Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests.

From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in 86open helping to choose the standard binary format for Linux and Unix. 0 was a "disaster" because of its lack of maturity and so he had switched to GNOME by 2009. Torvalds also commented in 2005 on the official GNOME developmental mailing lists that he encouraged users to switch to K Desktop Environment 3 rather than use GNOME.

Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish: [ˈliːn. 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 Linux kernel".