Linus's biggest contribution to software engineering is git but it took writing a kernel first to give him the idea. I'd argue that git has had a bigger impact

Linus's biggest contribution to software engineering is git but it took writing a kernel first to give him the idea. I'd argue that git has had a bigger impact on the world than Linux. The Linux kernel is an amazing piece of software but especially in the beginning wasn't especially innovative. The Solaris kernel was a much better implementation of the Unix lineage. The Mach kernel was interesting from a research perspective, and lives on in MacOS and iOS. HURD was a worthy experiment, as was Plan 9. But git was really head and shoulders above anything that came before.