South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux
South Korean here, explanation for some context:<p>South Korea has a deep legacy of MS-DOS&#x2F;Windows, and it’s reliance of Microsoft’s OS is very high. This mostly is due to two reasons: the high use of the unique word processor(Hangul Word Processor) and the legacy ActiveX plugins used for cryptography when banking.<p>In the 90s, multiple internet service providers used ActiveX technology (for people who doesn’t know, it’s basically binary plugin technology to provide unlimited access to the local environment) to provide services. They were used to provide VOD services, etc... and when online shopping &amp; banking started in the mid 90s the government mandated use of a 128bit crypto algorithm. At that time, the dominant browser IE only had 40 bit crypto due to US’s export restrictions — so the 128 bit algorithm they decided to use was a independently developed algorithm called SEED, which was then implemented in ActiveX by the banks and shopping malls. This became a legacy, and for a long time even after the restriction was removed, people were forced to use ActiveX plugins until the smartphones came and the banks were forced to rewrite the system. There are still a lot of banks mandating the use of Windows for desktops — that’s one reason why the Windows was so popular.<p>Windows 10 AFAIK (I’ve never used it, so I’m not really sure) is much more strict to the binary plugins, and Internet Explorer is almost going to die — so a lot of people were staying on Windows 7, including most of the government. By the deprecation of Windows 7, the government thought that this was a good time to remove much of the legacy that enforces Windows, and is considering Linux for one of its options.<p>One of the reasons why I have some hope on this project is because the government’s use of Windows is basically for two things — the ActiveX plugins in the web (which are mostly disappeared thanks to smartphones) and the Hangul Word Processor, which was exclusively only on Windows until about 2008, when a Linux version was released for a short period of time (and was removed due to the lack of interest). If the government decides to transition to Linux, Hancom(HWP’s developer) can prioritize the Linux port — which, in 2008 was already fully featured and has almost zero compatibility problems! (People using Linux still use the 2008 version by dockerizing the whole environment.)<p>Some context on the operating systems that were mentioned:<p>The Harmonica OS is a Linux Mint-based distribution that is localized thoroughly and has a lot of baseline programs (like the input methods) installed, and is pretty great for daily use.<p>The Tmax OS is... basically a scam OS that... well uses a big mix of Linux, BSD, and Wine’s code, a homemade custom DE that is a poor ripoff of the windows interface and tries to integrate them (unsuccessfully)... and advertise as a ‘pure Korean OS’ to the officials.