Why is Linux so spectacularly successful?
There are likely lots of people who doubt the power and versatility of Linux. Maybe their friends all use Windows. Maybe Linux doesn’t play any obvious role in their lives, and they may not even realize what Linux is. So what’s so special about Linux? To borrow the old Star Trek quote, Linux has gone where no OS has ever gone before. This holds true for a number of factors, including: its open source nature; its tailorability, which has led to something like 600 actively maintained distributions with many dominant “families” of related distributions; the flexibility that has allowed it to run on the tiniest devices; how it runs on nearly every supercomputer; and its dominance of the web.