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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @09:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @09:01PM (#957850)

    The actual article it much more detailed. Most government officials currently have two Windows PCs on their desk, the internal one and the external one, and a minority have an external one only. Note that while most departments have both running Windows, some departments have experimented with one or both being Linux based. The plan in the article is to have all external machines run Linux. So for dual computer officials, they will transition from one Windows machine for internal use and one Windows machine for external use to one machine. This laptop will be considered "internal," will run Windows to have access to "productivity software" and to all the other internal things. From this "internal" laptop, they can open up a virtual desktop running on another centrally-hosted cloud service. That virtual desktop will running Linux and only the virtual desktop will have access to the internet.

    An important thing to note is that when this is done across the entire government, they will more than half the number of Windows licenses they need. This is because people who only need "external" computers or computers that don't require Windows-only software will be running Linux as well.

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