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Comment by seren | Hacker News Reader

I guess an attempt already exists in the form of Ubuntu Kylin [1], ominously sponsored by the National University of Defense technology [2]. But I have a hard time determining how serious the project is, and how prevalent it is in China.

[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/ubuntu-kylin [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_University_of_Defense_...

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It is quite successful apparently

Downloads from the Ubuntu Kylin community sites in China are continuing to gain momentum, with over three million people downloading Ubuntu Kylin in the first 12 months. The initial adoption of Ubuntu Kylin 14.04 LTS, launched in April, has been phenomenal, with over one million additional new downloads.

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2014/05/15/huge-downloads-for-ub...

Just for perspective, 3 million users in China is the equivalent of about 700k users in the US.

It's not insignificant, but neither is it like every third Chinese person is running Kylin. Heck, even OSX has 20 million or so users in the US[0]

[0] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2050510/windows-8-users-now-o...

There are larger villages than that in China. Still you can visit a computer market in China and about 40% of the computers will be displayed with Ubuntu. So the average Chinese consumer is getting exposure to Ubuntu which is a good thing.

Based on the partners listed on the Ubuntu Kylin page, it has more traction with significant ISVs in China than Ubuntu Desktop has in the US.

There is a bit of irony in that the first Ubuntu Kylin OEM is HP. Presumably those machines will not be shipped from the US.

It looks like it is possible to build Ubuntu Kylin from source code. The ISVs probably have closed source apps. But it is interesting that a large swathe of users in China are being encouraged to use an OS that supports a lot of privacy-oriented software.

That's funny, when I looked at the description on Canonical's page, I had exactly the opposite intuition. (I thought "wow, I bet the China-specific apps have no end-to-end cryptographic security, and I bet several are even proprietary".)

Maybe it's a glass-is-half-full / glass-is-half-empty kind of phenomenon.

Looking more closely, I guess the Lotus IM app doesn't support OTR (but neither does the official release of Empathy) and the Kingsoft cloud storage doesn't directly support client-side encryption (but neither did Ubuntu One).

Everyone uses Windows in China. Half the sites won't even render correctly unless you use IE.

This is the government we are talking about. They visit websites outside the Great Firewall. So they need a modern browser.

A major Hong Kong Bank even listed IE as a required browser you needed to use to access your account. Insane.

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