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Comment by badRNG | Hacker News Reader

Many countries are currently ditching Windows in favor of home grown distros due to distrust of Microsoft. Notable examples:

Currently transitioning:

- Astra Linux (Russia) https://www.zdnet.com/article/russian-military-moves-closer-...

- Kylin Linux? (China) https://www.techradar.com/news/china-to-ditch-all-windows-pc...

- South Korea https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-koreas-government-explor...

Already transitioned:

- Red Star OS (DPRK) https://www.pcworld.com/article/2862737/meet-red-star-os-the...

- Nova (Cuba) https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/nova-os-new-release-scre...

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Definitely can't blame them for being distrustful. Seems like it would probably be easy enough for Microsoft to hide extra data in the telemetry that Windows 10 already sends home if the NSA or someone were to force them to, and history seems to inform us that US companies have little choice but to comply with such orders.

Just curious, what "history" are you talking about? Do you have some reference links?

Mostly just referring to PRISM and the like. Also, over the years, we've seen a few instances where big companies have publicly fought National Security Letters or gag orders, so I think it's a safe guess that plenty of other stuff like that goes on behind the scenes without ever coming to the public's attention.

Large governments have access to Windows source code.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/securityengineering/gsp

It's more about long-term strategy. China wants full control over their OS. They want features Microsoft would never add. They want support for their own hardware, etc.

Interesting note on Red Star OS: They appear to have a watermarking system allowing them to track how files move between people.

https://youtu.be/8LGDM9exlZw?t=2122

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8856979

FWIW in each of these countries, except perhaps North Korea, Windows is still king. Kylin, Red Star, and Nova are all very long running projects at this point, and as far as I can tell none of them are a majority even of government desktops.

There is also Turkish government funded Pardus project [0] and has been going on since 2005. Numerous government institutions started to use it but still not enough to ditch Windows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardus_(operating_system)

I feel like Pardus project has lost some momentum. Maybe I feel like this because there was a lot of publicity and hype around Pardus project when I was growing up.

What interested me most is that Pardus project had its own packaged manager called PiSi, which was then adopted by Solus.

I bet Pardus project had their own reasons to adopt the apt system and rely on Debian volunteers for all packaging support. As the OS is largely maintained by a government institution, I'd imagine it doesn't have the large userbase as Debian does.

There are also some other cool projects made for Pardus, for example Zemberek, a spell checker for the Turkish language that uses natural language processing for Libreoffice and Openoffice: https://github.com/ahmetaa/zemberek-nlp

Those are mostly countries for which the strategic advantage of not being dependant on Windows far outweighs the other aspects.

Yeah, aware of those... But... I wouldn't really use most of the countries on your list to set an example for the rest of the world, if you know what I mean...

It just means western lobbying doesn't have much of an effect there. Japan was going to use their TRON operating system in schools until Microsoft decided they didn't like that.

Plenty of other countries have faced US aggression, or are in danger of such.

Hell, US citizens face aggression from the US.

France's police uses Linux for 10 years now, a specific Ubuntu distro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

Is there really a need for them to create their own distributions?

No. And it's a shame everyone does.

I've been wondering about this. Competition breeds innovation and all that, but in the end, aren't we ending up with a whole lot of repeated effort for little benefit?

I guess it's a whole lot easier to repeat the effort (Even if it seems wasteful) than getting multiple countries / governments / languages and funding situations organized around one project.

Probably just easier to do it on your own and if at some point one of the distributions is gaining some momentum maybe then others will adopt it and send patches upstream.

Keep in mind that the whole motivation of these is "we don't trust outside group X"; these governments have no reason to believe that OSS isn't compromised, and one of the easiest ways to know everything is to do a lot of the work yourself.

I mean, it depends on what "their own distributions" entails. Adding customized branding or extra localizations or a different mix of preinstalled apps to a popular distro like Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora/CentOS or what have you seems perfectly reasonable.

If you're an authoritarian government and want to compromise them to report on users, yes. Most more liberal countries could and should use standard distros.

Some listed countries are banned or blocked from major company services that might be default on a normal distro, such as Google or GitHub as well. So beyond just setting country-relevant defaults, using a standard distro may present problems for some countries.

Why not?

If this is about trust, then it makes sense that you don't choose between trusting a corporation or a group of hobbyists, but take control and eliminate one layer of things to trust altogether. Bonus points, you get control too and don't have to fight upstream to pursue and care about your interests.

Yes. Is not as easy you chose your location and language and done. I remember me having to download,install and configure stuff to get spellchecking working in Firefox and Open Office. Also 10 years back to connect to internet I had to use a PPP application, this was not included by default in Ubuntu but the localized spin included this, the spellcheckingt stuff and other stuff.

Also if your country does not need to follow the laws about the codecs you can include them and not have your users have to install them.

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