China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows China’s efforts to end its reliance on Microsoft Windows got a boost with the launch of the openKylin project. The initiative aims to accelerate development of the country’s home-grown Kylin Linux distro by opening the project up to a broader community of developers, colleges, and universities to contribute code. Launched in …
I'm not sure Windows is any better with all the "telemetry" it sends back to Microsoft and who knows else. At least with Linux you can examine the source code since it's open source and see if there's anything odd going on there. With Windows you just have to trust Microsoft, which I do less and less with every release of Windows.
"At least with Linux you can examine the source code..." Really? I'll bet my left nut that most Linux users are not capable of examining source code.
Remember, every OS, browser, Android, iPhone, are all built with spying on you in mind regardless of where they are made. Though, I would never ever trust a Chinese Linux even if I had the capability to examine its source code.
I wonder how easy will be to examine THAT source code, and what you risk if you complain about something the Chinese government wanted into it.
Canonical looks to be another "useful idiot" to help a dictatorship because plain greed. Attlee sending the most advanced jet engines to Stalin didn't teach anything, it looks.
Being spied by Microsoft - for how awful it could be - is still far less dangerous that being spied by an authoritarian government with a penchant for "re-education" camps and for jailing opposition.
And you can still fight that kind of espionage - see GDPR - while fighting Xi Jinping is far harder and dangerous.
China doesn't need an extradition treaties. They have agents that will go to countries like Canada, Australia, or countries within Europe to get any of their own people that posted anything that the government doesn't agree with on Chinese social media while outside of the country. Often targeting family members within China to get the person to come back to China to be punished.
"optimizations for the latest generation of Intel and AMD processors, where available; support for emerging RISC-V CPUs; development of an x86-to-RISC-V translation layer"
Why do this on a single distro? Why not just feed your shit back to the main kernel tree?
And some of it might find a better home in the GCC anyway.
Every major distro does this. Stuff takes time to get accepted into the mainline kernel, years in some cases, so the distros pick up the required patches from the sources and include them in their distro kernel.
The optimizations for the latest Intel, AMD, and RISC-V ,models probably come directly from the relevant CPU makers. Eventually these will get mainlined and the distro won't have to do this.
What is being announced here Is the formation of SIGs (Special Interest Groups) to allow companies who want to sell kit for use with OpenKylin to feed kernal patches and feedback to the Kylin organization. The announcement gives a list of companies who sell things such as laptops or RISC-V chip sets who will be participating. Many of these companies are not Chinese but sell to the Chinese market.
When distro representatives talk endless about "community engagement", it's the above sort of thing they are talking about.
Kylin suffers from the same issue every other Linux distro suffers from (I am a die hard Linux user) is office and business software that is perceived to be just as good or better as that for BaaD. Also, sys admins might need some tools like Active Directory (not a sys admin). In many categories there are very few choices.
As far as usability, mainstream, desktop Linux distros are just as easy to use a Windows or MacOS.
The issue of software applications supporting anything other than Windows is a long standing problem, though if China simply slapped a tax/fee on any Windows software I suspect users and/or suppliers might make the effort for multi-platform support.
Generally speaking, multi-platform software seems to have less stupidity and issues with major OS over-halls in my experience as they have had to ditch the odd OS-specific APIs and approachs to make it multi-platform, and so less technical debt when anyone decided to end support for a specific OS version.
My experience is the precise opposite. Invariably a Java based nightmare with a million different files, DB's, config files, passwords in config files, services, etc.
Nothing is as compatible as Windows imho. We're currently upgrading our system estate from 2012 R2 (which will have over ten years support) and most applications still work natively on 2019 without any fuss. The ones that didn't simply needed small tweaks to (for example) IIS. It's an astonishingly robust OS for enterprise.
If an OS is mandated by an authoritarian government, then you have to make do or write what you need. If all the universities are pushed this way, then that's where all the dev work will go. China has a very large home market, they can develop stuff just for their home market and still have a lot of customers. It doesn't have to be all FOSS. As per the article, they've tried this before. I suspect it was a bit half-hearted. They seem a bit more serious this around. And don't forget, China is good at playing the long game.
It's not that they're more serious, it's that this time they are really worried. Something tells me right now they're busy taking notes on what is happening to Russia and they don't want to be caught unprepared when their turn will come. Because that day will come. And I'd say sooner rather than later.
My understanding is that the home market in China, as per most developing countries and East Asia especially, is considerably more oriented towards mobile than desktop - not just for reasons of end user cost, but physical space given the comparatively small square footage typical of the region, as Western expats are often keen to point out.
It's why the games industry over there is even more mobile oriented than it is nowadays in the West - games consoles, like desktops, generally require external peripherals and thus more cash and space.
Japan is something of an outlier, natch, given PC gaming continues to be dwarfed by the console market, but I digress. Despite the unwritten rule of Japanese commerce of favouring doing business with native companies over foreign ones, the country similarly continues to seemingly be content enough with MS offerings, to the point of receiving exclusive editions of Windows.
Why Japan's own homegrown Linux distro, which last I checked was still an active project, doesn't have a significant share of the domestic OS market would be beyond me if not for the fact that I'm sure MS has learnt how to Embrace, Extend and Extinguish in multiple languages and cultures.
China is big enough and has sufficient motivation to achieve what the city of Munich failed to achieve.
It would not surprise me if in 20 years' time the version of Linux and associated desktop applications widely used by many outside of China, owes much to Chinese developers....
>And they still need to rely on a Western-developed OS to achieve something
1) A large percentage of the people I've worked with (in California) are Chinese. They tend to be the backbone of "Western-developed" whatever.
2) There's plenty more where they came from.
Please stop underestimating the Chinese. We've got this fixation that they're some kind of hive animal that's good at copying but can't develop stuff. (Curiously enough we used to say the same thing about the Japanese....) They're formidable competitors and we need to start thinking of them in these terms, not putative 'enemies'.
Please stop underestimating the Chinese. We've got this fixation that they're some kind of hive animal that's good at copying but can't develop stuff. (Curiously enough we used to say the same thing about the Japanese....) They're formidable competitors and we need to start thinking of them in these terms, not putative 'enemies’. .... martinusher
That’s an incredibly valuable lesson very few foreigners are able or enabled to learn and make great headway in with almighty success gratefully rewarded and generously awarded great wealth, martinusher.
Such an intelligence deficit, for that is what it certainly is, renders practically any and all Chinese competition and opposition overwhelmingly disadvantaged and destined/fated to be followers of, rather than leaders in, Long Postmodern Marches akin to Millennium AIdVenturing and Greater IntelAIgent Games Play with New Orderly World Orders Commanding Controls and Controlling Commands.
There is certainly no widely nor remotely readily available evidence of such a lead from the Wild Wacky West, mired as it is in the attacking of defences of rapidly failing status quos with stagnant and petrified established traditional hierarchical administrations support in order to survive in fields of constant drain and increasing pain ...... which is a really odd path to be following so avidly.
Such is surely incontrovertible evidence of a lack of true leadership worthy of future support and present sustenance ‽ .
Importantly, those people in California are not, by and large, working for the Chinese government. Highly skilled Chinese people running to the US and other western countries is a real issue China faces and will need to figure out (their insistence on absolute control probably won't help them here). It's certainly possible they'll surge ahead and so we absolutely can't rest on our laurels, but the Chinese government also has a history of getting in their own way when it comes to tech and that doesn't appear to have stopped yet.
"It would not surprise me if in 20 years' time the version of Linux..."
Linux, and really pretty much all software, both FOSS and proprietary, owe a lot to Chinese developers /today/.
I lived in Beijing in 2009, and Google, Microsoft, Sun, plenty of others were already getting a lot of code done there.
Active Directory is likely one of the things that the Chinese government wants to get rid of - an authentication system that is possibly open to scrutiny (thanks to the CLOUD act) that states who works where and for what government agency.
Plus the added chaos that could come in case of a declaration of war if the US government ordered Microsoft to just shut off all their Chinese users...
I'd say the Chinese government are probably taking that possibility very seriously, if they're trying to wean the country off Windows.
In all the decades it has been around, I never met a geek who thought Active Directory anything other than dangerous garbage. Yet I never met an IT manager who did not believe it came intertwined with the sunshine out of Ballmer's backside.
Who gives a toss about Windows. The demons to exorcise are Active Directory and Exchange Server. Remove the business foundations and the rest will collapse of its own accord. You hear me, Xi Jinping (or however you want us to spell your name this week)?
Since Linux is open source, presumably whatever work is done for Kylin will presumably be open source.
There is a chance that whatever code improvements are done may be sent upstream and the rest of the world can benefit.
And presumably whatever code is sent upstream will be checked for backdoors, bugs, etc (that is standard practice, right?).
"I would like to know more about why they switched from FreeBSD to Linux."
And why not, they are good at building supercomputers and they all run Linux, not only in China.
There is so much more energy around Linux not to mention all that small stuff and phones and robots and so forth.
It sounds almost surprising but if you want one OS to run every possible device on earth or in space it will be Linux.
There is a significant open-source engineering industry in China, working on consumer electronics.
The engineering open-source material is all in Chinese, and that community has not demonstrated any particular inclination to translate it all into English, or to mentor foreigners on how to work with the community.
The Chinese IP tradition for hundreds of years was that Intellectual Property is open source, with intellectuals supported by government jobs. The tradition was also that the 'Middle Kingdom' encompassed all between the Heavens and the Underworld, and that the Emperor ruled all. It seems a natural state of affairs.
The engineering open-source material is all in Chinese, and that community has not demonstrated any particular inclination to translate it all into English, or to mentor foreigners on how to work with the community.The Chinese IP tradition for hundreds of years was that Intellectual Property is open source, with intellectuals supported by government jobs. The tradition was also that the 'Middle Kingdom' encompassed all between the Heavens and the Underworld, and that the Emperor ruled all. It seems a natural state of affairs. .... david 12
Thanks for the info and intel, david 12. It provides so many more than just a few with a secure base of understanding for all that is transpiring and unfolding behind the screens of main streaming media in alternative chunnels of communication.
Virtually Advanced IntelAIgent Operating Systems for both Heavenly Reign and Underworld Empire Rule is the natural state of future affairs and well suited and possibly better booted and probably best rooted in the centuries old Chinese IP tradition in order to ensure the overwhelming advantage which is delivered by failsafe secure secret material transmission/metadatabase transfer.
And foreigners are simply comprehensively provided with all manner of means to mentor and work with Chinese communities via delivery of sensitive and proprietary IP product in their own foreigner language for translation and transfer/export and exfiltration into Chinese.
Should the West disagree will there be both at least friendly competition and/or alien opposition for such is an undeniable fact which is also quite easily spun as a fantastic fiction to create phantom paper tiger enemies hell bent on self destruction for systemic vaporisation/annihilation/export and exfiltration, which is surely a certifiable MADness confirmed in such tall story tellers/crazy think tankers/Kool-Aid Drinkers
>The engineering open-source material is all in Chinese, and that community has not demonstrated any particular inclination to translate it all into English
From memory, none of the open-source licenses require the use of English, just that source code has to be available...
They'd do well to take Mark Shuttleworth's idea of a lightweight converging OS that can work on everything (TV, SBC, Laptop, Desktop, Server) :
- one OS to secure, maintain and develop
- one OS to write apps for
- the same features from an app regardless of what it's running on
- and plug a phone into a screen, and have it turn into a mouse and behave like a windowed computer.
Makes a lot of sense to me.
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