Just to get some things straight: What he had in mind was to write a good terminal emulator for his x86 computer to access his university's UNIX servers. When he realized that he had in fact written an operating system, which happened to be somehow Minix-compatible he released it. One of the reasons was that in his opinion Minix was too expensive for students. See: Linux is obsolete [1] Afaik he never had in mind to write an OS because the ones that were out there were bloaty or buggy and if Minix or BSD had been Free back then he would have never started Linux (as a kernel). The one who was frustrated with existing OSes (even before Linus thought about Linux) because they were restrictive (and therefore in his view buggy) was Richard Stallman. This is why he started the GNU project which unfortunately never made it to write a working kernel (HURD - it works today but still lacks lots of functionality which one would expect from a modern kernel), mainly because their standards were too high. Linux came in as a stopgap because it was a Free and WORKING kernel while BSD was still blocked due to AT&T's intervention which has probably set Free Software and Unix back for five years or so. [1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp....47530d082cd95d