Linux is what made Unix into a mainstream consumer OS.
It came along 22 years after Unix itself.
It's never too late.
Remember that Windows itself was a flop until version 3, and that -- Windows 3.0, in 1990 -- was the little snowball rolling down a mountain that brought multitasking multimedia networked GUI computers to the mainstream.
And thereby created the mainstream marketplace of x86-32 computers: the substrate that allowed Linux to grow.
(DOS made so little use of the 80386 that an 80286 PC was adequate, and after 5 years the 386 made little inroads into the mass market -- they were too expensive, even after the 1989 budget-model 80386, the 386SX. But Windows 3 ran much better on a 386 than a 286, and soon after Windows came along, the 286 was dead.)
