• Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com
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    6 hours ago

    my biggest hope with this is more contributors for LibreOffice, so people can stop requiring Excel and then they can move to Linux

  • BillyClark@piefed.social
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    8 hours ago

    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.

    • shirasho@feddit.online
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      2 hours ago

      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.

      • BillyClark@piefed.social
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        2 hours ago

        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.

  • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com
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    6 hours ago

    Anyone know what this is?

    [Windows 10 China Government Edition…] and support for Chinese cryptographic standards.

  • vanillama@programming.dev
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    8 hours ago

    That’s amazing, especially considering China has even more people than the entirety of Europe combined, may we soon follow over here

    • bignose@programming.dev
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      3 hours ago

      To be clear, articles like this are saying “China”, “Belgium”, etc. as shorthand for the national government of that country.

      Not that everyone in that country must switch; only that the country-level government is declaring they will switch computers they use.

      This does have a strong effect on what other organisations and individuals use, but it lags a long way and certainly doesn’t directly affect everyone in the country.

      With that said: Yeah the Chinese government is made up of a great many more people than European national governments. It’s a big move.

  • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    I bring it up any opportunity I get at work, but nothing yet. Unfortunately, our IT team does not have the skills or experience working with Linux, so it would probably be a rocky and dicey transition. As a dev, I think I can maybe convince the right people that our team should go Linux and we could be the test cases. We would all survive without the MS suite, but a lot of tools would have to change, like Jetbrains instead of Visual Studio.