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posted by martyb on Thursday February 13 2020, @07:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the windows-osx-tarpit-forever-and-ever dept.

South Korea's government explores move from Windows to Linux desktop

With Windows 7 in its support coffin, some institutions are finally giving up on Windows entirely. The biggest of these may be the South Korean government. In May 2019, South Korea's Interior Ministry announced plans to look into switching to the Linux desktop from Windows. It must have liked what it saw. According to the Korean news site Newsis, the South Korean Ministry of Strategy and Planning has announced the government is exploring moving most of its approximately 3.3 million Windows computers to Linux.

[...] The reason for this is simple. It's to reduce software licensing costs and the government's reliance on Windows. As Choi Jang-hyuk, the head of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, said, "We will resolve our dependency on a single company while reducing the budget by introducing an open-source operating system."

How much? South Korean officials said it would cost 780 billion won (about $655 million) to move government PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

[...] Windows will still have a role to play for now on South Korean government computers. As the Aju Business Daily, a South Korean business news site, explained: Government officials currently use two physical, air-gapped PCs. One is external for internet use, and the other is internal for intranet tasks. Only the external one will use a Linux-based distro.

Eventually, by 2026, most civil servants will use a single Windows-powered laptop. On that system, Windows will continue to be used for internal work, while Linux will be used as a virtual desktop via a Linux-powered cloud server. This looks to eventually end up as a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model.

Another reason might be if you don't trust the government of Windows' country of origin.

There have been stories of big moves from Windows to Linux for years. Do any Soylentils know of Linux deployments replacing Windows that have occurred and still remain in effect?


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:11PM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:11PM (#957710)

    If South Korean government officials are using this as negotiating leverage to get major discounts from M$, isn't that a good thing, since it saves their taxpayer's money? Even if they do get wined and dined during the negotiations, that's good for South Korea's federal budget, and the only losers are M$'s shareholders.

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  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:13PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:13PM (#957727) Journal
    But they're not - they're eliminating all the separate Linux computers on the desks of their users and consolidating on Windows, with Linux now relegated to a cm.

    They'll save money on electricity, they'll have all these extra computers to use if one fails (though they'll have to install Windows), fewer keyboards to spill coffee on, fewer calls to support for their Linux machines, fewer simultaneous access licenses since there's only one machine per user, etc.

    And then there's increasing productivity as users no longer have to deal with two separate computers - they can further increase productivity by giving everyone a second screen from all the desk space saved.

    Whoever wrote the original headline must have been jazzing in their pants, but the reality is that South Korea has decided that Linux is still not ready for the desktop because they're eliminating their Linux desktops. Nothing personal - they could have used a BSD in a VM and the result would be the same.

    Or they could have switched to Apple and run Windows in a VM ... or run Linux as the host OS, but that doesn't make sense if your users spend most of their time in Windows anyway, so convenience and simplicity won.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @01:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @01:48AM (#957992)

    You slightly misunderstood me. I'm not saying it is bad to be wined and dined. Nor did I say it was bad to get a discount or announce your intentions. Now that I'm thinking of it, I'm not really passing a value judgment. Instead, I'm commenting that if I were a more jaded, the entire reason for the public announcement would be the ones above, as opposed to any of the other considerations that government officials could have had to do so.