A first look at the OS the Chinese government wants to replace Windows | Hacker News Reader

A first look at the OS the Chinese government wants to replace Windows

qz.com

114 pointsbane78 comments

So 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?

Actually 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.

Another 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).

Didn't Redhat complain that the company behind RedFlag didn't distribute source?

The 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.

Man 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?

Yeah, 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.

Can 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.

What does the population have to do with the complexity of the OS project?

It has a direct impact on the resources the state has available to it.

True, 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.

Nobody uses it in China. Dell installs it on computers just because a computer without an OS is not allowed to sell in China.

what do people use instead?

Pirated installs of Windows, most likely

Or actual copies of Linux.

Why don't they just install any other distro or free OS?

Though 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

It 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.

While 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_sys...

Their 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.

Considering 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.

About office, someone there have made WPS Office, and that's what I'm using in Ubuntu right now.

<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>?

<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>

<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.

On 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.

Ah, I see it now. I wasn't reading it the way the author intended. The Chinese governments wants the OS. With the goal of replacing Windows.

Excellent explanation, thank you canjobear! (And jameshart).

That is still not how I read it. I think it is reasonable to say "Ogg Vorbis is trying to replace MP3". I thereby feel it reasonable to say "I want Ogg Vorbis to replace MP3". If we now want to refer to this thing, we can replace "Ogg Vorbis" with "a file format". However, we care which file format among many, so we qualify it as "the file format saurik wants to replace MP3". I think the difference here is that I am quite happy using the name of these software products as a way to refer to their projects, which I then am more than happy to treat as actors capable of trying to accomplish abstract tasks. "Uber wants to disrupt the taxi industry." "Uber wants to replace taxis." "Random people on Hacker News want Uber to replace taxis." "A first look at the new service random users on Hacker News want to replace taxis." (I also think this is more what canjobear meant, as Y has become the subject. It isn't that X wants Y with a goal of Z, it is that X wants Y to accomplish its goal of Z.)

"A detailed look at the mountain John wants to dance with an elephant" is perfectly grammatical. John wants the mountain to dance with an elephant. Let's take a detailed look at that mountain.

"Look at the car I want to buy." "Look at the horse I want to win the race." "Look at the OS I want to replace Windows."

In 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.

I 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.

>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

Nope. I use apparmor. Interesting though. I didn't know that about SELinux.

Do 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.

Also 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.

SELinux is open source, is there any validity to a claim that SELinux performs anything other than securing the local operating system?

There 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.

I understand what you are saying now.

So 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.

> 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.

Why are two girls sitting in the middle of the street?

And 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.

I 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?

Likely a moot point. Even if MS did anything, China would say, "nah it's just a coincidence" or, "doesn't look similar to me!"

I'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.

So what's the desktop environment?

Did they theme an existing one like Gnome or KDE or did they wrote one from scratch?

They skinned MATE - https://i.imgur.com/5J3f1Kf.png

The GNU gnu blended with nyan cat? What message are they trying to send?

  uname -a | grep Linux

/golfclap

They were suspicious when a unix terminal (telltale sign you might have accidentally installed linux) popped up so they did some forensics!

Hey, at least his grep did have the --color switch enabled.

The 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?

Hello, 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

"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 ;-)

I'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?

Allowing 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.

> rather appreciate the symbiosis that has developed within IT in general.

Microsoft has been a bully for very long. Whether that has been beneficial or detrimental to IT cannot be proved, of course, but whichever you believe, one must acknowledge the other side.

Personally, I think Microsoft held personal computing back by at least a decade. The Amiga 1000, in 1985, was better at Graphics, Sound, Games, and even multitasking than the PC of 1995, and was way cheaper (for the same functionality) then the PC of 1985[0]. Amiga died because of mismanagement, mostly, but might have succeeded if MS did not commoditize the PC market. (Amiga wasn't the only player at the time -- commoditizing the PC killed most of the variety)

Also, BeOS, in 1995, was way better than Windows 95 for all home uses; At the time, windows was popular but not dominant (DOS was still king), and BeOS actually was a competitor; Microsoft flexed their muscles and killed BeOS by forcing vendors to pay full Windows price for any unit sold (on one hand), and disallowing selling dual boot machines (on the other).

> Without Microsoft and Apple, how many of the generations that have contributed to open source, be were they are now??

Why, running Amiga 16000s, Atari ST 5200s, Sinclair QLs and Acorn Aristotles. There was once a thriving echosystem that comprised a lot more variety. And it died ~20 years ago, in no small part thanks to Microsoft.

[0] An Amiga cost less than an 8Mhz PC+EGA (best you could get back then) + EGA monitor + sound card, and delivered more - but the basic Amiga did cost twice as much as a PC+CGA+Green CRT which was the common setup at the time.

They fund the Core Infrastructure Initiative [1], OpenBSD [2] etc. They release free software themselves. [3]

[1] https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/

[2] http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

[3] https://github.com/dotnet/core

First, almost all open source software runs on Microsoft Windows. As such, it provides and curates the biggest market for open source PC software, and I'd guess that Windows generates the majority of the money earned by the developers of open source applications (ie not the OS).

You can see that in action at Steam, which is fuelled by Windows users (over 90% of the user base), and from which Linux gamers (less than 1%) derive huge benefits.

Second, Microsoft created a compatible x86-based PC market, which created high volume sales, which drove down prices. This is exactly the market on which and for which Linux was originally developed. The people who run free software have saved far more money through Microsoft-driven economies of scale than they would ever have paid for Windows.

Third, Microsoft is a major contributor to open source, including the Linux kernel, and it has a large number of projects on both Github and Codeplex. Sure, it's self-interested, but it's no more self-interested than IBM, Google, Red Hat, and dozens of other companies that make money from software.

Why do you think Microsoft is the enemy? (I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft was a spunky young bunch of freedom fighters, pioneering desktop Unix, among other things.)

Thanks for specific answers. I think we've both "proven our point."

> Why do you think Microsoft is the enemy? (I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft was a spunky young bunch of freedom fighters, pioneering desktop Unix, among other things.)

I'm old enough to remember Microsoft was always an abusive back- stabbing company, often abusing their position. Yes, Excel was the better product than 1-2-3, and Word was better than WordPerfect. That said ...

Windows 3, the killer MS app, refused to run on DR-DOS.

Their contract with SpyGlass said SpyGlass would get a share of the profits of selling IE - which MS gave for free. Though IE3 was acceptable, that was not enough to win the hearts and minds, so they kludged IE4 into the operating system, thus leveraging their OS monopoly to gain browser monopoly - which they cemented by having e.g. Word and FrontPage emit IE-specific markup.

Microsoft was continually spreading FUD, making vague threats about viral licenses, various ip issues and other problems with free software. They still make more revenue off Android patent threat agreements than they make on Windows phones.

They stacked the ISO vote for OOXML, which took a couple of years to clear in some countries (beyond the specific OOXML damage done, in some countries the new members that voted only on this issue ground work to a halt because of quorum requirements).

Not to mention all of the "protected path" issues, which are actively working against users.

While only the last three items have anything to do with free software, Microsoft is a bully, and has been one for 30 years. "Freedom fighters" is not a title I would associate with Microsoft at any point in time. They have been behaving better recently, but only because Google and Apple managed to beat them into submission. I don't think the company culture actually changed. Two years of behaving is not enough to be convincing, after ~30 years of bullying.

Microsoft's record of back-stabbing is rather small and trivial compared to some other companies, such as IBM and Oracle, and is a long way in the past. The company has been under government attack since 1995 (when it signed Janet Reno's consent decree) and was under very close day-to-day judicial supervision for a decade after losing its anti-trust case (it paid many billions for its sins).

So, for the past 15 years or so, Microsoft's behavior has been far better than average for the software industry. For the past five years, it has been listed as one of the world's "most ethical" corporations.

Pretty much all the people who did bad things departed in a previous century, and the company culture is radically different today.

> So, for the past 15 years or so, Microsoft's behavior has been far better than average for the software industry.

OOXML happened in 2006. Android racket is still going on. Proxy fight against linux through SCO (yes, MS financed it) went through 2010.

Microsoft can only be considered ethical in comparison to Oracle. But then, anything is ethical compared to Oracle.

Ah, I didn't realize "ethical" just meant things you don't like.

> OOXML happened in 2006.

Standard technique re committees, and Microsoft isn't the first to use it. However, on balance, it was a good thing to do. Frankly, I don't see how any sensible person can object to the opening up and standardization of ubiquitous file formats (and again, that's a common industry move). It's good for users.

> Android racket is still going on.

Microsoft was one of the pioneers of desktop computing and desktop Unix, so I can believe it has some IP (though I don't know what it is).

Monetizing your IP is a standard American practice, in which IBM has long been a world leader. I wouldn't expect the US DoJ to disapprove of it. Indeed, it appears the whole US legal, economic and political systems encourage it.

> Proxy fight against linux through SCO (yes, MS financed it) went through 2010.

Which Microsoft didn't finance.

> Ah, I didn't realize "ethical" just meant things you don't like.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you are unaware of what was going on. I've attached references so that you can educate yourself. If you think they are wrong, please have the courtesy to provide references that counter these.

> However, on balance, it was a good thing to do.

What exactly was a good thing to do? Stacking ISO committees with inactive members[0], that took years to clear so the committees went back to function? (No, that's not standard practice). Or was the good thing ignoring requests to join the OASIS ODF standardization process? Or was it the actual OOXML "standard" itself, which is so convoluted that at the time it was published, no software (Including Microsoft Office) supported it, and in general, no software CAN really support it because it has settings like[1] "auto space like word 95", which is not specified anywhere except in the Word 95 source code? It's not a standard, it's a joke, and it's a mockery any community process. And I've been on committees before - politics is rampant, but what Microsoft did is not.

> Microsoft was one of the pioneers of desktop computing and desktop Unix, so I can believe it has some IP (though I don't know what it is).

You were saying microsoft has changed and has been better than most companies for the last few years. I would say this contradicts your position. It is no worse than IBM or Oracle, but that doesn't make Microsoft ethical.

> Which Microsoft didn't finance.

"The email details how, surprise surprise, Microsoft has arranged virtually all of SCO’s financing, hiding behind intermediaries like Baystar Capital.”[2]

[0] http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20080825162905... and http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=OOXML+%22auto+space+like+wor...

[2] http://techrights.org/2010/05/25/microsoft-sco-and-then-acac...

Anybody who seriously references anything from techrights is so deluded as to be beyond argument. Sorry.

What can I say, you have the winning argument. It also totally trumps groklaw and hundreds of independent google results.

Ubuntu Kylin for China looks better http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/ubuntu-kylin

India has one too:

http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/indian-government-is-la...

This 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

Are they moving off home-grown Lenovo hardware because of superfish and other spyware? Governments disable all this stuff anyway.

The 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?

LibreOffice 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.

They weren't joking when they said it would be a WinXP replacement. The look and feel is almost identical.

I 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?

> 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.

The most laughable part is that you can't install Chrome or any other software created by companies that the government doesn't like.

I still prefer the Red Star linux.

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