Tanenbaum laid out why his hobby OS beat out Linus Torvalds' own pet project.

The primary reason why Linux beat out Minix, is that Tannenbaum wouldn't allow Minix to win. There was a desperate need for an open source Unix-derived OS at the time, and many people wanted Minix to become that, but Tannenbaum wanted to keep it clean and educational. FreeBSD could have been it had Linus not created Linux, but he did so at exactly the right time for it to be embraced by the community and launched into the stratosphere.

It might not have the relevance that Linux has gained, but Minix is an operating system that you can run today. Ymmv.

I mean, from what we learnt on university the "messiness" of a monolithic kernel seems "wrong" and a microkernel arch seems "better design". Once you spend a couple of decades in the workforce and opening your mind... I haven't seen a single "good modular design" that doesn't suck balls, super bloated and with many performance issues just to make it "pretty".

So, while I'm not claiming it doesn't exist... I think is at the very least debatable.

"was called obsolete" - by 1 person who happened to be the developer of a competing OS/kernel.

Windows was called obsolete (by me) years ago, and it's abandoned (by me) since mid 2024.

Tanenbaum is still around

"...but ‘vector’ is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature." - Lord Kelvin

It powers servers, smartphones, a growing number of personal computers, and at least three gaming consoles (Deck, Machine, Legion Go S), with more coming.

... and millions of phones 🙃

I mean, if it were for novelty and "cleverness" then it would be Plan-9 (or BeOS) the one who shoulda take over. At the end of the day both Linux.and Minix are both following the UNIX model which even at that time it already was "obsolete". But reality is often more pragmatic