When the Dust Settles, Linux
Three operating systems are competing for the future of computing, and I’ve been thinking about which one deserves to win for longer than I probably should. The question isn’t academic—what runs our machines shapes how we think, what we’re allowed to do, and who owns the relationship between us and our tools.
Windows got to ninety percent market share through luck, not merit. Apple was financially weakened in the nineties. Steve Jobs wouldn’t license the Mac OS. Linux was still server infrastructure that nobody normal touched. That’s the entire story. Not innovation, not quality, certainly not security—just a gap that Microsoft walked into and then sealed shut behind them. The people actually coding that system, staying up nights and dreaming in their own language—I have respect for them. The direction the company chose is a different matter.
Apple is beautiful and I understand the pull completely. But one corporation owning the hardware, the software, the distribution platform, and eventually the culture built around all of it—that’s a different kind of prison. Glossy and white, but still a prison. The idea of any single company running the world’s computing is genuinely frightening, whether it’s Microsoft, Apple, or whoever comes after both of them.
Linux is the only one that structurally can’t be owned. There’s no board to pressure, no CEO to threaten, no acquisition to make. It’s a thing assembled from many parts that together form something no single entity controls. That’s not just an ideological point—it’s an architectural one. That’s the actual strength of it.
Einstein supposedly said that WWIII would be fought with nuclear weapons and WWIV with sticks and stones. I think about that framing sometimes when I try to imagine the far end of whatever collapse eventually comes—water scarce, cities in fragments, civilization running on its own wreckage. Whatever survives of the network will run on Linux. Not out of principle. Because it’s the only one that belongs to everyone and can’t be taken back.