You use Linux every day whether you know it or not. Over 850,000 Android phones running Linux are activated every single day. Compare that to just 30,000 Windows phones, according to the latest reports. That means 100 Android devices have come online just since you started watching this video. Nearly 700,000 TVs are sold every day, most of which are running Linux. 8 out of 10 financial trades are powered by Linux. 9 out of 10 of the world’s supercomputers run Linux. Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon are all powered by Linux.
So how has Linux developed to achieve all of this?
Unlike other operating systems like Windows or iOS, Linux is built collaboratively across companies, geographies, and markets, resulting in the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing. A major new kernel comes out every 2 to 3 months. Compare this to years of competing operating systems. This is made possible by a unique collaborative development process. When submitting code to the Linux kernel, developers break changes into individual units called patches. A patch describes the lines that need to be changed, added, or removed from the source code. Each patch can add a new feature, new support for a device, fix a problem, improve performance, or rework things to be more easily understood. Nearly 10,000 patches go into almost every new release. About 6 patches are applied to the kernel each hour. Linux’s rate of development is simply unmatched.
Today, Linux is dominating mobile devices in the enterprise and web infrastructure, data centers, supercomputing, and more.
What’s next?
Because together we are ready.