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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

#31

Post by andrewzah »

microcolonel wrote: post #6
dmurray wrote: post #2

Is this actually likely to happen, or a negotiating manoeuvre with Microsoft?

Last time they trusted Microsoft, they got their entire country stuck with ActiveX; that said, possibly a bit of column A, a bit of column B.

Further reading about activex mentioned above:

* https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-koreans-use-internet-exp...

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...

Oh, and some required apps simply don't have mac equivalents. Fun times.

It's funny because S.Korea is otherwise quite advanced. It's just their banking/online shopping is a huge hassle compared to using foreign cards.

In order to use my Korean card online, I had to go to the bank, set a password there (valid for 1 year) and have a randomly generated numbers-lookup card printed. I forget the exact term for it. So when I used my bank's debit card online, I guess it would go "type in the number next to 20 on your numbers card". Totally ridiculous. I just never used it because I realized sites like gmarket allowed foreigners to use their cards anyways.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#33

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#35

Post by pcr910303 »

yingw787 wrote: post #22
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…

Ah, live demos are hard :P There's no shame in trying, and no shame in pivoting after a cost/benefit analysis, and sticking with Windows. In contrast, North Korea maintains its own Linux distro ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS#Version_4.0 ) and has for ten to twenty years, probably because they can't trust any proprietary software and they're not tied to Windows-happy U.S. DoD, and I would rather live in S…

Not OP, but:

> There's no shame in trying, and no shame in pivoting after a cost/benefit analysis, and sticking with Windows.

It wouldn’t been a shame if TmaxOS was advertised as a BSD distribution with Windows integration through Wine from the start — it advertises itself as a ‘pure korean OS’ without any mentions of BSD (which I’m pretty sure is a license violation) our Wine.

It later moved onto the Linux kernel and a more standard Linux environment (with some BSD components left over), and a custom DE, and is currently advertising itself as a Linux distribution. I’ve heard it is actually in a fairly useable state... but the OS already got a really bad rap.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#36

Post by oblio »

pcr910303 wrote: post #25

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’…

> 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.

Microsoft will just offer Windows for free and Office at a steep discount and nothing will change. Mark my words :-)

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#37

Post by pcr910303 »

runxel wrote: post #30

Wait, the country which stills uses Internet Explorer 6 for online banking?

As a South Korean, I can definitely assure you that’s not the case. We definitely didn’t mandate the use of IE ‘6’... and while it’s true that until early to mid 2010s banking did mandate use of IE, it stopped as soon as the smartphones became mainstream. Almost all banks and shopping malls work on Chrome and mobiles as well.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#38

Post by yorwba »

newnewpdro wrote: post #4
RoutinePlayer wrote: post #3

Did Germany try this unsuccessfully a few years back?

Munich successfully pivoted to Linux for over a decade, then Microsoft Germany moved their HQ to Munich no doubt greasing many wheels in the process and Munich switched back to Windows a year later IIRC.

It wasn't that successful, they were even still running Windows 2000 on some machines when they decided to switch "back" from Linux. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643182

I wouldn't be surprised if the switch didn't help their problems at all, since if they didn't get rid of Windows 2000 when switching to Linux, they're likely still running some legacy applications on their homegrown LiMux systems and suffering from the resulting interoperability problems.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#39

Post by AYBABTME »

As a foreigner who's spending a lot of time in South Korea and had to deal/saw people deal with the inability to do anything online without the use of a Windows client, I applaud this. Every time we need to interact with the government or a bank, we need to search around for a Windows laptop or try from a VM (doesn't always work). This makes it very hard for anyone to learn a non-Windows OS.

Next step: remove the silly Korean phone number requirement from your online services.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#40

Post by est31 »

yingw787 wrote: post #11

As someone who very much uses and likes FOSS, I'm not sure I'd actually recommend people use Linux in end-user, day to day work. I can definitely see BSD or Linux in core infrastructure, but end users don't really care too much about which OS to use, they care about driver compatibility, UX usability, and app availability, among other things like security and what-not. Windows has apps, it has vendor-built drivers, i…

> Windows has apps, it has vendor-built drivers, it has auto-update and nice GUIs and all that. Linux doesn't.

Linux has tons of auto update solutions. E.g. on Debian you can configure the unattended-upgrades package to do it for you. There are plenty of nice GUIs for most tasks if you use the right distro. Ultimately, it's up to the admins of the deployments to take care of updates, not up to the end users.

As for the vendor maintained drivers that Windows has, it's often the same in Linux actually. Often, the maintainers of the mainline drivers are employees of the vendors. As it should be.

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