What Does Bill Gates Really Think of Linux?
Bill Gates spent two decades as Linux's loudest critic — then watched Microsoft embrace it. Here's the real arc of what the Microsoft founder thinks about the operating system he once feared.
Ask "What does Bill Gates think of Linux?" and you'll get answers ranging from "he hates it" to "Microsoft loves Linux now." Both are partly true, and the gap between them is one of the more interesting reversals in tech history. Gates the executive treated Linux as an existential business threat. Gates the philanthropist and elder statesman has been far more measured — even quietly complimentary. Untangling the two requires looking at what he actually said, when, and why his position softened.
The short answer
Bill Gates has never publicly "loved" Linux, but his hostility cooled dramatically over twenty years. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he was running Microsoft, he viewed open-source software — Linux especially — as a direct commercial threat to Windows and the company's licensing model. His successor Steve Ballmer was even blunter about it. By the 2010s, with Gates stepping back from day-to-day leadership and Microsoft pivoting to the cloud, the company that once treated Linux as the enemy became one of the largest open-source contributors on the planet.
So the honest answer is: Gates respects what Linux became, acknowledges open source has won large parts of the market, and no longer frames it as a war. But he's never been a Linux evangelist either. His own loyalty stayed with the platform he built.
The "cancer" era: what Gates and Microsoft actually said
The most infamous quote from this era didn't come from Gates — it came from Steve Ballmer, who in a 2001 Chicago Sun-Times interview said, "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." That line gets attributed to Gates constantly. It wasn't his. But it captured the internal mood Gates presided over.
Gates's own objections were more lawyerly and more strategic. His real target wasn't the technology — it was the GPL license. The General Public License requires that derivative works also be released as open source, and Gates saw that "viral" copyleft mechanism as fundamentally incompatible with a business built on proprietary software you pay to license. In internal memos and public comments from that period, he and Microsoft leadership pushed the idea that open source was economically unsustainable and a danger to commercial software development.
There's a deeper irony here. Gates grew up steeped in the early hacker culture of sharing code, and his 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" — written when people were freely copying Microsoft's BASIC interpreter — was essentially an argument against the share-everything ethos that open source would later formalize. From the very beginning, Gates believed software was valuable property that creators deserved to be paid for. Linux, philosophically, was the opposite bet. The conflict was baked in from 1976, not invented in 2001.
Why Linux genuinely scared Microsoft
This wasn't paranoia. By the early 2000s Linux was eating Microsoft's lunch in exactly the place that mattered for the future: servers. Apache was crushing IIS on the web. Linux ran cheaply, scaled well, and cost nothing per seat. The internet was being built on a stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — that Microsoft made zero money from. Gates understood that if the infrastructure of the web ran on free software, Windows's dominance on the desktop would eventually become a smaller and smaller slice of a much bigger pie.
If you want a sense of just how much of modern infrastructure runs on this stuff, our explainer on what the Linux kernel actually is lays out the scale of the project Microsoft was up against — it's the largest collaborative software effort in history.
The turn: how the position softened
Two things changed Gates's framing over time. The first was simply that he stopped running Microsoft. As CEO, defending the licensing business was his job. As a philanthropist focused on global health and education, the competitive war became somebody else's problem.
The second was that Microsoft itself changed, and Gates watched it happen. Under Satya Nadella, who became CEO in 2014, Microsoft did things that would have been unthinkable in the Ballmer era:
- Open-sourced .NET and made it cross-platform, including on Linux.
- Brought Linux directly into Windows via the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), so developers run a real Linux kernel inside Windows.
- Made Azure — its cloud platform — fully Linux-friendly, to the point where a large share of Azure virtual machines run Linux.
- Acquired GitHub, the home of millions of open-source projects, in 2018 for $7.5 billion.
- Joined the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member in 2016.
"Microsoft loves Linux" became an actual official slogan. That sentence in 2001 would have sounded like satire. The community at It's FOSS has tracked this whole arc closely, and the consensus is roughly: Microsoft didn't have a change of heart so much as a change of business model — the money moved to the cloud, and the cloud runs on Linux.
Gates, for his part, has spoken approvingly of Nadella's leadership and the cultural shift. He hasn't issued a formal "I was wrong about Linux" statement, because that's not really how he operates, but his public posture moved from adversary to elder statesman who acknowledges the landscape changed. If you're weighing the two platforms yourself, our breakdown of Linux vs Windows and whether you should actually switch covers where each one genuinely wins today.
What OS does Bill Gates use?
This is one of the most-searched follow-up questions, and the answer is unsurprising: Bill Gates uses Windows. He's the co-founder of Microsoft and one of its largest individual shareholders; using a rival desktop OS would be strange on every level.
On the phone side, it's a little more interesting. For years Gates used Windows Phone out of loyalty, but after Microsoft abandoned that platform he switched to Android — specifically because the Microsoft software he relies on runs well there, and Android, at its core, is built on the Linux kernel. So in a roundabout, almost poetic way, Bill Gates's daily smartphone runs on Linux. He doesn't frame it that way, and he'd point out that Android is heavily Google-flavored rather than a "Linux distro" in the desktop sense — but the kernel underneath is the very thing he once worried about.
For desktops and laptops, though? Windows, every time. If you're curious about trying the other side yourself, our step-by-step guide to installing Linux walks through it without the jargon.
What does Steve Jobs think of Linux?
Steve Jobs's relationship with Linux was different from Gates's because Apple's strategy was different. Jobs never fought Linux head-on, partly because macOS itself is built on a Unix foundation — specifically the BSD-derived Darwin core. macOS and Linux are cousins, both descended from the Unix philosophy, which is why so many developers feel at home on a Mac terminal.
Jobs's real objection to Linux was about the user experience. He believed integrated hardware-and-software design — Apple controlling the whole stack — produced something more polished than a community-assembled OS ever could. He reportedly viewed Linux on the desktop as technically impressive but fragmented and unfriendly to ordinary users. In Jobs's worldview, the open-source model produced power but not delight, and delight was the whole point. He competed with Linux indirectly by making Unix beautiful and selling it as a luxury product, rather than attacking it the way Microsoft did.
Does Elon Musk use Linux?
Musk's companies are deeply dependent on Linux, even if his personal laptop habits are less documented. SpaceX runs Linux extensively — the Falcon 9 and Dragon flight software runs on Linux, and the company has been open about using a stripped-down Linux stack for its avionics. Tesla's in-car infotainment systems are also Linux-based. Starlink terminals run Linux too.
So in the world Musk has built, Linux is foundational infrastructure. As for what Musk personally types on day-to-day, he's posted from various devices over the years and hasn't made a public crusade of his OS choice the way some founders do. But "does Elon Musk use Linux" answered at the level that actually matters — his rockets, cars, and satellites — is an emphatic yes. When you need software that's auditable, free of licensing baggage, and rock-solid under extreme conditions, Linux is the obvious tool. That's also why it dominates everywhere from supercomputers to gaming rigs.
Will Linux be replaced by AI?
This question keeps showing up, and it slightly misunderstands what each thing is. AI and operating systems aren't competitors — an operating system manages hardware and runs programs; AI is a category of programs. AI doesn't replace the layer it runs on top of. In fact, the AI boom has made Linux more entrenched, not less: the overwhelming majority of AI training and inference happens on Linux servers, because the frameworks, GPU drivers, and cloud infrastructure all assume a Linux environment. NVIDIA's data-center stack is Linux-first. The model that answered your question almost certainly trained on a Linux cluster.
What AI will change is how we interact with operating systems — natural-language interfaces, AI assistants that automate configuration, smarter package management. But the kernel managing your memory and scheduling your processes isn't going anywhere. If anything, the question reveals how invisible good infrastructure becomes. Linux already runs most of the world quietly. AI is being built on that foundation, not bulldozing it. For a sense of how the broader open-source ecosystem keeps expanding, our overview of Linux Foundation open source projects shows just how many critical technologies live under that umbrella now.
The bigger lesson in Gates's evolution
What makes Gates's relationship with Linux worth studying isn't gossip about quotes — it's what it reveals about how technology markets actually resolve. Microsoft didn't beat Linux, and Linux didn't kill Microsoft. The fight that defined the early 2000s simply became irrelevant when the ground shifted to the cloud, where neutral, Linux-friendly infrastructure was more profitable than defending a desktop monopoly.
Gates, to his credit, is a pragmatist. He fought open source when it threatened his business and stopped fighting it when the business changed. That's not hypocrisy; it's adaptation. The man who wrote an angry letter to hobbyists in 1976 now sits on the sidelines of a company that pays engineers to contribute to the Linux kernel. The technology he tried hardest to contain is, in a very real sense, the thing that powers the cloud business keeping Microsoft valuable.
If all this has made you curious about trying Linux yourself rather than just reading about billionaires' opinions of it, the friendliest place to start is a beginner-oriented distribution — our guide to the best Linux distros for beginners is the natural next step, and once you're in, a handful of essential commands will get you comfortable fast.
So, what does Bill Gates think of Linux — finally?
He thinks it won the parts of the market it was always going to win, he respects its technical achievement, he licenses zero of it for his own desktop, and he no longer treats it as a threat because the war it represented is over. That's a more nuanced answer than "he hates it" or "Microsoft loves it now," and it's the accurate one. Gates's view of Linux is the view of someone who fought it, lost some battles, adapted his company around the new reality, and walked away with his fortune intact. In tech, that counts as a happy ending for everyone involved.