South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry | Hacker News Reader

South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

koreaherald.com

627 pointsjrepinc270 comments

As I recall, this sort of public statement is used as a lever to squeeze some discounts out of Microsoft's Enterprise Sales team before the government "decides" to stay with Windows.

As a Linux aficionado, I have to agree with you, unfortunately. I've seen this too many times over the years not to be cynical about it.

As someone who likes Linux and genuinely believe that software that was paid for by the public should be open source, I just have to ask you why that is.

I work in a Danish municipality with 100.000 citizens. We operate more than 300 IT systems, some of these are one of a kind systems that have no alternatives and some of those only run on Windows.

We also have 8000 employees, a lot of them couldn’t tell you if the smartphone they use each day is an android or an iPhone. They know windows and they know office, switching them to pages and macOS would be almost impossible, Linux and libre office is out of the question.

We have an IT staff of skilled people who were willing to skip pay for ideology they are all certified Microsoft and have little other education. They could all easily leave for other positions in the Microsoft infrastructure. It would cost around a million to replace just one of them.

We could easily switch our tech to Linux, we would need to build a lot of replacement software but that could be done in a reasonably manner, but moving the business side to Linux would be the most expensive thing we ever did.

Which is why I’m a skeptic of something I believe should happen. We pay a tech tax to Microsoft, by we can’t stop. It’s just not doable.

partial counter-point: many large companies, universities, schools etc have switched to things like Google Docs. Most use of office software is simple enough that people can transfer (afaik a big part in the Munich migration was making sure all the templates used for common documents where ported properly and people could easily access to).

Specialist software is a big problem of course, likely leading to a parallel Windows infrastructure of some kind, either dedicated Windows workstations for the workers that need it or a terminal-server setup of some kind - I know companies that used the latter to keep Windows XP applications available in an isolated environment too. But it's all a bespoke process.

That is not really a counter point though. I mean, education is part of a municipality, it makes up around 15% of our work force, and you’re right, they could probably be switched to Linux.

That doesn’t really make sense though, because our IT staff can’t support it, so we would need 1-2 guys extra which is more expensive than the windows licenses for 1200 employees.

That's basically why vendor lock-in works, you'll always stay on Windows. I get that, but that's the case for everything. If you want to change anything in your life, there's some need to get out of your comfort zone, since not doing so means only doing what you're comfortable with, thus not changing anything.

There's no doubt there'll be increased support costs in the short term, but this should be a long-term investment to get off of proprietary software and embrace open formats, (in my humble opinion, governments should by law be required not to produce documents that require proprietary software to open properly).

Governments should be the ideal vehicles for long-term investments. It's usually public corporations that are mostly concerned with the short term, it shouldn't be governments. If the SK government would seriously commit, in 10 years Linux would be the new normal and it would be Windows that requires extra staff, support etc.

I actually personally think all public software should be open source so citizens can have access to what they pay for. It’s a tough sell though, because of how massive of an undertaking it is.

We simply have too much software that only runs on; and too much staff schooled for Windows. You’re right that we could change if we wanted to, but it’s just hard to justify such an investment in an area where it would mean that we had to fire teachers and nurses to pay for it.

We don’t even have a good business case. I mean, our total Microsoft licenses are around the same expense as 4 employees. It would be literal decades before we brought the investment home if we made a full switch.

That doesn’t really work in political organisations, and it’s likely why all the previous attempts to switch have failed. To do this, we’d need massive public support for it, so the political leadership doesn’t get cold feet during the “short” term investment, and the truth is, the public couldn’t care less.

That doesn’t mean we can’t get there eventually. We try to buy more and more open source, we set up co-operations across municipalities to define architectural standards so suppliers can’t define our infrastructure anymore. But it’ll take a long time, and maybe it’ll never make sense to leave Microsoft. I mean, what’s the open source alternative to office365?

> That doesn’t mean we can’t get there eventually. We try to buy more and more open source, we set up co-operations across municipalities to define architectural standards so suppliers can’t define our infrastructure anymore

That's nice to hear. I think your best bet is indeed to slowly make sure you're not dependent on Microsoft. Even if Windows never wholly goes, at least Linux could then be a viable option for new deployments, or for smaller departments.

> so we would need 1-2 guys extra which is more expensive than the windows licenses for 1200 employees.

As someone who supports both Windows and Linux laptops, if you switched to Linux your support staff would eventually halve. The control you have over Linux is so tight, its relative immunity viruses, to staff playing with it and adverse Microsoft "upgrades" so good that support literally drops to whatever it takes to keep the hardware going. Or to put it another way: if you need to re-image a Linux laptop, it's because the disk drive broke.

Mind you, it takes a while to get to that point. And you need someone with real Linux expertise. Real Linux expertise unfortunately means when a problem arises gets to the point you would give up and re-image Windows, instead with Linux you haul out the source, and find the root cause. But if you can do that you will be able to drive the software defect rate to near zero.

Or to put it another way again: Windows licences are the price to pay if you don't / can't pay for that sort of expertise, so you are trapped into paying to do it for you. Unfortunately Microsoft is a monopoly, so you end up paying a fair bit more. I'll grant you small enterprises don't have much choice. But I'd expect someone with 1200 employees does have the choice.

Yeah, they're not going to do it. Or do you think they could ever stand to be seen as running the exact same OS as their northern, uh, neighbors? I mean, let's get real.

Doesn't NK have it's own special linux distro?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

And suddenly three new Microsoft HQs appeared in SK.

With more things running on Web I think they could probably do partial transition of some computers.

Whats worse is they could all pull it off if they invest in existing Distros and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need. If they rely on legacy Windowd OS' the licenses for new OS' wont matter. They need secure systems to avoid being hacked by external malicious state actors.

I would love to see some countries adopting Linux for government systems and funding research and development e.g. maybe fund Libre Office or the KDE one more and then build out other tools to be cross platform.

The French police uses a custom distro based on Ubuntu 16.04: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

Why are they using a custom distro? Is it just different graphics or do they have changes significant enough that a customised Ubuntu installer wouldn't suffice?

what's the difference between a custom distro and a customized installer?

Likely it's simply Ubuntu + some custom repos + different graphics (because why not).

They have some customized parts.

For example, IIRC, they use a smart card to authenticate on their workstations, and also on their web applications. For that you need to customize a bit (better out of the box support for pkcs11 devices, integrate the Certificate Authorities needed, drivers).

There are a few contributions to open source projects:

A few years back, they were contributing to a fork of Thunderbird called Trustedbird for example.

There are also a few individual contributors inside the Gendarmerie, for example Xavier Guimard creator and one of the current developers of LemonLdap (SSO portal).

Also just as a side note, this distribution is used by the Gendarmerie, which is not exactly the national Police. In France you have both a Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie National. The Gendarmerie is military personel (the Police is civilian). I'm guessing national sovereignty plays a small role in that (VS using MS Windows, which is completely controlled by a US company, bounded to the US government).

When you run Windows you can use GPO to override loads and loads of behaviours, and WSUS to customise which updates get picked up by the computers.

When you run Linux you do it by creating custom packages and changing the package manager to point to a different server, at which point you have created a "custom distro".

> Whats worse is they could all pull it off if they invest in existing Distros and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need

I don't know about that, I've seen what kinds of systems the existing distros build and I'm not impressed. Which isn't to say that Microsoft would definitely better, seeing as they are doing their best to become a Linux distro themselves while embracing all the bad behaviors that entails, but your statement certainly isn't a given.

> while embracing all the bad behaviors that entails

What do you mean by this?

Increasing user hostility (see: forced updates "for your own good"), poorer quality software released more often, no QA, ridiculously convoluted dependency management...

What distro are you using that has these issues? My Debian server has been running solidly for years without crashing or (automatically) updating. I've also never had any problems with QA or package management; everything installed with the system package manager has always run, installed, and updated smoothly. I'm not a linux expert, but what you described are all issues I associate exclusively with Windows and, to a lesser extent, recent MacOS, both of which I also use frequently.

A server is generally a single purpose device, and the server stuff in Linux is pretty mature because people make money off of it.

Run Linux on a Desktop and it's a whole different story. Shit breaks all the time, the package dependency spaghetti is insane, no one seems to test anything (or they don't listen to the people who do), etc.

Funnily enough North Korea runs their own Linux distro, Red Star OS

For anybody interested in a more detailed look on Red Star OS, check out this CCC talk [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/8LGDM9exlZw

My fiancee who is from South Korea thinks very highly of the North Korean engineers' skills. Even under hunger and adverse conditions, they can produce their own Linux distribution and nuclear weapons program.

It's not funny at all, IMO, it adds a unique identifier to each file created on the OS for tracking dissidents.

Technically interesting, though.

"... and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need."

There's a reason Microsoft was successful for years: they built turn-key solutions, and added new turn-key features their customers requested.

Switching from that sort of IT to a linux-based, 'we need a system architect' model doesn't happen overnight. There's organization shift, cultural shift, firing unneeded people who won't retrain, retraining people who are worth it, and hiring talent to fill gaps.

Not to mention that talent's more expensive and less easily certified (e.g. all the official MS rubber stamp programs).

Not impossible, but it's a LOT of work. With dubious chances of success.

Basically Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This is something people forget about. OS and app licenses are likely a drop in the ocean compared to the operating costs of supporting your infrastructure (regardless of whether it runs on Windows or Linux).

[edit: TOC -> TCO]

TOC seems to conveniently leave out risk as a factor too. At least at the sales level. And yet the amount of failed systems migrations I've seen...

If I have a 50% chance to cut my IT budget by 15%, if I remake my org, is it worth it?

I've seen some spectacular cockups over the years and eye watering sums of money burned because no-one factored in risk properly. And they more often than not happen on government projects, and usually some big name consultancy is heavily involved - Capita, PwC et-al.

Having worked the consultant gig for a bit, we never talked about risk.

Honestly, because most customers sponsoring projects were morons. If you told them there was a 25% chance of failure, they'd go with someone else who claimed a 0% chance of failure.

I finally decided most of this was just sponsors covering their ass. If they initiated a project with risk and it failed, that reflected on them. If they initiated a project and the consultants claimed (winkwinknudgenudge) there's no risk, then if it failed those lying consultants were the only ones to blame.

This is pretty much the reason consultants exist. They are the employee's risk insurance.

Or just not the right expertise to launch and manage such a contract. Sadly really difficult for government to hire the right expertise - either hiring procedures are too complicated (equitable!) or slow (thorough!) or not interested (salaries not competitive as citizens would be outraged about gov paying high salaries for high expertise).

TCO was also a big part of the marketing campaign of Microsoft against Linux in the late 90ies, early 00s.

A big difference compared to one or two decades ago is that a lot of domain-specific services have moved to web applications. So, there are probably a lot of machines out there that are just glorified web browsing machines.

Also, the popularity of iOS and Android have made more applications cross-platform.

Of course, once Office documents or legacy Win32 applications are part of the equation, you can't really beat Windows. It is a common misconception that LibreOffice could replace Office. I use a Linux desktop and a MacBook and most of the Word/Excel paperwork that I have to do (luckily irregularly) does not open correctly in LibreOffice. Of course, it is an uphill battle for the LO folks.

Linux workstations, Office 365 -- skip LibreOffice.

In my experience O365 office web applications are no competition even for Libre/OpenOffice. Has that changed lately?

I’ve switched to libreoffice from excel and find it totally viable as an excel replacement except for lack of vba support, but it has its own scripting language so even that isn’t a deal breaker. It’s just so much faster and less bloated than today’s excel.

Unluckily in my case Libreoffice Calc (using it privately) is a lot slower when using formulas than MS Excel (using it for work).

For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost.

By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.

The only way to break out of this, I think, is for governments to forbid themselves to use proprietary software that was not developed on their own soil. Because let's face it, it's not really about money (especially not about short term money). It's more about national security, sovereignty, and freedom.

And for why that's important: business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades.

Dealing with this at work now.

And it's not like they're disinterested or incapable of learning, literally no one thought "Gee, what those folks are doing looks a lot like code."

The biggest boost to interop would be requiring software vendors to release spec sheets for necessary software components and file formats... if they want government work. No more "It's too hard" or "We can't." You want the job, those are the rules.

> business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades.

So, business teams invented the all-too-common version of agile development even before “real” software developers, without the disadvantage of ignorance of the body of knowledge around the SDLC, got around to it.

The Excel file format has been a publicly released open standard for years.

There's a document that ostensibly describes the format, but I'm not aware of a free software reference implementation. Their format may be open in theory, but in practice Microsoft still takes advantage of vendor lock in.

> For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly.

For that use case, there's always SoftMaker Office[1].

1 - https://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office

Sorry, I was implying free software only. The "free trial" I see on the front page looks proprietary.

Yeah, it is, unfortunately. But the question then becomes, is it better for them to use GNU software and Linux, with maybe one or two closed-source apps, which they could migrate from over time, or use Windows and everything proprietary, even if the only use case LO doesn't cover is opening MS Office files 'perfectly' (yet)?

> By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.

By that criteria, the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office is the _same_ version of Microsoft Office.

The delta between two Microsoft Office versions has often been larger than between a Microsoft Office version and a LibreOffice version...

But the two MS Office versions both have a Microsoft logo on them. People will grumble, but get used to the new version, whereas if you give them something with a different logo, they will scream bloody murder and demand that you get rid of that weird program and give them back their Office programs.

This kind of condescension is why people hate tech people. Is it any wonder they don't want to use Linux with sentiments like this being so common?

Condescension does not change the fact that that’s an accurate description of the behaviour of some people, any more than it would change a left wing sneer at right wingers who think climate change isn’t a big deal, or a right wing sneer at left wingers who think evolution in humans stopped at the neck.

Have seen this exact problem get fixed by using the little blue E icon for Firefox.

Walk a mile in our shoes. You understand truths about your job we may not.

EDIT:

Perceived change generates just as much stress and associated opposition as actual change. You've just enabled me to make that explicit for myself. I feel stupid that took me so many years. Thank you for that.

Writing this out somewhat softens my frustration with people refusing to use anything but the blue e or similar intellectual laziness.

Where in my comment did you see any opinion being expressed? I merely described something that I encountered many, many times. You do not have to believe me, that is up to you.

Not everything is an adversarial thing about two opposing groups of people.

Well, newer MS Office versions are still 100% file-compatible with older versions.

(With compatibility packages)

> For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost.

Citation needed.

The company I work for switched wholesale away from Microsoft. Management moved first and the rest of us shortly afterwards. Haven't heard any complaints.

And the companies I worked with repeatedly stated that they couldn't possibly switch away because their clients (often the government itself) was using a particular version of MS Office. This often meant we had to use several versions of MS Office, depending on who we were interacting with.

The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?

> The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?

It is. We are a tech/consulting company, but management is management and we also have a good number of employees older than me (and I think that is great :-)

Try OnlyOffice. Works a lot better re compatibility with office files IMHO.

Not to mention it's a LOT of work that needs to be coordinated by someone with the vision and skill to make it happen. People like that are not exactly common in the public administration of any country.

Mostly because government and small-scale enterprise balk at the salaries they command.

Income inequality is a concern, and some people are certainly overpaid. But at the C* or technical architect level, the cost of pinching pennies is dominated by the cost of choosing a wrong direction (or not recognizing a changing situation and correcting quickly enough).

Public sector salaries are simply set a certain way - through a political process, covering all employees. There is little leeway to give higher/lower salaries to a few as that smells like cronyism. You can't negotiate a gov salary, except for externals.

Yeah finding talent and making good choices way outside what your traditional IT competency is pretty risky.

As a french, I have to say the french local police (gendarmerie) has been using Ubuntu in all their stations for years and they are very happy with that !

Yep. That's one common outcome. Another one is where they actually move and discover it's a nightmare to train people, and maintain the infrastructure.

Still means Linux is working as intended. Freedom means options. Options means bargaining power. Bargaining power means monopolies can't push you around as much.

Unless the monopoly knows you are bluffing?

Good ol' "Cristiano Ronaldo wants to return to Manchester United" every time he wanted a raise from Real Madrid.

I used to support our office in S. Korea.

It's true they depend super heavily on ActiveX and other weird applets/software that runs only on Windows and/or IE.

A lot of the communication with the government (yearly tax submission) as well as banking software would not run on our Linux or OSX devices, and so we had these 'loaner' windows 'tax machines' that got reimaged every few days that people could use to do their business.

They also have their own Office-like suite by Hancon[1], that is a pain to support and only runs on Windows. There were attempts to have gDrive to be able to read the files but afaik that never worked out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancom

The word processor by Hancom is actually pretty nice, especially for composing Korean-only and mixed Korean-and-English documents. I've been using it since before I even knew that MS Word existed, and I still prefer it to MS Word for anything that contains CJK characters. The proprietary file format is a PITA, though.

Hancom did release a Linux version of their office suite a few years ago, and regularly updates the OSX version. Moreover, Hancom has been dabbling in Linux for over 20 years. They even maintained their own Red Hat-based distro at some point. They also support OpenDocument and OOXML fairly well. In short, Hancom has been hedging their bets very thoroughly. So if the government adopts Linux by any chance, it won't be difficult for them to go fully cross-platform and keep their lucrative government contracts.

Have you been using it since its first release? I find it surprising you hadn't heard about MS Office if you were already using Hancom.

Yeah, I've used H.ngeul since 1990 -- version 1.2 I think. MS Word already existed, of course, but I didn't hear about it nor actually get to use it until a few years later. I was a kid and didn't have internet back then, so news was slow :p

WordPerfect had a large early market share

To explain the history a little bit (as a Korean):

Hancom's Hangul software was popular in Korea in the 90s because of its splendid Hangul support (Word wasn't that good at it back in the day). So it became a de-facto "standard" for Korean documents. But the problem was, piracy was really rampant at the time, because it was before online DRM protection technologies came into light. (They've tried hardware DRM, like the serial port dongles, which eventually were cracked.) They almost went bankrupt, up to the point where Microsoft was thinking about buying them out (there are a lot of conflicting info about this in the internet, so I don't know exactly what deal might have gone through)

But then, when Koreans learned about this imminent danger, they launched a national campaign to save the company, and raised over $10 million for them. As for why this was possible: nationalism was pretty strong back in the late 90s, partly because of Korea's IMF crisis. (If you want to read more about the Korean economic recession and how people responded to it with activism, read more about the Gold-collecting campaign in 1998 [0]) Because of this, Hancom was able to recover and still be alive to this day.

Nowadays more and more Koreans are using Word these days, but Hancom's software still has lots of uses, especially in the government. The Hangul word processor had some unique characteristics other than just language support: most notably it was one of the first word processors to have nested table support. Because of this, many Hangul documents have layouts made of nested tables (I know some people at HN would be utterly disgusted with this, but this has many benefits: you can have total control of your document layout, and it's good for making documents with dense information such as government forms.) This is why Hangul documents cannot be simply converted to Word; the two have very different conventions about layout in general.

To conclude, reflecting this as a Korean (and an avid Linux user), I have both good and bad feelings about this. On one hand, Koreans were forced to use a proprietary, non-free program to open their documents, including important government stuff. This also sucks for Mac and Linux users (The Mac version was horrible the last time I've used it, and I couldn't get the Linux version to install on Arch Linux). On the other hand, if Hancom wasn't alive, then Koreans would be forced to use Microsoft Word with subpar Korean support (because Microsoft wouldn't really care about Korean language support unless there was competition). While I have mixed feelings about Hancom, I really hope that they would provide good support for Linux users in Korea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-collecting_campaign

It's not just layout (which goes way beyond nested tables -- I always go for Hangul when I want sub-millimeter precision) but also typography that makes a huge difference. Hangul was built from the ground up to accommodate the needs of CJK typography.

You can tell that Word was never designed with CJK typography in mind when you write a sentence in English, try to add a word in Korean, and watch in horror as the entire line (and sometimes the entire page!) jiggles up and down while Word tries to figure out the line spacing (leading). By default, Word doesn't know how to keep leading consistent when you mix CJK and Latin characters in the same line, resulting in a very unprofessional-looking document. Hangul gets it right the first time.

On the other hand, Word blows Hangul out of the water when it comes to Latin typography.

If I remember correctly, the ActiveX widget provided home-grown encryption, because in the 90s, 40-bit encryption was the most you could export from the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

It was actually worse than that when I lived in Korea. It wasn't just Windows that you needed, it was Korean Windows. I thought I'd be okay because I was running dual boot machines with Linux and Windows. Nope. Windows purchased in the US simply did not work with many of the sites. (My understanding is that most software written for commerce/government sites had Korean people that purchased a Windows computer in Korea as the only audience they thought about.)

I lived in Korea between 2010 and 2015 and I never needed the Korean version of Windows. Even my work computer was running the en-US version. Your just need to switch the default locale and codepage for the occasional poorly written software (mostly old installers), it just takes a reboot.

MS had completely separate custom builds of Windows (made out of completely different binaries) until XP at least. E.g. an English Windows and a German Windows would install completely different files and the only way tonswitch system language was a reinstall. Conponents to support CJK were not part of these installs, either. This changed with Vista or 7 (don't remember) where they were able to seperate Windows into a core plus a set of language packs for all regions.

So depending on which version of Windows you are talking about you might both be right.

Actually I believe Windows 2000 had support for language packs (MUI if I remember correctly). You _had_ to start with an en-US install to use those, so the bit about different language versions installing different files was still correct. Components for CJK support was a check box in the Language & Region control panel, which required the Windows install disc to apply.

I think the language packs might not have been available in all SKUs; not very sure about that part. The CJK support, I think, was.

The default system locale thing (MBCS) was a separate issue.

How would the language packs have worked? Back then the translations were created by patching the resource tables of the compiled binaries. So notepad.exe with German localization would just contain the German strings instead of the English ones. There were no external string tables that I am aware of. That came with Vista, I believe. Since then, every language version is (finally!) the same base install plus the appropriate and exchangeable language pack.

Vista had language packs, but they were exclusive to Ultimate.

I guess running those ActiveX controls under Wine is a non starter?

Not necessarily. ActiveX controls are just plain old COM binaries (though some could be constructed with Visual Basic), Wine ought to be able to handle these just fine. But as with all things Wine, mileage may vary depending on app.

Its funny how wine have better support for legacy win apps then windows 10. Probably a reason why they are switching to Linux.

Did they try WINE or ReactOS?

I remember hearing years ago IE usage was crazy high in South Korea because they had laws in place requiring all online banking customers to install an ActiveX control. If that's true... Then they've come pretty far.

Even after ActiveX was on the way out they still had some pretty wacky practices. Korean websites requiring users to install proprietary security software was not uncommon.

> Korean websites requiring users to install proprietary security software was not uncommon.

It still is common. They just replaced ActiveX plugins with native Windows apps because ActiveX has a bad rep. It's still Windows through and through, and most of those "security" apps are borderline spyware.

I have to use Korean banks and government websites daily for business, and I keep them safely segregated inside a VM.

Easy; run Windows XP, IE, ActiveX in a virtual machine. Use Linux as your main OS.

Windows 7 with IE11 currently seems to be the sweet spot. Even in Korea, using XP has been frowned upon for a few years now :)

Yup, and the free Win7+IE11 VM from Microsoft doesn't really expire (you can rearm the license indefinitely).

Most Chinese banks still do, some even require you to install a service, some don't support Chrome.

Same for Korean banks

This is similar to Brazilian banks too. Both public and private.

They stoped using ActiveX in the 00s but then started requiring the user to install some rootkit-like security software that was nearly impossible to uninstall and was probably able to spy on users.

Now they some of them have an app that is basically a bundled browser accessing their regular website.

On the other hand nobody in China uses Web for banking. Most people I know just use mobile applications, which aren't that bad, moreover most of the operations done through AliPay/WeChat/QuickPass, so you don't need to use yacky bank things. Alibaba and Tencent have better UX in their apps. When you go to any bank you feel like a time traveller for 20 years back.

OK so Korea has this weird system which says most banking/e-commerce transactions must be authenticated by a home-grown, country wide asymmetric crypto system. Basically to do commerce stuff online, you need to get a public key certificate that you can sign your online activity with from either the government or a banking institution.

The crypto nerds (including me) might think this is a splendid idea--perfect security!

The downside: they did this to shift the blame to the consumer if something goes wrong. If there is a credit card fraud, the consumer is automatically at fault by default, since obviously the consumer mishandled the public key crypto file. This makes sense, but this also means no chargebacks and other nasty side effects.

Also, this also meant that you had to install a bunch of ActiveX verging-on-malware-ware to get your banking shit settled. Now it supports Chrome and Firefox but holy crap, they install a ton of weird malware protection software and I'm pretty sure some of them take a cut from your computer's performance and stability. I'm just glad they don't display fucking ads.

I doubt this will work out. They also tried that in many countries, they all go back to using Windows. I hate Windows, but I can envision how much money AND time it's gonna cost them to move out, and I'm sure that they will either run out of money before they do the transition, or machines would have already dominated the earth before they are done with this "transition"l

I would believe it much more if they said that they will try to use more Linux, try to mix them up, or create APIs for everything etc. Nowadays it's so easy to create services and use LDAP or whatever thing you want with whatever programming language or service. You can host it on Linux and start changing some computers and systems to Linux.

But "switch from X to Y" seems a terrible idea. Even as a personal computer user, for me, it's impossible to "switch". Imagine for a government. It's a hilarious statement, one of those that politicians do say, but they have no fucking clue of what they are saying.

> They also tried that in many countries, they all go back to using Windows.

uhh... no, here in France a lot of public infrastructure runs on linux.

The list of LibreOffice users hasn't grown, but hasn't shrunk either[0]. Kudos to the French for so far being the biggest Western-state to implement FOSS.

Apart from the obvious benefit of lower cost, security and personal individualization are further benefits. No matter what the politicians or business will tell you: Any government running Windows on their systems is basically broadcasting their data straight into US secret services. There's nothing stopping them from doing that. Who would prosecute them? Would US law enforcement have motivation to do that?

And when it comes to individualization: Any open standard that allows any other third party to develop products with will (if left to its own means) always win out against proprietary solutions, since you can pitch all the third parties against each other to compete for the lowest bid.

But since it's not about getting cost-effective IT, the governments don't appear too concerned of the US knowing all their secrets and Microsoft is definitely more capable of pampering politicians than 3rd party Linux developers could, absurd requirements dot every government contract to bar said Linux developers and leave Microsoft as the only "viable" choice.

[0]: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/who-uses-libreoffice/

Also, the maintainer of Linux distribution can be a local company so that public funds don't go to USA.

Munich did it this way: 100% Linux, no compromises - they didn't even had an central Active Directory so if you required Windows due to software in your part of city government you were on your own - no central updates! They also forced everyone on an ancient OpenOffice 3.x version with KDE 4.x and KMail? That Munich migrated back has less todo with Linux or Windows or Microsoft politics (maybe..) but more with badly run infrastructure and in-fighting and big egos there. Sadly. That there is such a huge group of Linux proponents that cry foul and suspect some conspiracy is not really helping...

That's the missing piece with these large scale deployments: is there an infrastructure to provide support, training and maintenance of the deployment. It's one thing to push for moving from Windows to Linux, it's another to actually figure out the thousands of details that go along with it.

What Munich did was essentially created a homegrown solution which suffers from all the problems of homegrown solutions. Yes, you get to tailor it to your business, but then you have to maintain it for decades. Inevitably industry passes you by, and you end up paying for a sub-standard proprietary (ironically) solution that has no widespread support and you're own your own for everything - from new features, to security updates, to training, to compatibility and interoperability. It's always great at the beginning, and it's always miserable 10 years later when the excitement goes away and the original champions have moved on.

> badly run infrastructure and in-fighting and big egos

In other words, the same situation that exists everywhere.

> 100% Linux, no compromises

Not exactly. When the decision to go back to Windows was announced, they were even still running Windows 2000 on some machines. [1]

The initial reason for overhauling their infrastructure was certainly due to the proliferation of outdated software, but the consultancy they hired to evaluate the situation made the more conservative recommendation to update everything to the latest version and let each department choose which operating system to use. (Since they were de facto already doing that, just without a reasonable process.)

That this turned into "100 % Windows, no compromises" was probably due to Microsoft politics, i.e. someone convinced the mayor that Linux was the cause of their infrastructure issues rather than bad infrastructure management.

I bet they still have the same problems, except now they also have a few machines running outdated versions of their homegrown LiMux distribution.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643182

There's also the sheer political force that Microsoft brings to bear against Linux every time this kind of thing comes up.

I did some search and found that the distros that Korean government is considering are: Gooroom OS, which is being developed by Hancom since 2015 but were never released, Ubuntu, and HarmoniKR based on LinuxMint. They are considering web-based office suite so LibreOffice is may not be among consideration.

There are options such as PolarisOffice and Naver Office, but given that Hancom Office has a stake in the game, their cloud service HancomSpace along with Hancom Online may gain momentum. In the worst case scenario, I could see Korean government see Office 365 as a fallback.

https://www.zdnet.co.kr/view/?no=20190516093822 https://namu.wiki/w/%EA%B5%AC%EB%A6%84%20OS https://space.malangmalang.com/ https://www.hancom.com/product/productNetfficeMain.do

What I really don't understand is why commercial stations (like burger king's, ice cream stands etc...) uses windows when all those computers do is show either videos or static images

I'm guessing here: The guys installing those arguably very simple IT-systems mostly couldn't bother with Linux.

Add to that, (at least here in Germany) BK is a franchise that sells licenses to franchise operators, so I doubt they have strict requirements on the actual IT setup, just the pictures they need to display.

So you have very normal, run-off-the-mill managers and IT services, the former unable to grasp that Windows 10 with constant updates and fuck-ups will constantly require the services of the IT guys, and the latter naturally profiting of that. The increased margin of not using Windows wouldn't be enough to compensate that, and an increased price for a Linux package is something very difficult to convince those managers of.

And then also IT-people well versed in Linux usually have clients who pay substantially more than simply outfitting non-IT businesses with IT-equipment.

It will be either one of these or a combination of these.

* Windows has been approved by management to be the only OS allowed on the computer network * The software for showing the static images / videos and whatever manages it will have been written on Windows or even DOS * The manufacturer of said machines whoever wrote their software was Windows Developer and it is cheaper just to ship a copy of Windows Embedded then to rewrite the software , QA and integrate it.

I have a piece of software that I get small support contracts for. I tell clients it is Windows only. There is nothing stopping me from deploying to Linux or even one of the BSDs (I think). I just can't be bothered to deal with differences in distros, going through a QA process etc when it won't really get me many more sales.

I've seen Burger King use Linux on their displays in India...

The correct question is: Why should they use Linux? Historically, Linux struggled to display video.

The companies that make that stuff started out with Windows, they have built a workflow to manage these devices on top of Windows, why switch now? It's not cost effective.

each windows distribution in theory needs a license. I don't know how big companies like Burger King handles those bulk licenses, but linux would be a lot more cost effective in this department

Might not answer you exact question, but I interned with the display team in Windows - they had loads of weird asks for interesting display topologies (and adapter modes) to be supported for media displays.

I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like that on LKML.

That is something that puts Linux off. Linux doesn't handle esoteric topologies very well without some complex xrandr instructions

My guess would be that it's easier to get tech support for windows than linux.

I'm surprised to see such a move from the South Korean government. The reason is that, back when I lived there a while ago, most of the government resources required Windows machines to access. Specifically, we needed ActiveX and Internet Explorer for many stuff.

Such dependence on Microsoft technology is not only found in government but also in corporations. Recently I needed to access my bank account there and the bank required me to install some anti-virus software that only runs on Windows.

I don't know how things are now in general, but I welcome this change.

Cue a concerted effort by MS salespeople to make them an offer they can't refuse. See also: Munich.

That's not why Munich moved back to Windows. They moved back because supporting Linux workstations for their workforce was hard and expensive. It wasn't very popular with the end-users either.

Not true. Microsoft built a huge local branch there and as a result they've moved back into the dark abyss that is proprietary, non-free software.

That is the conspiracy theory that some are telling themselves: that this is THE reason why Munich moved away. AS IF!

Here's something more likely: Munich was ready to move back because the project was expensive to maintain, cumbersome in practice, killed productivity and was generally unpopular with the end-users, and Microsoft's new branch was just a cherry on top.

Microsoft made major political moves after LiMux adoption began. They relocated their German headquarters to Munich, and a new mayor (Dieter Reiter) was elected after the Microsoft employees moved to Munich. Reiter initiated the reversal from LiMux to Windows, while the previous mayor (Christian Ude) refused to do so despite in-person appeals from Steve Ballmer.

You might not like this line of argument, but it's not a "conspiracy theory" since it's well-supported. It's disingenuous to completely dismiss the role of political influence on a government decision.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-comp...

"There is the allegation that you as former head of the department of economy have made a deal with Microsoft to move its headquarter to Munich and in exchange you now deliver the return to their products. Does this connection exist?" - "No, definitely not."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBRh2G29NNE

I did not allege that Reiter "made a deal with Microsoft". My point was that Microsoft gained political clout as a result of moving its headquarters to Munich, which influenced the city's decision to switch back from LiMux to Windows.

>You might not like this line of argument, but it's not a "conspiracy theory" since it's well-supported.

But it isn't. You just asserted it. I don't dispute the facts at hand, but you can't just link those together and assert causality when there is no evidence for it .

>It's disingenuous to completely dismiss the role of political influence on a government decision.

I don't know what to do with that. There is no evidence and everyone disputes the corrupt link you assert. Not only that, there is an alternative explanation: the Linux deployment wasn't popular, killed productivity, and wasn't cheap to maintain. What you're doing is the definition of FUD.

Government decisions are often the result of more than one factor.

I did not assert that Microsoft's move to Munich was the only reason for the city's change from LiMux to Windows. But, Microsoft did gain political influence in Munich by moving their headquarters there. Politics played a role in the city's decision, and there is sufficient press coverage to support this. See the TechRepublic article in my parent comment.

You're arguing that the deployment of LiMux itself was the one and only reason for Munich's return to Windows, and dismissing the role of politics in Munich's decision as a "conspiracy theory".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

How is what you're doing not FUD? You have no evidence for anything you're stating. Zero.

>Microsoft did gain political influence in Munich by moving their headquarters there.

And did it actually influence the decision of Munich to change their infrastructure? And how much? 10% or 90%? Let's say it was a minor consideration, on the order of 1%, and the rest was the result of the failure of the LiMux deployment itself - see what I mean about needing evidence. You can't just say things because of your FEELS.

Again, one thing we know, it wasn't a great deployment.

Read the TechTarget article from my first comment, which you've overlooked the last two times I mentioned it:

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-comp...

There are additional sources describing politics as a significant factor in the city's decision:

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3170104/munichs-great-l...

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https:/...

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Reiter based the decision to switch back from LiMux to Windows on a report commissioned from Accenture, "the leading Microsoft services provider for the ninth consecutive year" with an obvious conflict of interest:

https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-and-avanade-na...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-partner-claims-munic...

I invite you to provide evidence for your assertion that the role of politics in Munich's decision is a "conspiracy theory" and "FUD".

To note is that accenture didn't even go as far as to recommend the complete switch back to Windows the city decided to do.

EDIT: > role of politics

Role of politics is a somewhat different claim than just "pressure/influence by Microsoft" (which for sure happened, but it's hard to gauge how large the influence was), and includes lots of other factors that are likely to have also played a role. The entire thing is quite murky and I think "it happened because X" is too easy whatever the X is.

Unbelievable. You keep spreading FUD. Literal definition of FUD. Now it's Accenture who is secretly killing the project because they are in pocket of Microsoft. And why is Accenture involved? Because Munich commissioned their opinion. And why did Munich commission their opinion? Because they are in the pocket of Microsoft of course. And why is Munich in the pocket of Microsoft? Why, because Microsoft moved their German headquarters Munich - not for any business reasons - but for secret nefarious reasons. And where did the move it from? Why, from Unterschleißheim a city (suburb) approximately 16KM away!!!!!! Surely no corporation would ever want to move downtown to a major metropolis from a suburb into a bigger office complex. Let me repeat that: this nefarious move you keep using as an example, was a grand total of 16 km, from a suburb of Munich to Munich.

AGAIN, the BIG picture - this deployment didn't turn out to be the success Munich had hoped it was going to be. They could limp along, sure, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who like it, especially the guy who runs the entire project, and the people who are ideological inclined against Microsoft, and the Green party...

I mean Jesus, the only way they could get this LiMux thing to work was by maintaining Windows licenses for legacy software and interoperability, virtualizing Office because OpenOffice/LibreOffice sucks (and it does), and moving to Exchange for Calendar and Email. This is a chimera. It sucks.

There were good reason to ditch Windows in the first place, and now there are good reasons to ditch this Linux experiment as well. That's the big picture.

>I invite you to provide evidence for your assertion that the role of politics in Munich's decision is a "conspiracy theory" and "FUD".

I invite you to provide evidence that your bias has not coloured your interpretation of events. Have fun proving a negative.

(I read all the things you cited - it's the same kind of stuff - high on speculation, light on evidence).

> Why, because Microsoft moved their German headquarters Munich - not for any business reasons - but for secret nefarious reasons.

Here is where you are misinterpreting all of the above. I did not say there were any "secret nefarious reasons". All involved parties made the decision that would be most beneficial to them ("business reasons" in the case of Microsoft), which influenced Munich's reversal.

Munich's switch to LiMux was an embarrassment to Microsoft, and one of the reasons for their move to Munich was to gain political clout by becoming a more important stakeholder to Munich. Generally speaking, companies have more influence on a city's decisions when they are actually located in the city, because they pay taxes to the city and have more employees living there. This isn't a "conspiracy theory", it's common sense.

In summary:

You: Munich switched back to Windows solely because there were issues with the LiMux deployment, and Windows software is superior to Linux software.

Me: Munich switched back to Windows because there were issues with the LiMux deployment, and because Microsoft made itself more important to Munich by moving its headquarters to the city.

We can agree to disagree.

You may dislike it, but calling it a "dark abyss" is pushing it. Probably 95% of people in tech get a paycheck due to non-free software.

And yes, Googlers & co., that includes you, even if the small lib you released is Open Source, the magic sauce powering Page Rank, Analytics, AdWords and such isn't.

That is a flat out lie.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/13/munich_committee_sa...

> Hübner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. > She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds". > Hübner added, "in the past 15 years, much of our efforts were put into becoming independent from Microsoft," including spending "a lot of money looking for workarounds" but "those efforts eventually failed."

https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...

> https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...

Looks like the open source equivalents for the software didn't deal well enough with different file formats.

This is not flat out wrong, it's just the officially given reason. Not the entire story. The source is in German, but EN Wikipedia sums it up nicely:

"In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD, wherein it is claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich."

This is also worth a read:

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/02/14/statemen...

In short, it _was_ MSFT lobby grease.

So you link a biased source against Microsoft to prove that Microsoft were conspiring with the council. They're reason to exist is to make Microsoft look bad.

The hell it is. Really, if you want to argue this please at least do your homework and have a read on the effort MS put in to get into the good graces of the Munich authorities.

I don't doubt that there were issues with 'different file formats', .docx and .xslx right up front (open standards that they are one wonders how there could have been an issue).

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...

Probably has a lot more to do with it than file formats ever did.

Yes different file formats are big deal. I've run into problems with just Doc files if they have forms embedded. I've had to deal with quite a lot from different councils in the UK.

A lot of gov / HR departments etc have embedded forms in things like word documents and PDFs. The same problem with alternative PDF viewers, they don't do PDF forms well if at all.

You don't know the requirements of the different departments and saying "this free alternative works fine when writing a doc" doesn't cover their use cases.

The Linux community like to think that Microsoft is the "big evil" that is trying to thwart them at every turn. I know quite a few people in Microsoft and they tell me that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

So sorry I think it is a conspiracy theory and as someone that earns his living processing documents from Office I know that incompatibilities exist between Libre Office (which is a fork of Open Office) and MS Office.

So, to summarize: vendor lock-in is a thing and the best way to get there is to create closed stuff that open source then has no chance to properly deal with. You can use this to strong-arm all kinds of entities to deal with you on your terms.

> The Linux community like to think that Microsoft is the "big evil"

I really don't think I speak for the Linux community but I do think that MS is still the big evil, just in slightly nicer packaging. Fantastic PR, crappy company.

> So, to summarize: vendor lock-in is a thing and the best way to get there is to create closed stuff that open source then has no chance to properly deal with. You can use this to strong-arm all kinds of entities to deal with you on your terms.

No. Please don't put words into my mouth.

The problem is that there is no specs / documentation for anything generally. Most of my time in dev has been spent dealing and finding work around for all sorts shitty bugs in applications when dealing with either web browsers or generating documents.

This is partially because of deliberate vendor lock-in and partially due to nobody being given time to actually produce specs as these are often an after thought. Customers don't care about me making proper documentation, even when they do other developers that do integrations DON'T RTFM and I have to guide them through it anyway. Customers don't pay for specs / docs etc, they pay for the product that lets them get shit done.

Fanatics of Open Source (and they are that) always argue about cost of the software, vendor lock in etc. The costs of the software are almost nothing compared to hiring people. I was on a team of 6 people doing a major rewrite (which shouldn't have been happening IMHO) and it cost the business about £500,000 just in staff. Licenses for SQL Server and Windows server was a small percentage of that and were about 1 man months worth of cost. These costs are nothing for large councils / businesses that will either recoup that cost from the software itself or will just raise taxes to cover the shortfall (which is what Gov always does).

The really good reason to use Open Source software is security, privacy and being able to run what you want on what you have purchased, but that never gets mentioned, it always the bullshit cost angle because £400 sounds a lot to the kids in University which are broke.

Also vendor lock-in is the norm for a vast number of reasons other than "M$ is the evilz, stop using Windoz". Just look at the 8bit/16bit era, almost everything was lock-in and much more expensive than today (by factors of ten). The free PC ecosystem is NOT the norm in computing.

> I really don't think I speak for the Linux community but I do think that MS is still the big evil, just in slightly nicer packaging. Fantastic PR, crappy company.

LOL. Google, Facebook, Paypal, Twitter are far more powerful than Microsoft and are much much more evil, you know why? Because they think they are the good guys. Microsoft are basically like IBM these days, they sell loads of proprietary stuff that office use because they have won in that sector, they are dominate almost nowhere else.

A great deal of the internet is now hosted on a about 5 or 6 providers, the largest being Amazon's cloud. That is far more frightening to me than Microsoft. Every single competitor (except Microsoft) uses Amazon's Object Storage API because they are the largest.

This isn't the early 2000s where Microsoft were a monopoly they simply aren't anymore because the market has changed so drastically in 20 years.

I do believe Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple are as evil if not more than MS, but that does not diminish their crimes even a little bit. Twitter much less so imho.

I was the blogger who first wrote (in English) about South Korea's reliance on Active X controls and Internet Explorer. That was more than a decade ago.

I'm paranoid enough of the numerous backdoors Microsoft has into my system as a home user. I can't imagine actually having life-threatening secrets on a Windows box, which is a reality for most of the governments of the world.

At this rate, it really feels like the next version of Windows will be derived from some Unix os. Windows 8 and onwards has been an unmitigated IT disaster. Windows Server is meh. I once ran Ubuntu mate with a windows theme on a computer terminal in a computer lab, and everybody clamored to use it since it was faster, better at printing, and never bluescreened. (That particular model was forced into "obselecence" by windows 10).

Just throw a custom graphical shell over a hardened Unix os, then use Valve's proton project for application comparability. You could be so rich using other people's work Microsoft.

Agreed, yet their goal is to build their own crappy version so that people think Linux sucks, when in reality it is still MS. I blame their culture though. No one who appreciates quality open source wants to work there.

> Agreed, yet their goal is to build their own crappy version so that people think Linux sucks, when in reality it is still MS.

Can't do it, Google owns that business model. I mean, they managed to do that twice? Must have taken them some serious effort!

Not really, Microsoft has a lot of enterprise customers and when their first user experience to Linux is WSL they are immediately turned off and unable to even take it seriously. I can at least take Android and ChromeOS serious enough to see it being viable for most desktop users and small businesses. Android, along with G Suite, is great for mobile enterprise management.

Then why did Microsoft just recently patch it and make it better? (WSL)

Have you used the new unreleased version yet?

Does it matter? Your premise is "they are shipping this bad thing on purpose" - what would be the point of making it better and spending more money on it if you were making it bad on purpose?

Apply Hanlon's Razor, and dont assume everyone has a grand plan.

Have you seen the same enterprise users try a Linux distro? I can assure you that the reaction is not better...

The scenario of someone not knowing Linux at all but then using WSL seems fairly unlikely compared to someone knowing Linux and using it to get a Linux environment on a Windows box.

Just as another anecdote to yours, I regularly get months of uptime with my Windows 10 dev box. Its been nothing but rock solid for me (so was 7 and 8 before that).

I'm not sure if it is possible to get months of uptime on a Windows 10 box without having pro/enterprise and disabling auto-updates. I have done this on my W10 desktop workstation and agree - literally no downtime/crashes until I have to windows update.

OOTH, my W10 laptop (xps 13 9343) is forced by microsoft to update. This means that every week my lappy spends around 90 minutes downloading, installing, failing, and finally rolling back an update. If I can remember I just keep delaying it.

Yes, months of uptime === no updating. The 'months' part was just to show that Windows10 doesn't necessarily suck for every single person. I'm quite happy with it, but I'm happy with Ubuntu and W7 and OSX too. I haven't disabled W10 updates, but being the sysadmin at our company I have a special OU for machines that I manually update via WSUS.

I hope that Indian govt switches to Linux

I think the way forward here is getting more Linux support at lower levels, including the state-level. There has been some progress on this front, especially in Kerala, and also in Assam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_free_and_open-sour...

Recently state govts of Telangana and Gujarat have shifted to Linux

As have many colleges

What I was talking is the central govt and all govt undertakings. It'll be huge. Windows and IE6 is standard and they are bad, they hang a lot

Boss Linux developed by CDAC comes to mind https://www.bosslinux.in/

Although the penetration is quite low. The project looked stalled few years back, seems like they are back again. Last release is dated 28.8.2018

I wonder if this is something that can be accomplshied at a scale, particually thinking in the context of maintaining upgrade readiness and update compliance for all the devices.

Absolutely, it is very easy to automate too. Arch has a great package manager BTW.

Curious if they'd roll out their own distro.

That will be too much work. Why not use well maintained existing distros?

Why would that be too much work? I expect total cost of ownership for the government distro to be way less, than using those "well maintained" ones.

If I understand correctly, we are talking about taking a well maintained distro and continuously updating it? Why? If the idea is to save money why would the govt build its own version? And I don't mean a Korean theme, I mean a full version

Building a one time theme or anything of that sort is okay, I think. But it'll be costly to maintain a distro

Why would a government maintain their own distro in the first place? Other than some minor modifications, what is it about S. Korea gov. officials that's fundamentally different from Office workers that they need specific Linux functionality?

Surely at the level of app/drivers or something, but probably not core functionality.

The whole point of the process was to save money, and one of the ways they can do that is by standardization.

Any deviation for de-facto standards can be costly in many ways, especially in terms of risk.

Fundamentally different are at least timeframes and security. Think decades of operations and advanced persistent threats.

Everyone faces advanced threats, large companies etc. The rational thing to do would be to pool talent and make sure there's a product that's well suited to them.

By 'pooling' I mean paying some smart people to do that. Like Rad Hat. Or --> Micrsoft! Or whoever.

Software is like anything else: it has to be made and maintained, it takes work, and someone has to pay for it.

The fundamentally different issue is 'platform monopolies' which we have to watch out for. But other than that it's just a product.

S. Korean gov. probably spends a zillion dollars making and maintaining roads. Do they design and build their own construction equipment? No way. Because it makes more sense for all of us if they pay some specialized people to do that, i.e. 'just buy it'.

More specifically to your point, it might make sense for a 'state version' of some linux distro, that really wasn't a functional variation, but more or less a 'bundle'. Maybe RedHat could do this ...

I say they use Arch Linux, automate the install and management using some DevOps and call it a day. it already supports pretty much every piece of modern software under the sun.

Maybe Arch Linux is a bit too bleeding edge, but perhaps it could be done (I'm currently using Manjaro and it's as solid as the other distros out there)

Because this is Korea, and there's always someone trying to milk the taxpayers' money by offering to develop a "Koreanized" product that is "specialized" for government tasks. Even if it's just Ubuntu with a custom theme and slightly different Wine defaults.

I'd bet 5,000 won that they won't even contribute their translation fixes (i.e. their only positive contribution to the world) upstream. They will also rather go out of business than to follow the LTS cycle and keep their distro up to date. It has happened before. It will happen again.

Okay. Maybe a theme would be good. A full blown distro would be costly

Betting 5,000 won is kinda...

I've never understood the clamour for rolling a new distro. Maintaining an apt/yum repository and creating a meta-package or package group should be more than enough.

To be fair, "a new distro" often isn't that much different: You take the package repository of an existing distro, tweak some packages and add your own packages on top.

I'd say the main difference is that just an additional repository on existing system might break if that base distro updates, while you control that if you go entirely through your own repo.

Very true, I actually envisioned something like a shell or a chromeOS-like shell to avoid having government workers learn command line and such.

Exactly. Maybe they'll be like OxygenOS to Android.

The fact that you think of Linux distros as apt/yum tells a lot about the bias in our statements.

They are the most common package managers, right? Could just as easily have listed some more niche ones, I'm an Arch user after all, but it wouldn't have illustrated my point any better.

> I'm an Arch user after all

Thanks for letting us know, couln't have guessed it.

Why do the 600 existing distributions not do that?

The way Linux systems are constructed is by gluing together a giant pile of disparately developed software, usually with fragile scripts, and trying to pretend that it is a robust and integrated system. Consequently, they require huge amounts of effort to alter, which will all be undone or in conflict with the next update. So what do you do when you get a Linux system working the way you want? You make your own distro, because it's the only way to keep it like that.

I get your point, but parent was trying to say that there will be some security concerns when Linux is to be used for Defense computers. That's why they need some hardening of the kernel/OS

Because "well maintained distro" won't fix issues as soon as possible and won't make necessary changes. For example, Linux is not friendly to proprietary third-patry software, but the government might need it. Or there could be bugs.Or they might need to support local encryption standards in browsers and document editors. Or support a specific hardware device.

So the working scenario is that a Korean company creates its own distribution, adapts it to the needs of government, sells it and then maintains it for the fee. This could also have a benefit of supporting a local vendor instead of sending public funds to US.

Got it. I had limited understanding. I stand corrected.

Recently there was a votation in my town, to decide whether to accept a budget for renewing the schools IT infrasture. It included office365 accounts and new computers and tablets (presumably ipads)

I wonder how different it would be were they using an OSS stack. Any stories?

Best example I am aware of is from Penn Manor SD in PA, but others exist.

[1] https://opensource.com/education/14/9/interview-charlie-reis...

[2] https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/editorials/penn-manor-s-...

[3] https://technology.pennmanor.net/open-source-in-school/

Well, even Russia managed to switch some governmental bodies to Linux. It is only a matter of political will. UK has Collabora who has contract to remove some issues in LibreOffice. South Korea can do just the same if required.

The dream of a free OS.

I've heard something like this in the south-Indian state of Kerala as well.

I think SK government will not see problems in migration to Linux as blockers but as a major opportunity to help its IT businesses grow, particularly in the e-gov market. Net result: more choice and more business for all.

China has this "original" OS called Redflag Linux, it's basically repackaged Linux to rake in government money, sells to military for some 500 usd per pc, the kickback must be big.

And yet nothing is as common as pirated windows. Even one of the displays in an airport crashed and there was a bsod

It might not have been pirated. Microsoft has done well with getting the government/SOEs to actually by windows over the last decade, probably at a significant discount but whatever.

Piracy just isn’t mostly worth it anymore.

How does that make it pirated?

(It's super common for information displays everywhere to run Windows)

> The transition to Linux OS and the purchase of new PCs are expected to cost the government about 780 billion won ($655 million), the ministry said.

You're doing it wrong. The government should have a robust hierarchy of support staff in place. While the transition will consume a significant amount of their time and therefore cost money, it's money that you were spending anyway, and was already budgeted. New PCs are not required for Linux, except in cases where their existing hardware is damaged or insufficient, which again should already be in the budget.

Most of governments are locked-in windows and will for a while.

Does this mean their shitty Active X plugins will be fazed out?

I switched 20 years ago. What took them so long?

uh you're just 1 person?

This is amazing!

Hurray!

Of course they don't have any other questions since Linux is now stable like never before

maybe they should use Kali?

tough crowd, just a joke.

They are going to be amazed by how much they wasted by using Windows.

Hope that works as well for them as the switch to Linux worked for Munich

Except that Munich switched back[1].

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/13/munich_committee_sa...

After Microsoft moved their german headquaters to Munich, which of course had nothing to do with their decision to switch back.

A two-year-old interview with Munich's mayor on that issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBRh2G29NNE

Difficult not to agree with the view that some corruption took place there. Dude seems shady and technically illiterate.

Then run a full linux kernel upon WSL2...

WSL2 isn't out yet, and WSL sucked so much that I imagine WSL 2 won't be much better.

> WSL sucked so much that I imagine WSL 2 won't be much better

Why does it suck? Is it an issue of compatibility or performance? At least WSL2 will fix the former.

Again, you are talking about something that isn't even released yet.

It sucks because the Linux distros available for it are now outdated, it utilizes a specific outdated kernel, it is extremely slow.. the file system is about 20x slower doing most file-system related tasks. Copy/paste doesn't work well without XLaunch (and then stills sucks). There was never a good terminal for it, and the new one doesn't address if it will provide mouse support for things like Vim, it didn't support Docker.

There are many more nuances, but that is just a few. Let's not forget though that Windows package management is the worst out of all the operating systems, so even if you have WSL, you are still going to be suck maintaining a crappy OS using terrible bloated installers that leave files everywhere and a crappy package manager like Chocolatey that is falling further behind repos like AUR and Arch.

> the Linux distros available for it are now outdated

That's what apt-get is for.

> it utilizes a specific outdated kernel

Lots of distros do that.

> it is extremely slow.. the file system is about 20x slower doing most file-system related tasks

That's a windows problem, not a WSL problem.

> There was never a good terminal for it

Don't you have the choice of almost all existing windows and linux terminals? How can none of those be good?

And normal windows installers have nothing to do with it.

The lack of docker support is important, but let's not ignore that they're in the middle of fixing it.

What does 'Linux OS' mean?

Various Linux desktop distros?

If so, have mercy on anyone who will be using Ubuntu Desktop for the first time. I hope they aren't afraid of using Terminal, because the internet will shout them down for wanting a GUI solution.

Love Ubuntu server, but could never get into linux desktop.

The elitism can be absurd. Sometimes I wonder if it's stockholm syndrome. "You want to configure things with a GUI with discoverability? Not read a dissertation-length man page and edit config files whose syntax changes between versions so you can't even rely on google results? Go back to winbl0ws"

Most of the config files are (IMHO) much more discoverable than most GUIs, usually the default config has the default settings commented out along with a block of comments explaining them. A lot of GUI apps I've used have really crappy settings dialogs that don't explain things well and aren't searchable. But it's really the individual app, both can be done nicely or poorly, config files are often easier to implement and copy between machines and app versions (at least that's the feeling I've gotten.) And at least with config files there's something to google. GUIs change even more often (there are even fewer reasons to keep them stable than config file syntax.)

Also you're not really supposed to read through the entire man page for an app that you only touch once or twice, you're supposed to just search for what you need and leave.

My personal opinion is that GUIs are often less user friendly, they just look friendlier. GUIs make it easier to sell software, not to use it. Free software isn't being sold and that's why it tends to not have a GUI.

I have a theory on why guides in Linux are predominantly text based and it has nothing to do with elitism.

I think it’s a mixture of two factors:

1. From the perspective of the writer, it’s much easier to describe instructions via text when publishing those instructions via a predominately text-based medium such as web sites. The alternative is taking screenshots and editing those images to highlight relevant widgets. This is more time consuming and not ever site offers an easy way to upload those images (meaning you’re then sometimes having to manually upload them) nor even embed them into the discussion (eg HN). And on top of that, you still need some text to accompany the images anyway. So you might as well go with a text driven solution. And if you’re having to describe a UI in text, it’s obviously going to be easier to do so with a text based UI than a graphical UI.

This is a problem I’ve personally experienced as someone who used to write a lot of documentation for graphical UIs. It can be annoying and remember that a lot of time, people providing guides are those volunteering their time. So naturally people will opt for a lazier approach.

2. The other major factor for why I think CLI instructions are so common even on desktop Linux is because there isn’t a single agreed standard desktop environment. Not even a standard GUI toolkit, let alone DE. Arguments about whether this choice / fragmentation is a net good or bad thing aside; it makes much more sense to offer a guide that is going to be more universal (as the CLI on Linux tends to be - notwithstanding some district-specific file system hierarchies). Where as a guide with images will not only be very specific to using that unique management tool but would also be subject to any changes to the UI of that tool even if the underlying configuration files haven’t changed. So with CLI examples you end up with a guide that is not only more universal but also has greater longevity. The longevity point is something that can frustrate less technically capable Windows users who are left confused each time Microsoft decide to redesign their Control Panel applets (et al) and Linux isn’t any less subject to UI changes in its graphical frontends either. So it does make some sense to provide instructions to configuring things directly in the backend - even if it seems counterintuitive to a desktop user.

Ultimately though, I don’t see anyone who uses Linux being rude about those who use GUIs. At worst they might recommend using the CLI if someone has tried configuring something from a GUI and found themselves getting stuck because options aren’t getting applied in a way that was being expected. However there are examples when the reverse is also true. For example on HN a few weeks ago some CLI users moaning about the complexity of kemu was repeatedly (and rightfully) recommended to use a frontend instead.

Personally, I find config files to be simple and elegant, and gui based configuration to be clunky and cumbersome. For most things anyway.

I like GUI programs but even on Windows some setups are easier done using command line because I at least could repeat the correct command sequences in the right order.

I imagine it's easier for an IT department to address issues pretty quickly and remotely.

Come on, this is not accurate. My wife, a journalist employed in the local university and my mother, a shop owner, use Ubuntu every day and have never used the terminal. The demographic that has needs more advanced than the basic desktop functionality will indeed use AskUbuntu and the terminal, but we have to recognize ourselves as niche. Most office workers will use a browser and very little else.

Would have been so nice if that were the case - Chrome/Firefox work atleast as well on Linux as on Windows if not better. But Outlook has a vice grip on office scene and has no real equivalent on Linux side in terms of feature parity.

Well.. everyone thinks "basic desktop user" to mean different things. The problem is I don't think there is such thing as an average user.

Every workplace is domain-specific, and domain specific software is simply a tool to get the job done. Windows/Linux is completely irrelevant and of absolutely zero consequence IMHO. You pick a tool that you know will get the job done, and simply use whatever OS it works on. We use a lot of scientific software at work and a 100% of it requires Windows. Yes, it could easily be re-written to work on Linux or OSX but that is not the case at this moment. If we were an accounting firm, we'd just pick Quicken or Quickbooks or whatever tool people were familiar with and use it. Or if we were an magazine or an architecture firm, or an electrical company, we'd again use whatever tools we need to get the job done. As far as the OS goes, the only thing people care about is whether their tools still work on version N+1.

For various reasons, Linux and OSX require much more involvement from the vendor to keep the software running. OSX is very user-friendly, but very hostile to developers who just want to push code out, and not be shackled with supporting the new flavor of the month API that Apple comes out with.

Windows requires very little time investment from the vendor to make it work on newer versions. Heck we're using Windows XP software (like.. binaries compiled decades ago) on Windows 10 without issue. Yes, obviously, giant caveat here - I'm not saying windows never has API breaking changes .. I'm only saying the probability is much much lower on Windows than any other platform. (discounting esoteric options that nobody is using)

People who are cheer-leading Linux or Windows or w/e, never seem to "get" this. Nobody really cares about the OS.

I've just given up on Linux again. Again. And it's the GUI that makes that decision final. There were also (and I'm still fighting 'em) serious file issues (perhaps related to file name lengths, perhaps not), but these may well have arisen from Windows/Linux interactions or even Windows not getting along with Windows. But flickering and otherwise unusable or unstable GUI features in the distributions finally did me in. Damn. Just plain not ready for prime time. It's not that you couldn't go Linux if you absolutely had to, but the cost is just way too high. (I put the most time in with Ubuntu and ElementaryOS.)

What specific issues did you have with the GUI? Not sure if you know but there are a number of other polished DEs apart from Gnome.

Sounds like your graphics card doesn't work well with Linux. Is it Nvidia ?

It is, but I'd be shocked if it were involved, I've tried to keep it out of the mix with Linux.

With nvidia, you must absolutely make sure you are using the proprietary drivers if you want a good experience. Some distros (like Pop OS) use these out of the box, but most (like Debian) use open-source nouveau.

> And it's the GUI that makes that decision final.

Which one? There's a crapton.

Both those mentioned had more than one deal-breaker issues. The jumpiness (at maybe 5 hz) was ElementaryOS IIRC. No doubt the fact that there are a "crap ton" is the underlying evil.

Evil? It's software not a religion. Not much of that made sense.

Too many forks, not enough fixes or polish. The kernel has avoided forking for a reason.

PS - "evil" is not a religious term, it's actually the substitute for a religious term, which is "wickedness" (see Widipedia.)

Mint Linux is the only distro with a sane UI if you ask me.

Turns out that the most serious file name issues are mostly down to disagreements between Linux and Windows about what characters are kosher - Linux allows a finger-slip to insert characters in folder and file names (such as a forward slash) that cause windows to crash out of copying tasks without specific explanations. It's taking me more than a week to isolate and fix these issues one by one in a large file system. Dead lost time. Extremely expensive. Some file issues appeared to be one Linux vs the other Linux, earlier, however. It wasn't just Windows operations crashing.

Linux will allow anything as a valid file name. Including slashes, colons, new line characters and even none-printable characters. Usually GUIs filter will catch the worst offenders but it’s less of an issue on the CLI because you can escape all of those weird characters pretty easily (at least it’s easy once you know how. There is a little bit of a discoverability problem there though).

Windows, on the other hand, not only has special characters that cannot be used but also reserved words that cannot be used as file names (eg COM). Then there’s the issue with magic file extensions and even Windows Explorer hiding extensions entirely by default.

On balance I prefer Linux’s approach. Sure it creates some problems but they’re easy to be worked around and usually only rear their head when you start using lesser polished UIs or shared file systems with Windows. Plus Linux empowers you to use those names if needed, or change them if it’s a problem. Whereas Windows has these weird hidden show stoppers - many of which were only relevant in the days of DOS but have been carried forward in every iteration of Windows since (including NT) for compatibility reasons. That causes way more problems to developers - which is my personal use case.

Thanks for clarification, haven't realized until now that some of my previous problems with Windows might have been the result of hard-coded characters and those reserved name gotchas.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/fileio/nami...

No warning, no opting out - that's a huge problem. It means you absolutely should not mix these two OSes.

I don’t see a problem mixing those two OSs if that’s what you really want to do. If we’re honest, it’s pretty edge case stuff we are talking about and most users experienced enough to be mixing Windows and Linux systems would be aware of the limitations of Windows when it comes to naming things. Granted the reserved namespace problem, COM1 et al, is far less discoverable; but it’s also far less common of a trap. So it’s not something that comes up that often if your team are aware of the problems.

Worst scenario is you’re dealing with a non-technical team but in those instances you’d keep your storage centralised and use an NT based solution (or something with first party support for AD) so you catch any Windows related bugs at save time rather than further down the road when you need to access them again. Given file names in Windows is limited by both the file system and the OS, whereas Linux is limited only by the file system, all you really need to do is catch those Windows-related errors. So running an NT-based storage array would solve that problem.

True, if you're big enough you can insert a filter - which only underlines the question - why isn't there a filter available to begin with?

> Love Ubuntu server, but could never get into linux desktop.

It seems fine to me. I'm running it on my laptop right now, and I don't find it significantly more annoying than Windows or MacOS, both of which I've recently used on work machines.

I'm sure there are plenty of people for whom that's not true, especially people who need niche commercial software. But a great deal of what people use is on the web these days anyhow, so I think it matters a lot less what OS Chrome is running on top of.

> ... as Microsoft’s free technical support for Windows 7 expires in January 2020.

they are still on Windows 7? ouch!!!

Lighter and easier to manage than 10... why not?

Can't run Windows 7 on Skylake and greater chipsets.

Don't know what makes you think those computers are running a chipset that was launched late in 2015.

Intel i5 6600K on a Z170 with Windows 7 reporting in, that statement is definitely not true.

Installing is not straightforward though, you have to load drivers into the installation environment if you're using M.2 or USB 3.x.

IMHO the effort I need to learn that causes me far less frustration than having to use Windows 10. My total experience (helping colleagues/friends with their Win 10 systems) is probably less than 60 minutes in total, but one look at that start menu with actual internet-loaded ads (!) was enough to dissuade me from ever installing that OS on any of my systems. If they're greedy enough to blatantly do that, who knows what kinds of other dark patterns lurk within that OS...

Oops, I got the chipset wrong. It's Kaby Lake that I was thinking of. Apologies.

Maybe I got older and life lost some color, but the difference between Windows 10 and Windows 7 doesn't feel like the difference between 7 and XP. Seems like most of the action (outside gaming and Office power users) has moved to browsers and browser wrappers.

The telemetry was not a welcome ‘upgrade’

Same for me, although it might be because I also switched to Linux in parallel. XP was just perfect and there was no reason to change, yet 7 came along and if you want the best protection you need to be up to date. While 7 didn't bring anything for me beyond different skins, it did its job.

Windows 10? Man I feel like I'm on an ad-infested website and I need to be careful of where I click. But I'm definitely not objective here.

> XP was just perfect and there was no reason to change

Lolz, I heard that already... with Windows 2000. So many (me included) spent serious time trying to strip XP of all the crap, because "Win2000 was just perfect".

In reality, XP (like 2000) was just another pile of shit. They patched the hell out of it with SP2, and still it would get owned and owned.

Vista and Windows 7 have made using Windows much safer, and Win 7 refined the interface enough to be a substantial improvement over XP. Win 7 was probably the pinnacle of pre-touch/pre-cloud Microsoft.

Windows 7 also had lot of exploits. It runs many services like network file systems (NetBIOS) in kernel which makes it easier to gain access to it.

I am using both right now. 7 in the desktop, 10 in the laptop.

The main difference so far is the shortcut used to switch keyboard layout, and enabling Wi-Fi sharing in 10 is very straightforward.

The software I use in both feels just the same.

Depends on if you're a technical user or just a casual user. There is a ton of difference under the hood. I appreciate the new security features like LSA protection, hardening of the heap, improved ASLR, etc.

>they are still on Windows 7? ouch!!!

If you think that's painful, wait until you find out about Windows XP[0]. :)

[0] - https://www.windowslatest.com/2018/04/04/windows-xp-is-still...

My desktop dualboots XP and 7, and it is necessary to play KoToR correctly.

In a more modern OS, KoToR doesn't render grass even running in the same hardware.

I lot of people prefer 7. I am not a fan of the forced upgrades or saas model. I don't want to upgrade which breaks this or that and you can't not upgrade unless you have the pro version.

I think a lot of people were fine with 7.

I really don't get all the conspiracy theories being thrown around about Microsoft now having to send over some suits to rescue the situation.

Doesn't really jibe with the moves they have been making lately that seem to show that if anything, Microsoft is de-prioritising the Windows business.

They are happy for you to move off Windows provided you still use some of their cloud offerings. There's a reason Office 365 is doing as well as it is.

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