Microsoft Windows is the dominant operating system in China, but the government is trying to encourage homegrown replacements. The most popular one is called NeoKylin. We gave it a whirl to see how the hottest China-made OS looks and feels.
Exactly what you’d expect.
That’s an OS I would not trust. Not that I trust Windows either…
Edited 2015-09-24 16:58 UTC
Only if someone publishes the patches to Fedora and LibreOffice, etc. and made it so it would build reproducible.
Which you can’t with Fedora yet AFAIK.
Debian is getting a lot closer these days: https://reproducible.debian.net/reproducible.html
If Debian gets there, I may switch back. That is a killer feature for me.
I kinda doubt fedora will do that, as its an anti-feature for RHEL. Red hat kind of lives on that uncertainty about weather or not you’ll be able to reproduce their binaries exactly. Kind of a shame, really. But maybe now that Centos is in house they can do that? Not sure. But its not a trivial task as Debian well knows by now.
Probably reproducibility will also apply to Debian derivatives eventually.
But the good thing about this Debian project is they are also helping to fix the upstream projects.
So it will be easier for for example Fedora to adopt a similar policy
As an XP replacement, I’d say that it was looking pretty good.
The problem is the Applications. If the Chinese Gove can stingarm the top producers into releasing versions of their products for this platform it might gain some long term traction.
I have to ask the mandatory question…
Does it run Crysis? {Yes I am joking}
I hope not. It’s a numbingly stupid point and shoot game.
Crysis 2 is entirely different!
So it’s not an actual OS, just another Linux distro. Guess I expected more considering the available resources and government backing.
Not being able to run major Windows software would be a crippling handicap, but this ‘OS’ can’t even run Linux software without hacking config files?
Guess I don’t really see the point, other than more government control. And the beautiful desktop interface.
That is the point, and the only point.
Sorry for the bolding, but there seems to be a rash of comments like this on the web.
Product X main feature Y.
Comment: Well, if you ignore main selling feature Y there isn’t any point of getting Product X.
In related news, water is wet.
I should clarify, I understand perfectly well the ‘why’ of why the OS exists and what it’s purpose is.
I don’t understand the ‘why’ of why anyone would choose to use it. Other than the beautiful
desktop interface, there’s no incentive. Perhaps nationalism, using a “home-grown” operating system (even though it’s not)?
Edited 2015-09-25 19:16 UTC
I’m not so sure anyone who uses it has an alternative choice( to be fair most people at work don’t have an operating system choice either). It was built by the government for the government. It would love to eventually force everyone to use it, sure. That’s phase II.
Myself, I’d prefer a hacked copy of Windows over a Linux distro that can’t use standard Linux software.
Curious response. Again, no choice is offered for people who are using it. But furthermore, it can use standard linux software. What makes you think it can’t?
It isn’t meant to run normal Linux software. It is meant to be a totally locked down system for government use.
I assume that it was forked many years ago and has limited compatibility with current Fedora distros.
If I was advising the Chinese government (or anyone else who would listen) I’d tell them that effort trying to replicate an OS is wasted.
Instead focus on apps that work through a modern standards compliant web browser.
That way you decouple the OS from the apps, and you free up loads of effort to where it should be – on the apps users want to use. Desktops are dead. OSes just need to secure the device, drive some hardware, and … run a browser.
You’ll never succeed in replicating a proprietary desktop OS – and when you get close you’re years out of date.
For over 10 years I’ve been preaching that.
At least I’m not the only one.
Maybe China is afraid they can’t block all the information on the web with their Great Chinese Firewall and would rather block things at the OS level… like Apple.
Edited 2015-09-24 22:02 UTC
No. Apple doesn’t control the operating system to the same degree as what they want. It will not only limit the software used, but also monitor I/O and proxy any network traffic.
Sounds nice until you realise that web apps are a hideously inefficient joke, and completely inappropriate for just about everything. If you’re not able to understand this, try implementing a high performance database management engine (complete with ACID) in HTML5.
– Brendan
Right, because every app on this planet needs a high performance database management engine
In mordern web app speak, you’d simply connect to a native one running on a database server, see, problem solved.
Lets face it, the time that JS was too slow for most things is pretty much over, and most apps sit and idle waiting for the user to do something anyway.
I’m sure you can find examples of apps that would not work, but for 80% of computer usage out there, it would be fine….
Keep your web apps to yourself, they are shit! If you want/need to run something, keep it native. The more that is ran on the web, the more control will be wrestled from the user, and consumer rights will go even further down the pan.
Do not try and ram that down my throat thank you very much!
LOL, I’m not, but “native” software isn’t much better in general, take a look at Microsoft’s latest and greatest with Windows 10….
In the end, that behavior, as disgusting as it is, has nothing to do with native versus web, just look at the “native” crap in he mobile app stores…
I have no idea, I don’t use mobile apps. I have several PC’s, Amiga’s, Atari’s and ZX Spectrums for application and gaming use. As for Windows 10, stop swearing! Hell will freeze over before I use that obtrusive piece of crap!
While those operating systems are very cool, they don’t really change the fact that native doesn’t give you any more control over what they do unless they are FOSS applications. And if they are, then well you can get the same level of protection by running your own FOSS server software on your own web server.
Who runs a high performance database on their desktop? Just do what everyone does: put it on a server and provide a web application interface.
Web app doesn’t necessarily mean 100% local application. Or even if it does, they you’re pretty much arguing over a definition. The parent was just saying not local native apps, that very well could include apps like gmail where the bulk of the data is accessed remotely.
The Chinese government can basically force users to use certain software or hardware. China already has Google-free Android. The next step is probably Kylin on home grown non-X86 hardware.
Edited 2015-09-26 01:47 UTC
Stop pretending the situation in the US and China are any different from one another.
I aim to enter Chinese university in 2016, get master degree there and continue if possible.
Government wanting to fund own technologies is an opportunity for me. If I get lucky I might be working on what will become a component of Chinese OSes (and then other OSes too).
I like the will of Chinese government. “Turn workshop of the world into laboratory of the world”. Our ex education minister Fursenko, in contrast, blamed Soviet Union for education aimed at producing man-creator, and publicly stated that education must produce qualified consumer. Awkward.
I hope you and your generation can change things! For, at this moment China is known for a censored internet, hamstrung lawyers, lack of political debate, no independent financial press. On the science field, plagiarism is endemic and the contribution to global science – including computer science – is small. So yes, a change is needed.
I may be easy to amuse, but I find funny how the article title is “A first look at the Chinese operating system the government wants to replace Windows” and then follows a picture captioned “Would they ever trade OSX for NeoKylin?”. Really, was that hard for the author to find a photo with a computer not having an Apple logo on it?
Actually the whole article is very poor: they installed and used the OS, but they still can’t say for sure on which distro is based. They believe it may be a “recent version” because it uses yum, at a time when recent Fedora moved to DNF. They also think OpenOffice died (hint1: is still alive at Apache, hint2: if the distro is based on Fedora, the office suite may be based on LibreOffice).
Another thing not covered by the article which made me curious is the desktop environment. Looking at the video, you can see a ls on the home directory and there are a few .gnome2 folders, so the desktop may likely be a fork of GNOME 2 (other than MATE) or just an old GNOME 2.
“The Year of Linux on the Desktop” ™, forever the butt of too many jokes, is finally upon us!
Please, don’t vote me down to oblivion just yet because I’m not being sarcastic. In fact I’m (at least half) serious. I mean, just think about the sheer number of potential users: since it’s China we’re talking about, even a 5% user base is going to translate to a nice, fat number.
Not only that, India is doing pretty much the same thing with its own operating system called BOSS (http://www.indianweb2.com/2015/09/24/india-boss-operating-system/): “GNU/Linux distribution developed by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) derived from Debian for enhancing the use of Free/ Open Source Software throughout India.The Beta Release of BOSS GNU/Linux Version 5.0 is coupled with GNOME Desktop Environment with wide Indian language support & packages, relevant for use in the Government domain.” (http://www.bosslinux.in/)
Now, given that China and India account for about 2.5 billion people (roughly 1/3 of the world’s population) even that hypothetical 5% I made out of thin air is nothing to scoff at, isn’t it?
RT.
Edited 2015-09-25 09:16 UTC
This reminds me of South Korea’s TMax Windows, that actually illegally used source codes from Wine.
Funny that they research only this one and not: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/ubuntu-kylin
As a regular Linux user it is always amusing to read this kind of posts. So inaccurate and biased. But who cares. It doesn’t influence my way of working.
Heh. They could just have copied North Koreas StarOS instead
Who knew?