Why not Windows 11? Because China, like many other non-US governments, no longer trusts American companies with their software and services. This approach is all about digital sovereignty.
I never understood why any country would allow their government computers to run proprietary software from a foreign (to them) company.
I’m sure that China had access to a lot of Windows source code as part of their previous agreement, but it’s far too big a risk, really, for any country, even the United States, to run Windows.
As far as I’m concerned, China is decades late in making this decision, and it’s still ahead of a lot of (most?) governments.
I’d argue that Linux has only within the last 3 to 5 years become “good enough” to use as a daily driver for the casual, tech illiterate government official. I’ve tried different flavors on and off for the past decade and never stuck with any of them due to instability or UX problems. It was only at the beginning of this year that I found a Linux flavor I could actually stick with and use as my daily driver (CachyOS).
Linux was ready for tech savvy enthusiasts 10+ years ago, but Government is never that.
Edit: Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn’t until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.
Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn’t until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.
I was using Linux in the late 90s when my Linux machine would run for months, only being rebooted when I decided to do a kernel upgrade, and meanwhile everybody was running Windows 95, one of the least stable OSes that I’ve ever used. It literally had a counter baked into the OS that caused a crash if you ran it for a certain amount of days, I think 30. If stability was so important, they’d have switched to Linux back then.
Even in the late 90s, the UI was decent enough as long as you had a decent administrator. I don’t think casual users could be expected to set up Linux back then, but that’s not a government type of use case.
I remember learning about that bug years after the OS came out, and not being too surprised that it was never fixed.
Windows 95 crashed so often that you’d basically have to specifically do nothing with the machine to ever get that crash. And even then, you’d just assume that it was crashing like Windows 95 always did anyway.
So you’d be unlikely to see or recognize that bug unless you were specifically testing for uptime issues.
I never understood why any country would allow their government computers to run proprietary software from a foreign (to them) company.
I’m sure that China had access to a lot of Windows source code as part of their previous agreement, but it’s far too big a risk, really, for any country, even the United States, to run Windows.
As far as I’m concerned, China is decades late in making this decision, and it’s still ahead of a lot of (most?) governments.
I’d argue that Linux has only within the last 3 to 5 years become “good enough” to use as a daily driver for the casual, tech illiterate government official. I’ve tried different flavors on and off for the past decade and never stuck with any of them due to instability or UX problems. It was only at the beginning of this year that I found a Linux flavor I could actually stick with and use as my daily driver (CachyOS).
Linux was ready for tech savvy enthusiasts 10+ years ago, but Government is never that.
Edit: Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn’t until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.
I was using Linux in the late 90s when my Linux machine would run for months, only being rebooted when I decided to do a kernel upgrade, and meanwhile everybody was running Windows 95, one of the least stable OSes that I’ve ever used. It literally had a counter baked into the OS that caused a crash if you ran it for a certain amount of days, I think 30. If stability was so important, they’d have switched to Linux back then.
Even in the late 90s, the UI was decent enough as long as you had a decent administrator. I don’t think casual users could be expected to set up Linux back then, but that’s not a government type of use case.
Apparently it was 50 days:
https://pipiscrew.github.io/posts/why-window/
Wonderful, thanks for looking that up.
I remember learning about that bug years after the OS came out, and not being too surprised that it was never fixed.
Windows 95 crashed so often that you’d basically have to specifically do nothing with the machine to ever get that crash. And even then, you’d just assume that it was crashing like Windows 95 always did anyway.
So you’d be unlikely to see or recognize that bug unless you were specifically testing for uptime issues.
The city of Munich did it in 2004. Only reversed it after Microsoft decided to build their new Germany hq in the city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux