I have a pretty good memory .. Kinda, I think. I hate looking up exact dates, wikipedia, and avoid AI with a passion. Anyway, from memory way back when I was a kid, The kernel was developed to drive Unix type systems way back in the 80's at College universities in the computer science field and was designed as open source, GPL. for learning purposes. It was adopted, or forked if you will, during the development of Linux back then, hence Linux itself adopting GPL Open source. Popularity never grew till the internet poofed into existence. Even then, very few wanted to go through the trouble of using it, as backwards engineering proprietary drivers for hardware was so limited. So much hardware not supported in the early years and getting things to work was hit and miss. I look at it today compared to those early years, despite not being old enough to drive back then, and am like WOW! I was such the geek as a kid! Anyway.. that's all just from memory.. I could be a little off, but That's what I remember.
I never messed with Windows till I went to college and started working, At home I always remained the geeky Linux rebel! hehe .. New Computers came with Windows by default.. I never wasted any time wiping the disk and poofing Linux on them. I had to do a lot of research before getting a computer, making sure all the hardware was compatible.
I remember creative sound blaster sound cards was perfect for Linux back then, and I always stuck with Nvidia graphics cards despite all the troubles back then.. they were very usable with the Linux driver verses Nvidia's driver at first, sometimes working and sometimes not. Modem drivers Ugh!! pain in the but is what I remember hehe