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A first look at the OS the Chinese government wants to replace Windows
- simonh 11y agoSo they took Fedora and a dead end fork of Open Office and re-skinned them to look like Windows XP. Additional applications are installed using Yum. Microsoft are toast! Edit: BTW, what ever happened to Red Flag Linux?
- snogglethorpe 11y agoActually the biggest fear I have of this sort of thing is that they'll end up with standalone unshared forks of stuff, which won't benefit from newer developments and bug fixes in other forks, and vice-versa.
- rwmj 11y agoAnother problem is they may violate licenses by not distributing source. We may end up with forked versions of the kernel and other major components, with useful new features implemented and no corresponding source. (Note: I have no evidence that this is happening).
- chaostheory 11y agoDidn't Redhat complain that the company behind RedFlag didn't distribute source?
- halfelf 11y agoThe original Red Flag Linux is ended in 2014, due to fail to get government subsidy. This is recorded on both Chinese and English wikipedia. And in later 2014, another company bought the remnant of Red Flag Linux and continued publishing it till now, though I don't know anyone still using it.
- mahouse 11y agouname -a | grep Linux /golfclap
- kalleboo 11y agoMan this article has the most pointless and annoying use of Animated GIFs. I want to read that uname line, damn it, what's the point of animating the typing in of it? Over and over again in a loop?
- notfoss 11y agoYeah, it was a huge pain. I usually deal with fast GIFs by left clicking on the GIF at the required frame and then dragging that away from the GIF. That's the only way I can deal with such GIFs other than decompiling.
- vinceyuan 11y agoNobody uses it in China. Dell installs it on computers just because a computer without an OS is not allowed to sell in China.
- dharma1 11y agowhat do people use instead?
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoShh... youre ruining the "MS and the NSA will pay for their crimes" circlejerk here. The reality is that MS is not going anywhere. MS sold 200m copies of Windows last year. Its difficult for organizations to move off Windows, and especially Office and IE, considering how much infrastructure expects those things to be available. The 10 year Munich linux migration wasn't much of a crowd pleaser either, considering that city is thinking about going back to Windows: http://www.zdnet.com/article/after-a-10-year-linux-migration-munich-considers-switching-back-to-windows-and-office/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/after-a-10-year-linux-migration... MS still knows how to play this game well and arguably the desktop is something of a natural monopoly.
- leni536 11y agoWhy don't they just install any other distro or free OS?
- vinceyuan 11y agoThough NeoKylin is not a free OS, I guess Dell may get paid for preinstalling NeoKylin from China Standard Software. According to this source (in Chinese) [1], China Standard Software got 0.5 billions RMB funding ($800M) from the gov. The gov measures its performance by some methods including the shipping number of NeoKylin. It's natural for Dell and China Standard Software to have such a contract. One preinstalls NeoKylin for money. The other has the number to get funding from the gov. Though nobody uses it, two companies get money. [1] http://baike.baidu.com/view/4920982.htm http://baike.baidu.com/view/4920982.htm
- cyorir 11y agoThe article mentions that NeoKylin may be based on a recent version of Fedora, which has me confused. Isn't NeoKylin derived from Kylin, rather than Fedora?
- nsonnad 11y agoHello, I'm the author of this article. From what I can tell it appears that both NeoKylin and Ubuntu Kylin (a collab between Chinese state actors and Canonical) have simply adopted the Kylin name purely for its familiarity as meaning "Chinese OS." The original Kylin was a government project based on FreeBSD whereas NeoKylin:Fedora::UbuntuKylin:Ubuntu
- scholia 11y ago"That’s pretty ironic, given how similar it feels to a product made by Microsoft, long the enemy of open-source Linux evangelists." You're a few years behind the times ;-)
- sounds 11y agoI'm a Free Software evangelist. Microsoft has been my enemy for a long time. Please be specific: what has Microsoft ever done that has significantly improved end users' ability to run Free Software?
- sslayer 11y agoAllowing multiple generations access to an simplified UI & OS,and providing opportunity for those that thirst for knowledge a stepping stone into the world of open source. Yes, free/open source *nix distro's allow this as well, but the barrier to entry is higher when you are a young kid without even basic knowledge (providing that your hand was not held during the process). Without Microsoft and Apple, how many of the generations that have contributed to open source, be were they are now?? Edit: Just playing Devils Advocate here - I hold no special regard for MS - but rather appreciate the symbiosis that has developed within IT in general.
- userulluipeste 11y agoTheir efforts could have been actually beneficial for everybody if they decided to contribute to ReactOS. That way they could have had something instead of LibreOffice skins and a dead-end Linux fork.
- jarcane 11y agoConsidering the Russians have been footing the bill for ReactOS for a while now and it's still no closer to being actually usable, I highly doubt it would make the slightest difference.
- Poyeyo 11y agoAbout office, someone there have made WPS Office, and that's what I'm using in Ubuntu right now.
- eloisant 11y agoSo what's the desktop environment? Did they theme an existing one like Gnome or KDE or did they wrote one from scratch?
- mkesper 11y agoThe user interfaces for these are also very similar to those of Microsoft Office, and they work pretty well. One reason might be that, as one Chinese blogger analyzing NeoKylin (link in Chinese) found, NeoShine appears to be based on code originally in OpenOffice, a now-defunct open-source productivity suite. Why didn't they use LibreOffice?
- cwyers 11y agoLibreOffice was released in 2011, and this is apparently version 6.0 of NeoKylin, maybe they forked OpenOffice before the LibreOffice fork and haven't had the time/resources to switch.
- livatlantis 11y ago<aside> Is it just me or is this title missing a preposition? Surely it's 'A first look at the OS with which the Chinese government wants to replace Windows'. Or perhaps, 'A first look an the OS the Chinese government wants to replace Windows with' if you don't mind dangling prepositions. </aside> Interesting how far they went to make it look like XP. What are the chances that someone using it is frustrated when they learn they can't install <insert Win package name here>?
- xsznix 11y ago<aside>It looks right to me. The adjectival clause describing the OS says "the Chinese government wants the OS to replace Windows". There's an implied "that" between "the OS" and "the Chinese government".</aside>
- livatlantis 11y ago<aside>I see what you mean, but I don't think it's the implied 'that' that's problematic. The subject of the second clause is 'the Chinese government', the verb 'to want to', the object 'replace Windows'. This whole thing qualifies the first clause, 'the OS'. But the semantic relation between these two clauses ("with") is not established. It's like saying "A detailed look at the mountain John wants to dance with an elephant". Doesn't make sense without the "on" which links the two bits. </aside> PS: Excuse my pedantry; this stuff really interests me.
- canjobear 11y agoOn the aside: You are right that the sentence is ungrammatical if you take the object of "want" to be "replace Windows" and the subject of "replace" to be "the Chinese government". But it is grammatical if you analyze it as an instance of the construction "X wants Y to Z", where Y is (semantically) the subject of the infinitive Z. To a first approximation, relative clauses in English are formed by taking a sentence and moving some noun phrase to the front, while optionally adding "that" after the moved noun phrase. E.g., "I saw the man" -> "the man that I saw _" (where _ marks the place where "the man" would have been if it was a regular sentence; called the gap or trace in linguistics.) In this case the transformation is "the Chinese government wants the OS to replace Windows" -> "the OS that the Chinese government wants _ to replace Windows." I agree it sounds somewhat awkward.
- mtgx 11y agoIndia has one too: http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/indian-government-is-launching-its-own-operating-system-boss-to-replace-microsoft-windows-245255.html http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/indian-government-is-la...
- FilterSweep 11y agoThis might be a long shot, but I wonder if the now-well-known Telemetry of Windows 7,8, and 10 created an incentive for foreign governments to avoid using Windows OS
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoAre they moving off home-grown Lenovo hardware because of superfish and other spyware? Governments disable all this stuff anyway.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoSo it's a Linux kernel and TTY prompt with what looks like some kind of X11 skin designed to resemble Windows XP. Does anyone else think that actually sounds kind of awesome? I mean without the crippling censorship and the high likelihood that everything you do is being reported back to the Chinese government, of course. But otherwise, it just seems to go one step beyond MATE/Mint (i.e. a "Windows-like" GUI with a Linux backend) and make what essentially looks like a Windows frontend on top of a Linux backend.
- outworlder 11y ago> Does anyone else think that actually sounds kind of awesome? Is it, really? I've seen themes for the gnome desktop that look prettier and closer to Windows than that. So much so, that I've spent a couple of days working alongside my colleagues until one of them noticed that something was off. To me, that looks like an amateurish throwback to the beginning of the century. I was expecting some reporting on how they would have Wine pre-installed and customized so that users could run Windows applications effortlessly or something like that.
- smaili 11y agoWhy are two girls sitting in the middle of the street?
- josteink 11y agoAnd with a Macbook too. In an article about cheap laptops sold with a Windows look-a-like Linux-distro. It makes no sense what so ever, so I will have to assume this is a random stock-photo chosen without too much consideration.
- tempodox 11y agoIt seems quite logical that the Chinese don't want an OS that shovels data to the NSA. They want an OS that shovels data to their own agencies.
- unKlever 11y agoWhile this is likely true, do you think they can't get that data another way? I would speculate that with pre-installed root certificates and total network control they could get a lot of data. This wikipedia entry estimates that in 09 ~80% of chinese software sold was pirated. Pirated versions of windows and chrome are distributed on the black market. This software may have changes for the cracking program so the hash will mismatch the authentic software. Placing spyware on chrome and windows copies and distributing them would allow them the ability to harvest this data anyway. I agree with your appraisal. As a cynic, I assume they are trying to control data flowing out of china and this is one of many ways to control data, especially the type of people who would use this operating system which I would assume could be gov't controlled institutions like schools and research labs, as well as party officials. Edit: forgot to cite source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...
- snowy 11y agoI wonder what spyware they have embedded in it? A distro brought to you by the Chinese government. I would trust that as much as a distro brought to you by the NSA.
- cuckcuckspruce 11y ago>I would trust that as much as a distro brought to you by the NSA. So do you run a version of the Linux kernel where SELinux[0] has been merged into the mainline? [0] http://selinuxproject.org/page/Main_Page http://selinuxproject.org/page/Main_Page
- snowy 11y agoNope. I use apparmor. Interesting though. I didn't know that about SELinux.
- cuckcuckspruce 11y agoDo you use a kernel with a version greater than 2.5? Then you have SELinux as a part of your kernel source, so the NSA has sponsored made changes to your kernel.
- schoen 11y agoAlso a lot of Donald Becker's old network driver stuff in the kernel has a copyright assignment to DIRNSA. I don't know why, particularly because I thought Becker worked for NASA the whole time.
- rndmind 11y agoSELinux is open source, is there any validity to a claim that SELinux performs anything other than securing the local operating system?
- cuckcuckspruce 11y agoThere are no claims that SELinux does anything other than secure the system, but if you're going to distrust things based solely on who sponsored them (Chinese government for this Linux distribution) then it makes sense to ask if this logic is applied consistently. To make it crystal clear: I'm not saying SELinux is untrustworthy. I am just asking the poster if they would trust SELinux knowing that it came from the NSA. I ask the same question of people when they claim that Windows/OS X is untrustworthy because the NSA may have made changes to spy on the user through it.
- pmelendez 11y agoThey weren't joking when they said it would be a WinXP replacement. The look and feel is almost identical.
- clw8 11y agoThe most laughable part is that you can't install Chrome or any other software created by companies that the government doesn't like.
- hiram112 11y agoIn the long run, this is probably a benefit for Linux users. I always use Dell Precision laptops, and they usually support Linux pretty well (you can buy them with RHEL and even Ubuntu on some models). Once sales and accounting begin to realize that using OEM devices poorly supported on Linux (e.g. Broadcom) means Chinese customers won't buy the hardware, they'll begin using more Linux friendly vendors such as Intel.
- stinos 11y agoI cannot tell from the article but I wonder if this OS is completely open source? If not it seems a bit pointless to replace one with another one, which might have security problems just as well? Or is it just done to not have to pay a foreign company for an OS?
- wsterling 11y agoCan we please stop referring to spins and skins of existing Linux distributions as a whole new OS? There doesn't appear to be much hear that a highschool kid could not do in a few days. Pretty under whelming for an effort of a nation state of 1.3 billion people.
- intopieces 11y agoWhat does the population have to do with the complexity of the OS project?
- wsterling 11y agoIt has a direct impact on the resources the state has available to it.
- intopieces 11y agoTrue, but when we've already established that this kind of project is trivial in nature, does that really come into play here? North Korea built their own OS based off of linux, and they've not nearly the population of China.
- kazinator 11y ago> The Kylin name—an odd English rendition of qilin—comes from .. ... comes from the obvious unacceptability, to the Chinese, that this word is already known to English speakers as "kirin", by way of the via the Japanese language.
- open-source-ux 11y agoI wonder if there any copyright issues over the look-and-feel? Windows XP is obviously old and out-of-date, so Microsoft are unlikely to pursue China Standard Software over the visual design. I am against the idea that interface ideas (visual design and interaction design) can be patented or copyrighted. However, I'm also against someone slavishly copying someone else's design to the point that it's practically an identical copy. Or do folks consider this to be an acceptable practice? After all, someone can take an open source project and make minor (or major) tweaks to the code and re-release the software. Is such an approach considered acceptable in the case of UI design? Or only if that design is attached to an open source project?
- uremog 11y agoLikely a moot point. Even if MS did anything, China would say, "nah it's just a coincidence" or, "doesn't look similar to me!"
- tracker1 11y agoI'm somewhere in the middle... I would really like to see skinning become more common/popular... I was a pretty big fan of lightstep on Win2k (not ME), as it allowed me to run the UI/UX that I wanted... It was not as easy or seamless as it could have been but was very cool. I can't help but feel that most of the differences between say Unity and Gnome3 should have been a matter of skinning instead of more ingrained as they are... That should include certain filters against notification tools/icons and the dock/taskbar in order to get app icons to appear more inline with the skin/feel. I know we moved away from the likes of litestep and winamp skinning, art and distro groups, but it would be nice to see some of that return.
- issaria 11y agoI still prefer the Red Star linux.