[He said "It's] Just a hobby, [it] won't be big," and almost called it FREAX !

[smfadmin (OP)]

https://www.zdnet.com/

'Just a hobby, won't be big': Linus Torvalds introduced Linux 35 years ago - and almost called it Freax

Aug. 25, 2026

It's been 35 years since Finnish graduate student Linus Torvalds drafted a brief note saying he was starting a hobby operating system. The world will never be the same.

Torvalds had no clue how big Linux would become.

Some early developers still work on Linux today.At the time, Torvalds thought he'd call Linux "Freax," a mashup of "free," "freak," and "x" to evoke a Unix‑like system.

When he uploaded the code to the FUNET FTP server, though, his friend Ari Lemmke, who set up the first servers, really disliked "Freax," so he named the project directory "Linux" instead, and that name stuck.

Torvalds has no intention of ever stopping work on Linux.

In 1991, Unix was an important but secondary x86 operating system. That year, on Aug. 25, a Finnish graduate student named Linus Benedict Torvalds announced on the Usenet group comp.os.minix that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

No one knew it, not even Torvalds, but the technology world was about to change forever.

Also: Linux's remarkable journey from one dev's hobby to 40 million lines of code - and counting

Thirty-five years later, Linux rules IT. Almost all major websites, including Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, run on Linux. The same is true of the cloud. Even on Microsoft's Azure, Linux is the most popular operating system. As for supercomputers, the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux. Thanks to Android, Linux is also the most popular end-user operating system.

"Most of the time, Linux was very much under the radar -- it's not like it was ever a university project and I didn't want it to be -- but Helsinki University (at least the CS department) was very open to unofficial 'extra-curricular' activities. I don't think Linux was necessarily all that special in that way either. It just happened to grow to be something big. I never got the feeling that you had to work a special way, or that only the sanctioned official university projects were given resources. For example, the CS department ended up trying out (and then using fairly widely) Linux machines running X as thin clients, but also a DEC Alpha machine running Linux in the server room. Sure, Linux use in universities wasn't exactly unusual, but I think they were particularly open to it because it was a local, cool project."

Today, Torvalds still doesn't see himself retiring to the garden anytime soon, or ever. True, these days he no longer thinks of himself as a programmer; he's mostly a maintainer. AI, which in 1991 was a niche computer science topic, has become 2026's hottest tech. That's fine by Torvalds, who has also embraced AI, especially for finding bugs in Linux.

Where do we go from here? ... Stay tuned. Recently, the one area where Linux hasn't displaced all its former rivals, the desktop, is finally moving to Linux.

So, who knows? By 2031, when Linux turns 40, maybe Linux will be the top desktop operating system.

"The many faces of Linus"