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?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Thursday February 13 2020, @07:54AM (3 children)
Air gapped or otherwise, this is how you know they're serious about an OS switch. Messing around with dual booting is typically a short romance. But when people set up a KVM, you know they're gradually working towards getting rid of Windows but are realistic about how long and complicated the transition may be in terms of porting efforts and retraining.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by petecox on Thursday February 13 2020, @11:18AM (2 children)
There are conflicting messages in the summary - seems they're going with Windows laptops and have an icon to remote desktop into a Linux environment.
I wonder where Samsung are in all this. Killing off "Linux on DeX" seems badly timed - I would be pitching to their government that they don't need 3.3million dedicated Linux PCs if they supply every employee with a Galaxy phone.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:57PM
They're not switching to Linux - they're eliminating the second computer users had,, which had Linux on it. This is not about saving money on Windows licensing, but licensing that requires a per- computer licence for accessing certain services. Those licenses will be cut in half, as everyone moves to Windows as their only physical computer. So this is actually a loss for Linux since all those separate Linux laptops go bye byes.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @09:01PM
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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:08AM (7 children)
Microsoft deploys their best Damage Control Team to South Korea. Wine em, dine em, buy them mercs, girls, drinks, yachts, BUT don't come home without a signed contract for our fine MS products.
Worked in Munich.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:16AM (4 children)
Well, that and...
"Oh, come on, that's the asking price! Let's sit together as the nice people we are and start to talk a bit over the price, maybe we can cut you a sweeter volume discount or somethin'".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:31AM (3 children)
If I were slightly more jaded, I would think the people in charge of the transition in South Korea are only announcing this publicly in order to get leverage for said discounts with the wining and dining treatment as a bonus. If I were really more jaded, I would think the people in charge of the transition in South Korea are only announcing this publicly in order to get said wining and dining treatment with the leverage for said discounts as a bonus.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:11PM (2 children)
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.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:13PM
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.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @01:48AM
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.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @09:18AM (1 child)
Microsoft is a progressive workplace. They send tgirls now.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:21PM
So all those separate Linux pcs and laptops are eliminated in favour of consolidating on Windows exclusively as the main OS and thisis your take-away? This was a major loss for Linux. Yet again history repeats itself, and it's not even a ploy to negotiate lower licensing costs for the OS - just eliminating licensing and maintenance costs for software that requires per-computer simultaneous access.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:05PM
Former megacorporation moved all of field circus to ipads which are functionally identical in use to android running on linux tablets. Ditto my kids school not just students but staff, plus some chromebooks.
I would say even at the megacorporation, by mid 2010s every "application" for almost all drones had a web interface so even PC rollouts amounted to "install chrome on bare metal" and little to nothing else. Almost no apps run on windows anymore, they run on a web browser that might be on a virus and security infection prone windows os.
You can even run pretty advanced CAD in a browser, see "onshape", although my former employer has not used that ... yet ... AFAIK. Meanwhile my development laptop had specs beyond anything anyone can buy in a laptop because its rdesktop over a VPN into a VMWare cluster with a beefy "testing" image. The fan never turns on and the battery lasts forever and with stuff like Apache Guacamole, the rdesktop connection works fine from a chromebook too. So for places that have one or two legacy windows apps, just rdesktop (or similar) into an image.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rich on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:15PM (2 children)
From my overall perception of media in the last decades, South Korea is about the most Windows-infested place on the planet. So my take: They'll be the last to migrate, this is about discounts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:59PM
yeah, lots of korean servers show these "asp" letters in url bar..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:38PM
Plenty of times in the past when cities, or other large organizations threaten to move to Linux it is really about negotiations with Microsoft for more sane pricing.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Thursday February 13 2020, @04:06PM
Many years ago, probably at least 20 the schools in South Korea decided to deploy Linux. Back in those days inetd still had every service enabled by default. So guess what happened when thousand of open SMTP servers suddenly appeared? Spammers found them in a hurry and the Spam level skyrocketed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @07:30PM
Microsoft uses Linux servers for all their critical systems.