Goodbye American made spyware windows, welcome inhouse Chinese built spyware Linux distro
It's not your data. It's OUR data. ~ Chinese Government
Honestly I'm a bit surprised they didn't do this much sooner. They've had a big push to decouple themselves from products and services from outside China. Good in the sense of self reliance but also much easier to prevent foreign backdoors while implementing local data collection and control.
Honestly I’m a bit surprised they didn’t do this much sooner.
Me too. China wants to control as much as possible. And with the entire operating system being Open Source, they can do whatever they want. One can say whatever they want, China relying on Linux can only mean good thing. Because that means they need to develop and invest on that front. And we are not forced to use their system, but will probably benefit anyway.
I have doubts anything they add will be merged. Most likely made closed source for security and control purposes. A FOSS system designed to monitor and control a populace doesn't really work because then said populace could just revert those changes. There's also no benefit to them in sharing anything they dumped their money into.
There’s also no benefit to them in sharing anything they dumped their money into.
They do, in the sense that anyone could work and help. Also Chinese companies share even LLMs (ai models) where they spent ton of money, without any user giving them money or working on it. One reason to do so is, to prevent monopoly situation from the Americans.
I mean that is literally just to stave off financial investments into US AI labs and give some leeway to catch up. Couple this with extensive evidence of them distilling US AI models and you'll see this is much more to do about the race to AI supremacy than about their humanitarian love for open source software.
I don't even mean direct benefits like coding and merging in Linux. I mean the overall boost in the eco system of Linux systems. This will bring more people in China with Linux in contact and encourage to support software, build and work on various Open Source projects. I don't mean the government, but the citizens. Besides that, China could financially support Linux like Microsoft does, as they benefit a lot from the Kernel. Or they support a library or project in the FOSS world, that they depend on in Linux, such as core libraries and applications. Or they start their own applications to have them as an alternative.
Maybe I'm just too hopeful.
I get what you're saying but I only see red flags ahead since their goals don't align with the goals of Linux or FOSS. It's like Microsoft's push to embrace Linux, similarly their goals don't align. There's also been more than one attack by devs (who may have been sponsored by a nation state) trying to implement backdoors into the kernel. It'll truly be a test of the ideology of Linux and FOSS if a large organization moves from the embrace and extend stage into the extinguish phase. Trust that China has no alignment with FOSS. Their goal is self sufficiency and control, also likely espionage. The same can really be said for almost all governments
Yes, but what you say is infiltrating into the Kernel. That can always happen and they surely try and tried it before too. But in this topic here, we are talking about distributions that anyone create without being involved in Linux. And its not only a thing with China, I expect in the future more distributions from governments all around the world. And to me, that's a good thing, for them and for us, just not for Microsoft and the US government (because they have access to everything Microsoft saves).
I get what you're saying. Wide adoption is going to change a lot of things for the better and the worse. I imagine the foundation of Linux and FOSS will be challenged as more power and money flows into the project and of course more potential for espionage or other bad actors. Simultaneously I can't deny that more support for enterprise software will come and ultimately the potential for an integrated OS across devices like an actually viable Linux phone / tablet OS that could rival android and iOS. Reality is complex and it's rare that things are absolutely one way or the other. I think many Linux users have gotten use to being in a niche and not needing anti virus software or other such protections. That will most definitely change.
surprised some other country in general hasn't funded an alternative operating system to windows.
is it REALLY that hard when you have infinite resources behind you idea?
i'd love some real competition in the digital space regardless.
I'm not sure if you've ever been in factories or down anything B2B but verified, tested, and universally supported is much much more valuable than one may initially expect. Absolutely no one wants to use a product or service whose existence or support may disappear in a few years or is equally unknown or untested. A government could decide to switch and then get backlash for having a new system that isn't fully or perfectly identical/interoperabile shoved down constituents throats and then deciding in just a few year that the adoption cost isn't worthwhile. The global economy is still running on code written in Fortran and B because it's so vital no one wants to risk changing something that's working.
Europe didn't really "ditch Windows" though or did it. You see news of some places switching to Linux or planning to switch, but if you work in a company in Europe and its not an IT company, chances are they are using Windows still. Consumers may have left Windows for Linux somewhat but most are still stuck there as well.
What if the European Union formed an organization that works on improving Free/libre software (FLOSS) since they'll be using it? I think that would help maintaining/improving FLOSS greatly.
note: I'm not European so I don't even know if what I'm suggesting is even possible. I'm just fantasizing really.
They do give out grants, which then existing organizations distribute to open-source devs.
For example, they give money to the NLnet foundation: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101135429
And then NLnet has given it to these projects: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html
Some of those you might know, like for example this project called "Lemmy".
Another example of what they do, which is somewhat different from what you had in mind, is that they give money to companies, if those companies open-source the developed software (and pay half the dev costs themselves), and ideally also cooperate with other companies.
You also have intermediate foundations for that, for example the Eclipse Foundation does a lot here: https://projects.eclipse.org/
Lemmy what's that 😂🤣?
Yeah seems like the EU is pretty involved with funding.
europe does fun dspecific projects through grants. but they are individual projects and not really something like a full OS
Ah ok thanks for the info.
Consumers may have left Windows for Linux somewhat but most are still stuck there as well.
I work in a STEM-heavy university. Nerds everywhere, and many are computer nerds. I only know one other person here that daily-drives linux out of the hundreds I work with. I am very sceptical of the consumer market share statistics.
Do you mean steam stats? I don't know of many others, and those are going to be enthusiasts of one form or another.
There are a lot of other stats around, like statcounter, cloudflare, wikimedia, and even the data pornhub publishes from time to time. All of them show linux growing, and they all have different audiences and maybe methodologies
Yep thats the main one I've seen posted around. I'm sure their data is accurate but I'm not convinced it's representative of the wider consumer market
Along side what you mention, I work for a company with a lot of engineers from multiple disciplines. Linux is everywhere in our environment and has been growing. Most of our engineers either have a Linux laptop, use Linux virtual machines or submit jobs through Linux backed software stacks. Our products have tools built on Linux to the point that we used to maintain our own Linux distribution to make having all those tools on a system easy, though we've just moved to having scripts to install and setup everything. Almost all of those engineers also have a Windows laptop as their daily driver. The few who don't have Macs.
I don't doubt that organizations can move to all non-Windows, but the Windows Ecosystem of Exchange, Office and Active Directory/Entra is very hard to replace. Yes, you can absolutely cobble together alternatives. But, you then have a special snowflake of an IT infrastructure. Maintenance may be eased by the use of tools like Ansible, but even that will likely result in organization specific playbooks and scripts. But centralized management of a Linux environment isn't quite as standardized yet and so requires more planning and effort. And then there is the challenge of security.
Folks like to tout the inherent better security of Linux. As someone who works in Cybersecurity daily, I fully agree with that assessment. However, "better" isn't "perfect". You still need vulnerability management, monitoring and response tools. And this is an area where Linux lags behind Windows, mostly because of the effort put into it. Something as basic as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) on Linux is still a foreign concept to a lot of folks. And yes, it's absolutely necessary. I've personally worked cases involving compromise of Linux systems and Linux specific malware. And more than just XMRig clone #5374. It may be harder to move from user to root on Linux than moving to local admin on Windows (unless some jack-off decided that Linux doesn't need updates and DirtyCow still worked); but, there is still a lot of damage which can be done without root.
Overall, I'd say that the Linux ecosystem is evolving. It's already embedded in a lot of environments of all sizes, but it's usually a smaller part of a much larger Windows network. Hopefully, if enough large organizations start pushing away from Windows and towards Linux, there will be more investment and standardization. And, we've already seen some of that. Red Hat is a common distro of choice for large organizations because of that higher level of centralized control and standardization. Of course, a lot of the tools engineers want to use aren't on Red Hat, specifically because of that centralization (read: everything AI). So, it will be interesting to see where we land.
Indeed. After a couple of years of using Linux at work because no one gave shit what I used as long as I got my work done, a few weeks back I was given a new Windows PC and told I had to use it, because the company now cares about cybersecurity and everyone has been 'upgraded' to Win11 and Office 365.
I had an argument with my boss where he was trying to stop people checking out source code to company laptops because they could be lost. My retort was that the company uploaded all it's company documents, spreadsheets, and other data to the cloud including employee personal data, and that was far for likely to experience a data breach. Those breaches would result in legal issues for the company, rather than a slight embarrassment.
He was apoplectic. How dare I question company policy.
Welcome to corpo land. Nobody was ever fired for choosing Microsoft.
No Europe hasn't yet. But France is certainly as serious about it as China and it is halfway through creating feasible alternatives for the complete worklflow. Once that is fully implemtented it will get much easier for all the other member states and also "Brussels" itself to follow suit. Also , having this for state bureaucracy also makey private business application much easier.
Just had to deal a few things with my local municipality offices and my email not being a Gmail was a big, big issue and cause of long wondering. If we (we and we, normal peeps outside of Lemmy and all) don't even know what is a non-Google email, or why someone would use one, or the basics of Open Source, no, they won't know about operating systems either. Maybe that could make the change easier, but it won't make people understand why we'd need to make the change. Linux what?
If you have your own company, you would naturally use the.boss@theBestCompanyEver.lol email for these kinds of purposes. Shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. On the other hand, nobody prohibits you from getting a domain and hosting your own email even if you don’t have a company. Sure, they probably have a long list of gmail users already, but the other people will have all sorts of random email addresses, so I don’t see what’s the problem. There are lots of valid reasons to use some other service besides gmail.
I've recently looked at some statistics to get a sense of Linux overall market share, and it does seem to be hovering around 7% currently, which is a heck of a lot for Linux but of course still less than every 10th PC. And then there's some more wrinkles to that.
For example one wrinkle I didn't know about is this is skewed by a few countries, namely India has a gigantic 30% of Linux market share iirc. So you might know about the Linux growth if you live in India, but not as much in the US or Europe.
I didn't know it was so high in India. Interesting. Any guesses as to why it's so much higher there compared to the US and EU?
No clue, I'm still puzzled by that and open to theories.
My initial guess was that they have a big tech community there. A lot of the IT call centers are outsourced there. And with all the tech people they probably gravitate toward Linux. Just a guess though.
Yeah I was initially thinking the call centres don't wanna deal with expensive windows licenses and prefer to just use Linux, or maybe all those scam call centres need operational security and therefore Linux, or maybe there is some cultural thing where people naturally gravitate to open source? Or maybe there was some censorship implemented into Windows systems for India and everyone is just bailing by switching to Linux or something but honestly none of those theories have a lot of weight behind it so my guess is as good as the next guy.
Fucking wild to me that China is still so windows-dominated.
Windows is very cheap if you don't pay for it, and all the backdoors are a feature for the powers that be.
Surely China can't be fine with the US poking around their government computers? Or are they?
I don't understand how another country can use another hostile country's closed operating system for sensitive material.
FOSS in general took a very long time to be embraced by china, which feels weird
They are the same way the U.S. government is. Windows isn't used for shit that's actually important in either government.
I would guess that Microsoft has to comply to Chinese privacy and data laws, AND that China's firewall also might block a lot of the telemetry.
I agree nonetheless. They should be using Linux a long time ago.
I don't think China would be naive to think a US company would actually comply. Even regular people don't believe claims of respecting privacy and totally not spying on you assurances.
Hope that means more Linux drivers and hardware support for Chinese products in the future.
My biggest hope is improvements to LibreOffice so all those people saying they need Excel can switch
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