher of Ubuntu, is founded
- May 14 CentOS is released
- August The first Akademy, KDE's annual developer conference, is held
- October 20 Canonical ships Ubuntu 4.10 "Warty Warthog"
- April 7 Linus Torvalds makes the first commit to Git
- August 9 The openSUSE Project launches, opening SUSE Linux development to the community
- June 1 Ubuntu 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake", Canonical's first long-term support release, ships
- August 27 Linux Mint 1.0 "Ada" is released
- January 22 The Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group merge to form the Linux Foundation
- June 29 The Free Software Foundation releases GPLv3
- August 10 A Key Court Ruling in the SCO–Linux Disputes
- November 5 The Open Handset Alliance announces Android, built on the Linux kernel
- September 23 The first Android phone, the HTC Dream, is unveiled
- April 27 Samsung announces its first Android phone
- July GNOME and KDE hold their first joint Desktop Summit
- April 30 Lennart Poettering publishes "Rethinking PID 1", introducing systemd
- March 31 elementary OS 0.1 "Jupiter" is released
- May 24 Fedora 15 becomes the first major distribution to default to systemd
- July 21 Linux 3.0 is released, marking the kernel's 20th anniversary
- August 28 An intrusion into kernel.org's infrastructure is discovered
- December 20 Cinnamon, a fork of GNOME Shell, has its first release
- January 7 Red Hat and the CentOS Project join forces
- February 11 Debian selects systemd as its default init system
- April 12 Linux 4.0 ships with live kernel patching
- August 22 The Linux Foundation marks the kernel's 25th anniversary
- November 16 Microsoft joins the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member
- May 17 Android reaches 2 billion monthly active devices
- November 13 Every system on the TOP500 supercomputer list now runs Linux
- March 3 Linux 5.0 ships
- July 9 IBM completes its roughly $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat
- September 24 CentOS Stream is released alongside CentOS 8
- December 8 CentOS announces it is shifting focus to CentOS Stream
- March 30 AlmaLinux OS 8.3, a CentOS successor, reaches its first stable release
- May 18 Android reaches 3 billion active devices
- June 21 Rocky Linux 8.4 "Green Obsidian", a CentOS successor, reaches its first stable release
- October 2 Linux 6.0 ships
- December 11 Linux 6.1 lands the kernel's initial Rust infrastructure
- February 28 KDE Plasma 6 is released
- March 29 The XZ Utils supply-chain backdoor, CVE-2024-3094, is disclosed
- June 30 CentOS Linux reaches its final end of life
- June 26 Omarchy first release
- April 12 Linus Torvalds releases Linux 7.0
- August 14 Omarchy 4.0 "Quattro" releases