Linus Torvalds Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds (; ; born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish–American software engineer who is the creator, and historically, the principal developer of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for many Linux distributions and operating systems such as Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed version control system Git and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used
Kernel (operating system) in 1984, bundled with its Macintosh personal computer. Apple moved to a nanokernel design in Mac OS 8.6. Against this, the modern macOS (originally named Mac OS X) is based on Darwin, which uses a hybrid kernel called XNU, which was created by combining the 4.3BSD kernel and the Mach kernel. Microsoft Windows was first released in 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS. Because of its dependence on another operating system, initial releases of Windows, prior to Windows 95, were considered an operating environment (not to be confused with an operating system). This product line continued to evolve through the