Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

fosslinux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 209 posts

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#151

Post by esjeon »

It seems like the government is pushing VDI to replace dedicated internet PCs, which are used alongside air-gapped government network PCs. That means, main office PCs will still be running Windows.

Actually, Korean military had an experimental VDI program years ago, but the program failed mainly because of the price, most of which had to be spent on Windows license. IIRC, after creating a small prototype, the program is eventually scrapped.

So, no, this is not a negotiating move. Also, I believe this will definitely happen, because Windows 10 is stupidly expensive.

The official announcement from Korean government (Korean): https://www.mois.go.kr/frt/bbs/type010/commonSelectBoardArti...

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#152

Post by fierarul »

atq2119 wrote: post #107
dmix wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked headline from the OPs post about the switch: > Linux in Munich: 'No compelling technical reason to return to Windows,' says city's IT chief https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-comp... The reason was probably a shift in IT management who wanted to keep things "simple" with some vague thing about keeping one platform since they had kept previous windows machines around which were apparent…

It was absolutely a political decision. Microsoft even moved their offices there from slightly outside of Munich to inside of Munich.

First time I hear this. So they didn't move offices from the far away Berlin to Munich, they just moved them from a small nearby suburb into the downtown of Munich? How was that such an important decision?

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#153

Post by eropple »

pcr910303 wrote: post #138
mr_toad wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They learnt to deal with the terrible UX in Windows, no reason they can’t on Linux. :-) They could, but they won’t. They want Outlook and Word and Excel, and they’ll exhibit a mule-like stubbornness to budge.

> They want Outlook and Word and Excel I’ve mentioned that we don’t use Word, (BTW, seriously, is there anyone who uses Outlook anymore?) and the dominant word processor used in South Korea had a port to Linux that is fully featured and has a very high compatibility since 2008.

> (BTW, seriously, is there anyone who uses Outlook anymore?)

Outlook is still huge amongst professions that have to deal with people a lot. The calendaring is better than online solutions (by a lot) and the plugins, I am told, for stuff like Salesforce are awesome.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#154

Post by smallstepforman »

smabie wrote: post #91
coldtea wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But, like, why?

To ensure foreign intelligence agencies have reduced visibility? To prop up local industry? Support customisations? Lots of valid reasons to roll your own OS, especially for National organisations.

The question I have is isn’t it obvious?

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#155

Post by totorovirus »

Mirioron wrote: post #150
totorovirus wrote: post #45

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…

> 2. M.S holders: you get to work for private firm for 3 years. Called 'special research agents'. Mostly work for engineering related firms. So the government essentially uses people to subsidize businesses?

by providing an alternative option for highly educated male engineers, yes.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#156

Post by redis_mlc »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #70
theredbox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same with Japan. Read some of patio11's posts on that.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#157

Post by redis_mlc »

totorovirus wrote: post #20

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…

I evaluated China's Red Flag Linux back in the day, around 2010.

They took a common linux distro, added Chinese fonts, and made a nice graphical login screen. I was impressed at how smooth the final result was actually.

If you're familiar with the final linux distros based on KDE (pre-Gnome 3), that's what it looked like.

So if you're a government IT staffer, study the history of Red Flag Linux.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#158

Post by cookiengineer »

fierarul wrote: post #152
atq2119 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was absolutely a political decision. Microsoft even moved their offices there from slightly outside of Munich to inside of Munich.

First time I hear this. So they didn't move offices from the far away Berlin to Munich, they just moved them from a small nearby suburb into the downtown of Munich? How was that such an important decision?

> How was that such an important decision?

Taxes. Politicians still think Microsoft pays taxes. Though 60M [1] per year in taxes while paying much more for their software is technically a retarded thing to do deal-wise.

[1] https://www.northdata.de/Microsoft+Deutschland+GmbH,+München...

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#159

Post by dx034 »

rrdharan wrote: post #99
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That only makes sense if the total bribe outweighs the investment in building the credible alternative.

The bribe here is not to people but to the government. If the tax effect for the city outweighs licensing costs it makes sense for the city to switch. The city where their office used to be is the one suffering under the decision.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#160

Post by dx034 »

rocky1138 wrote: post #54

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.

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or companies much harder. That's where Microsoft makes the money and has its monopoly.
Post reply on HN