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Comment by TkTech | Hacker News Reader

China has used its own FreeBSD (kylin) and then ubuntu-based (neokylin) since 2001. Nearly half of all laptops are sold with it. Likewise, North Korea has Red Star since 2008 which is mandatory or risk forced labor.

While kylin isn't too far off from a traditional distro, officers will force you to install rootkits on both desktop/laptops and phones (JingWang). If you're caught later with it missing you will most likely disappear.

Red Star is horrifically oppressive and monitors everything you do. The GPL is of course ignored and very few changes are ever released. Trying to circumvent the restrictions causes the OS to self destruct. The few applications you can use watermark every file you create.

Long story short them creating linux-based distros is just an easy way for them to exert total control. It does nothing positive for the Linux or BSD ecosystem.

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>If you're caught later with it missing you will most likely disappear.

That could well be true in North Korea, but Chinese really isn’t like that. They have a very active tech industry so installing and experimenting with Linux distros and such that might not have monitoring software is fine. As long as you don’t do something openly suspect, like post something considered anti government, they just leave people alone.

I have relatives in China who have desktops and laptops and never come across Kylin. As far as I know it’s mainly used by the military and government departments.

That comment refers to JingWang not the OS. If you were an individual forced to install it you are added to a registry. If you live in a particular city, it is mandatory. If you are part of a particular minority, it is mandatory. Refusing to install it or prove its installation if your national identity is in the registry is a crime and you wil be arrested.

Beijing is not Kashgar. Many Chinese will experience relative freedom and others live in city-sized prisons.

This article and thread is about pre-installed Linux on some recently announced laptops. Could you please stop trying to politicize everything in every possible way?

Much as I also grow tired of the constant shoehorning of China into every single conversation here, in this instance Lenovo is a Chinese company so it's at least somewhat relevant.

OTOH how is it possible to ignore politics if technology makes politics possible, with the earliest examples being fire and the wheel?

It is my impression that despite initiatives like Kylin and Deepin, most of China is still on Windows. Am I wrong?

They adopting Linux would mean their hardware would work with it and developers targeting the Chinese market would have to make their programs work on Linux. That's all I'm hoping for.

I was pretty sure you're correct, but I double checked just to be sure [0]. I've read an article about the rampancy of piracy in China and Microsoft earning next-to-nothing. Last I remember is they're just leaving them alone, while trying to develop a new way to profit off of them.

[0] ~ http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/china/2016

WinXP is pretty much is a "national OS" by default.

Loaded to the top with antiviruses and other crapware to keep it running.

Why XP? Too much hardware comes with XP only drivers. Too much important stuff like tax/bank software was written decades ago for XP, and never ported to never OSes because developers moved on years ago.

It has always amazed me that North Korea is able to create an OS like Red Star. I assume it takes a lot of knowledge and skill to stitch together such an OS, with fairly "unique" spying features not really seen in other distros.

Considering the limited access to the internet and not being able to ask StackOverflow users, how can they even manage building such a complex piece of software?

Why wouldn't NK be able to make a Linux distro? Some distros are managed by only a few people. NK has 25 million people.

Also, they don't restrict information for everyone. Kim Jong Un went to school in Switzerland... They know about the outside world. Just not the plebs.

Well they have nukes, so a Linux distro shouldn't be too hard.

I would've reversed that statement.

You think a distro is a harder engineering project than a nuke?

yes

Why would they restrict internet access for those that do the coding? And why wouldn't they allow them on forums/IRC? They would just be heavily monitored, at least that's my guess.

North Korean army has a pretty advanced cyber warfare division fully capable of doing that sort of thing.

It's just a Linux distro. Anyone can make one.

Yes, but even though I myself have created my own Linux distro, I would absolutely not be able to do that with restricted internet access, without access to the guide-books, and without the help of IRC. I suspect this would be the case for most of my developer friends as well.

The distros are not being created by independent developers and then the state uses the distros, the distros are being made by the very state itself. The same organisation that will lift internet access and guide books and send their staff overseas to get training.

I'm sure they can get access to necessary documentation.

If anything it must be easier to do it without the distractions of the web.

My mother can't. You need a skilled, trained and informed team of technicians to do so.

In a dictature killing access to culture and education, it not weird to assume it is hard to breed those so you have a limited pool.

So yes, I understand the surprise. Which means NK has some resources we don't include in the picture.

One nerd is pretty much all it takes.

Certainly not. Creation, customization, maintenance and deployement at the scale of one country is a huge task.

That's not true. A single person can do it at world scale provided they are not trying to do something overly esoteric (though you can actually get pretty far with a Gentoo base). There are even plenty of from-scratch distros that started as a one-man show. Take the recent Void Linux for instance.

> Likewise, North Korea has Red Star since 2008 which is mandatory or risk forced labor.

I wonder how true that really is, given the proliferation of ancient (i.e. pre-XP) versions of Windows in heavy use over there.

The government still uses a majority mix of Windows and some OSX for the upper classes. For anyone else it's very much mandatory, and you need to be on a national registry just to legally own a computer, which is also how they ensure you update.

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