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China joins Europe in scrapping Windows for Linux (www.zdnet.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 79 points 3 days ago (1 child)

Why not Windows 11? Because China, like many other non-US governments, no longer trusts American companies with their software and services. This approach is all about digital sovereignty.

I never understood why any country would allow their government computers to run proprietary software from a foreign (to them) company.

I'm sure that China had access to a lot of Windows source code as part of their previous agreement, but it's far too big a risk, really, for any country, even the United States, to run Windows.

As far as I'm concerned, China is decades late in making this decision, and it's still ahead of a lot of (most?) governments.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago* (4 children)

    I'd argue that Linux has only within the last 3 to 5 years become "good enough" to use as a daily driver for the casual, tech illiterate government official. I've tried different flavors on and off for the past decade and never stuck with any of them due to instability or UX problems. It was only at the beginning of this year that I found a Linux flavor I could actually stick with and use as my daily driver (CachyOS).

    Linux was ready for tech savvy enthusiasts 10+ years ago, but Government is never that.

    Edit: Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn't until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn’t until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.

    I was using Linux in the late 90s when my Linux machine would run for months, only being rebooted when I decided to do a kernel upgrade, and meanwhile everybody was running Windows 95, one of the least stable OSes that I've ever used. It literally had a counter baked into the OS that caused a crash if you ran it for a certain amount of days, I think 30. If stability was so important, they'd have switched to Linux back then.

    Even in the late 90s, the UI was decent enough as long as you had a decent administrator. I don't think casual users could be expected to set up Linux back then, but that's not a government type of use case.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago (1 child)
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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago

    Wonderful, thanks for looking that up.

    I remember learning about that bug years after the OS came out, and not being too surprised that it was never fixed.

    Windows 95 crashed so often that you'd basically have to specifically do nothing with the machine to ever get that crash. And even then, you'd just assume that it was crashing like Windows 95 always did anyway.

    So you'd be unlikely to see or recognize that bug unless you were specifically testing for uptime issues.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    A lot of the world server-wise is running on Linux already anyway, Microsoft’s own servers included. For the end user I’d argue it is not about stability but rather UX mostly. I’m not completely tech illiterate, but I prefer something that “just works” without too much fiddling, and Linux definitely isn’t that currently.

    On the other hand, a knowledgeable IT department can provide that for the enduser, you just need the knowledgeable people in your IT department and the will (budget) to move away from the current environment, then everything works just fine. But time will tell.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    I grew up with Windows and I constantly had to fix shit just for my own casual use, the biggest barrier to moving to Linux is about learning a new OS from scratch, we already go through that learning curve with Windows normally so we forget how much time and effort it took us just to understand the system well.

    That aside, I'd argue that for most productive work that doesn't require proprietary software, you also don't need to understand Linux that well to be productive. You just need to know how to log in, launch whatever you need, and then turn it off before going home. The biggest reason why we can't just make people switch overnight is that they're probably used to proprietary software that just won't work well on Linux, like Adobe or Microsoft Office. If you train your personal to first switch to FOSS alternative, when you do make the switch to Linux the learning curve for what they need to do is small and they won't be as intimidated. But now, if you're talking about how their years of learning Word or Excel or Photoshop doesn't translate 1:1 because of different UI and behavior, they'll be very uncomfortable and less productive when they switch.

    Things inevitably go wrong no matter what system or software in general you use, we're just used at tolerating it when it's something we know and use already, but there's no reason why we should think Linux or FOSS software has to be strictly much more stable than its counterparts, as long as they're good enough for the person or the use case, it's already good enough to switch, with the caveat that you should never switch everything at once, but rather first switch your productive software, retrain to feel confident in it, and then switch to Linux. That way you'll not even remember you're running Linux after a few weeks, other than when you see the login screen or something.

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    • [–] 61 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Hey Canada, why are we not doing this?

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    • [–] 42 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    my biggest hope with this is more contributors for LibreOffice, so people can stop requiring Excel and then they can move to Linux

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  • [–] 14 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    The problem is comoanys' VBA macros. Many many companies run on excel essentially and have a few spreadsheets using VBA for important things.

    Libreoffice has 1st class python scripting support, unlike Microsoft's shoehorned in environment, so it is much better for scripting.

    Sadly, it makes it more difficult to switch.

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    • [–] 9 points 2 days ago

    I've never understood why Asian countries seem so reluctant to use Linux. Maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part? You would think China especially would have an interest in not using Windows anywhere, and they have the power and resources to quickly build and replace whatever needs to change.

    Just checking the Steam stats only 1.38% has Simplified Chinese set as their language, the same number for Windows is 23.80%. While that just represents Steam users private computers, I guess we will see an increase here in the coming months or years.

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    [–] 21 points 3 days ago

    I don't always say this, but good job China!

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    [–] 15 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    That's amazing, especially considering China has even more people than the entirety of Europe combined, may we soon follow over here

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago* (2 children)

    To be clear, articles like this are saying “China”, “Belgium”, etc. as shorthand for the national government of that country.

    Not that everyone in that country must switch; only that the country-level government is declaring they will switch computers they use.

    This does have a strong effect on what other organisations and individuals use, but it lags a long way and certainly doesn't directly affect everyone in the country.

    With that said: Yeah the Chinese government is made up of a great many more people than European national governments. It's a big move.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    But also remember that this may actively impact the developmemt of linux, the EU and China both have resources to contribute to Linux, will China do it? I have no idea but they have to publish their modifications under GPL if they ever do any

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    • [–] 5 points 2 days ago*

    So weird that it took them this long. Probably because pirating Windows was even less of an issue for them.

    I guess they needed to wait for DHH's example.

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    [–] 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Yessss, lets get every country away from MS

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    • [–] 9 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    Anyone know what this is?

    [Windows 10 China Government Edition...] and support for Chinese cryptographic standards.

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    • [–] 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    I bring it up any opportunity I get at work, but nothing yet. Unfortunately, our IT team does not have the skills or experience working with Linux, so it would probably be a rocky and dicey transition. As a dev, I think I can maybe convince the right people that our team should go Linux and we could be the test cases. We would all survive without the MS suite, but a lot of tools would have to change, like Jetbrains instead of Visual Studio.

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    • [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    It would probably be cheaper and easier to go back to paper and pencil after all this tech world domination bullshit.

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    [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    This is great news for Linux viruses and spyware.

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    [+] 1 point 3 days ago
    [deleted]
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