A lot of schools and colleges in Kerala (Indian State) use Ubuntu. Kids are taught how to use software like GIMP and Audacity in schools. It has become part of the syllabus in public schools.
12 th standard students have to do maths practical in GeoGebra.
Kerala has a very good relationship with Free Software Foundation. Here is a video of Stallman speaking in the inauguration function of “Free software foundation of India” in Kerala broadcasted on State television youtu.be/ZnlslvE2A9U
I think its their loss as Microsoft products are know for quality with less bugs. Also American products should be used by every country. I think India and China should be put in the blacklist so that they can’t buy any US hardware and chipset.
Very cool! Always good to see more countries get closer to embracing FOSS. Really helps with the collaborative benefits that FOSS can have, plus allows for organizations to have more control in their digital destinies instead of simply being customers.
The article says this will be “based on Ubuntu” but it will probably actually just be Ubuntu with custom defaults, pre-installed software, and maybe repositories.
This just makes sense in my view. The cost relative to the number of machines they must deploy will be miniscule. If they do not mess with the core system too much, they can outsource almost all the admin and expertise to Canonical in terms of security and packaging. People saying this will blow up. Why? It does not sound like they are really creating a full distro from scratch. Is Ubuntu not viable?
In terms of why crating a custom version instead of just using actual Ubuntu. Again, the cost of customizing a distro can be dramatically less than making even simple configurations on every system after the fact. They can standardize what the desktop will look like and set key defaults. They can choose what applications are installed by default. They can remove applications from the repository that they do not want to be installed. The can ensure that localization is done well, etc.
I remember when Ubuntu was just Debian with custom defaults, pre-installed software, and their own repositories. Basically what every new distro is in the beginning.
And yeah creating dpkg packages isn’t really all that difficult. Don’t know why people are saying this will be a disaster. There’s a lot of technically proficient people in India that could handle doing QA, and putting a dpkg on a server that gets automatically picked up by all the various systems that need it. Hell, they could develop their own applications and package them up and distribute them around much easier on a Linux system than a Windows system.
My main concern is support and delay b/w security patches the OS will introduce. I’m making a wild guess, but I think they should have lot older hardware devices and from performance pov, they should benefit given latest Windows are not that great on older devices and older win versions have already reached EOL.
If they do get it right, they probably need to retrain their staff to be able to use other apps like Libre Office and more.
This is 100% a nationalism thing. They want to be able to say we make our own operating system. That’s it. It’s going to be a disaster when they inevitably fuck up because they are doing g it for the wrong reasons.
Even if it is, this is an instant attitude switch for uncles who go “open source is not acceptable in the industry” or “open source is not sustainable”
Only if it actually succeeds. If the Indian gov’t gives up on it after a year or two, then maybe it’ll have the opposite impact.
I work with some Indians, so I’m going to ask them their thoughts. I’m genuinely interested in whether there’s a will in India to actually make this a thing. I know it wouldn’t fly in my area (US), but it has worked to some extent in other regions.
Haven’t there been issues with other governments maintaining their own distribution? Why not just maintain a repo thats added with a script or something.
I ain’t a super Linux user, but I find it crazy that so many governments aren’t scared to put their data in the hands of US corporations like Microsoft of Apple.
I work for the state in Geneva, Switzerland, and my employers gives me an iPhone and forces me to use Windows at work.
I know that developing your own Linux distribution or any other solution is difficult but my country is even using a foreign cloud service instead of a swiss one😨
I’m just talking about keeping your data and those of your citizens away from Apple and Microsoft.
I don’t know enough about the nazi gold, but whatever your country is, I’m sure it has a dark history too. Still this is in no way related to the original post.
People are so shortsighted about this. Spend billions on Microsoft products to prevent spending millions on a safe solution that will never be suddenly deprecated.
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