The story, according to Linus, is that while Tove may in fact have vaguely mentioned penguins at some early stage, it was in a conversation with two high-ranking Linux types that the icy creatures were first seriously considered as the operating system's official mascot.

In 1996 after an initial design suggestion made by Alan Cox,[8] use of an image Torvalds found on an FTP site,[9] showing a penguin figurine depicted in a similar style to the Creature Comforts characters created by Nick Park, the concept for Tux was further refined by Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list.

[10] Torvalds was looking for something fun and sympathetic to associate with Linux, and he felt that a slightly fat penguin sitting down after having eaten a great meal perfectly fit the bill.

[11] The final and original design was a submission for a Linux logo contest by Larry Ewing[12][irrelevant citation] using the first publicly released[13] version (0.54) of GIMP, a free software graphics package.

The image was designed by Andrew McGown and recreated as an SVG using Inkscape by Josh Bush,[19] and released under the CC BY-SA license.

Gown is variously depicted as being a pink version of Tux (XTux) or as having a somewhat less fat appearance and wearing items of clothing such as a red and white short skirt and a hair bow (e.g. TuxKart and A Quest for Herring).