New Ubuntu about to take over the World?

[Quarkrad]

Have you read this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28928369

Hmm... wonder what the other two big OS boys are thinking?

[mastablasta]

at first glance and short term this won't harm them. people in China used mostly pirated versions. MS aim is companies and to tie them into their packages. not home users.

however 2 things to note here - many companies have ties to government so they might want to have Homemade Linux, and if school sand unis adopt it as the only OS then kids will be taught the Linux martial arts and when grow up they will be ninjas in Linux. anyway they might continue to use it. but in short term they will still probably use pirated windows.

when I was visiting relatives in Asia they mostly had some pirated windows. ok so they weren't online for the most part and these might not be a major security risk. some where. some might be wrongly installed. I told them they can use Linux and showed them how it works using USB I had with me. but they are tied to MS with other OS. so in the end I told them to get an original OS for the PC that are connected to internet (even occasionally) and to get some descent AV.

by the way I never saw this before - Windows 7 laptop working kind of slow and then fast and then slow again and then fast again for shorter time. they claimed it was a poor PC (not strong enough). it didn't have any malware and I never seen this kind of behaviour before (ok I am not an expert). anyway I decided to boot Xubuntu. hardware was descent for office use & internet (plenty of RAM - 4 GB, dual core modern Pentium CPU). and it ran like a charm. then I tried Kubutnu also very snappy. then I went back to windows 7 at first very good then again slow unresponsive, then again fast for a couple of minutes.

maybe it was a disk issue...


anyway plenty use pirated, despite option for Opensource as well as cheap widnows version available in certain Asian markets. Yeah they have windows version there that is not really sold in EU or US.

[buzzingrobot]

Is any revenue going to Canonical from the Kylin effort?

Banning Win8 might be driven by paranoia about potential U.S. surveillance, but mandating use of a government-driven OS facilitates surveillance by that government.

[grahammechanical]

Ubuntu being open source means that government agencies can audit the source code. But it is a door that swings both ways. Any additions made by government or corporate agencies would also be open to scrutiny. If there were blocks on scrutinising certain parts of the code then that would be a give away for sure. Well, that's my theory.

At the moment Ubuntu Kylin ISO images are being built and tested by Ubuntu QA. The images are hosted on Ubuntu servers. While that remains the way Ubuntu Kylin is developed and offered for download then there is a good chance that it may remain "pure."

That is not to say that an employer cannot put its own employee monitoring software on its machines. That been possible for years.

[mastablasta]

but mandating use of a government-driven OS facilitates surveillance by that government.

or standardisation. it is not unusual for government to choose an OS used in their services. as well as the office programs they will use. and since in China many corporations are also government owned...