Linux was created by Linus Torvalds , a Finnish computer science student, in 1991.

Quick Scoop

  • Linux started as a personal hobby project by Linus Torvalds while he was a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
  • He originally built it as a free, Unix-like operating system kernel to run on his own PC with an Intel 80386 processor.
  • Torvalds announced Linux publicly in 1991, sharing the source code so that anyone could use, study, and improve it, which kicked off the global open‑source development model around the Linux kernel.

In short, when people ask “who created Linux,” the answer is Linus Torvalds — with millions of developers worldwide helping evolve it ever since.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.