South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

Interesting development. I wonder if Excel/VBA are a big part of their work. If so, there could be large costs in converting, testing, and deploying the alternatives.

It's not exactly SK trusted Microsoft. Rather, some idiots had this brilliant idea that if you create a piece of code that hooks directly into Windows kernel and messes around with device drivers, your users will be secure, because how would those evil hackers run keyloggers when your security plugin already hijacked keyboard events.

So far so good, but then how do you disseminate this wonderful piece of security technology? By creating an ActiveX plugin and make every user download and install it before they can use your website. And since those pesky new versions of Windows will keep warning "This program may harm your computer, continue?", we just have to tell users to click "OK".

But what if users are trained to always click OK and accidentally stumbles upon a fishing website? Stupid dummy users, they shouldn't have done that! If they accidentally went to a fishing website, downloaded a bad security plugin, and uploaded all their banking credentials, it's their fault!

IIRC Microsoft practically begged South Korea to please stop using ActiveX, it was never a great technology and it outlived its usefulness a long time ago, could we please move on?

Edit: As far as I remember, real fun started when you needed to access two banking websites. Now their security plugins start to fight each other!

South Korean here, explanation for some context:

South Korea has a deep legacy of MS-DOS/Windows, and it’s reliance of Microsoft’s OS is very high. This mostly is due to two reasons: the high use of the unique word processor(Hangul Word Processor) and the legacy ActiveX plugins used for cryptography when banking.

In the 90s, multiple internet service providers used ActiveX technology (for people who doesn’t know, it’s basically binary plugin technology to provide unlimited access to the local environment) to provide services. They were used to provide VOD services, etc... and when online shopping & banking started in the mid 90s the government mandated use of a 128bit crypto algorithm. At that time, the dominant browser IE only had 40 bit crypto due to US’s export restrictions — so the 128 bit algorithm they decided to use was a independently developed algorithm called SEED, which was then implemented in ActiveX by the banks and shopping malls. This became a legacy, and for a long time even after the restriction was removed, people were forced to use ActiveX plugins until the smartphones came and the banks were forced to rewrite the system. There are still a lot of banks mandating the use of Windows for desktops — that’s one reason why the Windows was so popular.

Windows 10 AFAIK (I’ve never used it, so I’m not really sure) is much more strict to the binary plugins, and Internet Explorer is almost going to die — so a lot of people were staying on Windows 7, including most of the government. By the deprecation of Windows 7, the government thought that this was a good time to remove much of the legacy that enforces Windows, and is considering Linux for one of its options.

One of the reasons why I have some hope on this project is because the government’s use of Windows is basically for two things — the ActiveX plugins in the web (which are mostly disappeared thanks to smartphones) and the Hangul Word Processor, which was exclusively only on Windows until about 2008, when a Linux version was released for a short period of time (and was removed due to the lack of interest). If the government decides to transition to Linux, Hancom(HWP’s developer) can prioritize the Linux port — which, in 2008 was already fully featured and has almost zero compatibility problems! (People using Linux still use the 2008 version by dockerizing the whole environment.)

Some context on the operating systems that were mentioned:

The Harmonica OS is a Linux Mint-based distribution that is localized thoroughly and has a lot of baseline programs (like the input methods) installed, and is pretty great for daily use.

The Tmax OS is... basically a scam OS that... well uses a big mix of Linux, BSD, and Wine’s code, a homemade custom DE that is a poor ripoff of the windows interface and tries to integrate them (unsuccessfully)... and advertise as a ‘pure Korean OS’ to the officials.

Their friends to the North have been using Linux for many years know, although pirated copies of Windows are still prevalent as well.

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

To your updates point: as I understand Microsoft's strategy they are doing rolling release now, which is how a desktop OS should do in the age when hardware is expected to still be fast enough for everything in 15 years. Ubuntu doesn't do it, their LTS is just 5 years, neither does MacOS by the way. This is of course very annoying to deal with and disrupts and breaks user experience pretty significantly. But also is not a problem for government making their own distro, updates is like half of the reason to even make a distro.