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South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

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Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#61

Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it. This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

Relevant well-known case: when Munich switched to Linux and then switched back to Windows 10

https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/26/linux-pioneer-munich-swi...

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#63
post #61

Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it. This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

Relevant well-known case: when Munich switched to Linux and then switched back to Windows 10 https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/26/linux-pioneer-munich-swi...

Which is, of course, the canonical example of why all governments should do it.

The project didn't fail, it was on pace to succeed, which made Microsoft swoop in and basically bribe them to switch back.

The lesson being, switch to Linux. Either you'll switch and save money, or Microsoft will bribe you not to and you'll save money.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#64

South korean developer here. I am quite aware of government plans for software since I've done my service as a software developer for army. There is a company called TmaxSoft which advertises itfself as only builders to the 'Korean OS'. Fueled by relatively high patriotism shared by average koreans, the government had been subsidizing this firm for more than 10 years. Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a…

>Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a private US firm this wasn't successful so far: first they tried to build their own kernel which froze at the public demo.

So? Linux, Windows, Mac OS, have all frozen during all kinds of public demos.

>After realizing it was dumb to write kernel from scratch

Is it? A nation state, especially one the size of Korea, should have no problem finding resources for writing a kernel from scratch - to a level suitable for running POSIX software and a modern UNIX-like userland.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#65

South korean developer here. I am quite aware of government plans for software since I've done my service as a software developer for army. There is a company called TmaxSoft which advertises itfself as only builders to the 'Korean OS'. Fueled by relatively high patriotism shared by average koreans, the government had been subsidizing this firm for more than 10 years. Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a…

More on TMaxSoft. This software firm builds many 'hard' softwares like OS, DBMS or even MapReduce data processing cluster(like hadoop and spark). One might naturally ask 'why build a wheel while there are plenty already built by open source developers?' and economically aware person might also ask 'how are selling their products while competing against ubuntu, postgresql, spark?' Cloning something from scratch and le…

This is so interesting and new to me. Do you have links where I can read further about all this?

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft will just offer Windows for free Which... doesn’t have a really incentive now in because all of the legacy components that required Windows in the first place are all broken on Win10... > Office at a steep discount ... and we don’t really rely on Microsoft Office that much (compared to other countries). The dominant word processor is from a local company (side note: Word is just awful... seriously. Maybe…

No idea where you are getting any of this from... A little hard to complain when we can take dlls that are 10-12 years old shove them into something like server 2019/SQL 2019, and not think about compatibility. Same goes for client apps, was your app shit 10 years ago? It's not going to change 10 years later. Did it work in word 10 years ago, it will most likely work 10 years later with zero changes.

ActiveX.

See other comments here

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#68
post #62

I said this 10 years ago: if government from many developed nations pool their resources together, we could have a serious alternative to Windows and Windows Server. Most of the base elements are already there.

We already have a better alternative to Windows Server. It's Linux.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#69

South korean developer here. I am quite aware of government plans for software since I've done my service as a software developer for army. There is a company called TmaxSoft which advertises itfself as only builders to the 'Korean OS'. Fueled by relatively high patriotism shared by average koreans, the government had been subsidizing this firm for more than 10 years. Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a…

Hello, nice to meet another Korean (still wake at 4AM) on HN! :-) > The result was criticism that is was just a pathetic clone of MintOS(linux distro). I’m pretty sure you’re mixing up Harmonica with Tmax — Harmonica is based on Linux Mint (and is a pretty well operated open source project) while Tmax uses the Linux kernel, some BSD components and a custom desktop environment that features a rip-off interface of Wind…

Found a page with some information + a screenshot of Harmonica: https://linuxreviews.org/HamoniKR

There wasn't any english stuff for Tmax distro that I could find...

idk why they don't just adopt Debian + Gnome for their desktop stuff with some Korean development work on top of that. It's a great looking UI/UX and would be perfect especially if most of the software is via the browser/SaaS anyway. Or some occasional wine translations where needed.

But I guess that's just how governments work and their constant obsessions with the sunk cost fallacy.

Edit: Harmonica seems to be doing the right thing already, from the review:

> However, it is, at it's core, just Linux Minux with two special PPAs for Koreans on top.

This isn't something to shame them for, this is how it should be done.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More on TMaxSoft. This software firm builds many 'hard' softwares like OS, DBMS or even MapReduce data processing cluster(like hadoop and spark). One might naturally ask 'why build a wheel while there are plenty already built by open source developers?' and economically aware person might also ask 'how are selling their products while competing against ubuntu, postgresql, spark?' Cloning something from scratch and le…

Well not even Samsung can do proper SW engineering (it's an insanely failed side of Samsung and yeah it's that bad) and they can pay top dollar. Koreans just cant really do b2c products that well that are not hardware.

Korea doesn’t value software engineers like Silicon Valley does. Over there, it is considered menial work and the pay is VERY substandard. This has been true as recently as 2018, but it is (too slowly) starting to change. The only FAANG with an engineering office in Seoul is Google.
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