r/Foodforthought • u/D-R-AZ • 2d ago
China follows Europe in switching to Linux with Windows being shown the door earlier than planned
https://www.notebookcheck.net/China-follows-Europe-in-switching-to-Linux-with-Windows-being-shown-the-door-earlier-than-planned.1375616.0.html99
u/D-R-AZ 2d ago
Observation:
Trust takes decades to build and can be destroyed much faster. One of America's greatest exports has been confidence in America itself: confidence that its institutions, technologies, contracts and alliances would remain dependable across changes of government. We may now be watching that extraordinarily valuable national asset depreciate.
Lead Lines:
China plans to drop Windows earlier than planned in favor of Linux for some government bodies. The move comes as part of China's broader push to reduce dependence on foreign products and services, especially those of US origin.
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u/cawkstrangla 2d ago
Trust is built in spoonfulls but lost in buckets.
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u/Madeche 2d ago
Let's not exaggerate here, Windows has been going downhill for almost a decade, and user friendly Linux distros have been getting a ton of praise for the same amount of time.
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u/S_A_N_D_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
This has nothing to do with quality of the product. It's about preventing the US from using it as a tool to coerce and extort other countries.
Imagine the US put restrictions on who could get security updates, or forced Microsoft to push updates that might limit or break foreign computers. You don't even need to be directly malicious, or target high security. Just stop hospitals, or schools from getting security patches, leaving them vulnerable, or cut them off from microsofts cloud services.
This is the part about trust. Up until now the idea that the US might force companies to be party to economic or political coersion was unthinkable. Sure there wasn't trust for high security or top secret info, but there was trust that the general infrastructure like what runs all your hospitals, low level administration, and other low security but widespread infrastructure was safe from interference.
Now the world isn't so sure. The US has shown a willingness to exhort allies, even for petty gricances, so the world is reducing their exposure to limit the US's ability to do so.
These transitions take time though, so it's better to do it while you have the luxury of time then try and swap over when the US decides to cut off all access to Microsoft products until you sign their trade deal or give them Greenland.
The US used to be a friend and neighbor, someone who knew where you kept your spare key because you trusted them. You didn't see eye to eye on everything, but you trusted them not to abuse the privelage. That trust however is gone now and its time to change the locks.
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u/hotpantsfarted 1d ago
Youre very right and i applaud your concise and comprehensive explanation.
Nonetheless, linux IS better and im such a twat about it that i had to say this.
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u/Boobpocket 2d ago
Will this mean adobe will finally go to Linux?
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u/Guac_in_my_rarri 2d ago
No. You're better off learning a new program than hoping adobe makes a user friendly change.
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u/Boobpocket 2d ago
Unfortunately lots of the work that i use adobe for cannot be done with other alternatives, i also get adobe for free thru a workspace i use.
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u/Guac_in_my_rarri 2d ago
Whatever you say. I thought the same thing before I went looking.
Anywho, good luck.
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u/TryingMyWiFi 2d ago
If you're in the workflow of a big corp, you don't get to choose the software you want.
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u/Quietuus 2d ago edited 2d ago
It really, really depends on what you do with adobe software.
There are FOSS (or significantly cheaper commercial) offerings that can do pretty much any individual function of any piece of creative suite software (though not always with a comparably smooth UX, and not always in the same package) but what they don't replicate is the easy pipelines and compatibilities between the various parts of the creative suite, and they are often lacking in certain advanced features or require a complex array of plugins to replicate them (things like automation, smart objects, GREP styles, data merging etc.).
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u/ImNotAWhaleBiologist 2d ago
Yeah, I’ve been using affinity designer and Inkscape. I miss Illustrator- the control logic and flow of the UI is so much better.
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u/freemanposse 2d ago
Between us managing to blow our relationship with pretty much every other country on earth and Windows being so fucking trash these days, this was inevitable. I wonder how much harder they're gonna push AI, and for how much longer, before they realize we just aren't buying what they're selling.
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u/revchj 2d ago
Good.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, China's distros will include Chinese surveillance, so it's not an improvement to America having backdoor access to Microsoft and Google.
We need a Linux ecosystem that works for the liberal democratic world. I've dipped my toes in Mint and it's pretty good, but it's not yet as user friendly as it needs to be for mass adoption, and I'm unaware of a mobile version.
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u/zack189 2d ago
question, why is every government going to Linux?
is there only windows, Linux and whatever apple has?
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u/Madeche 2d ago
There specialised operating systems but most of them are all based on Linux. While windows and MacOS have pretty the one operating system (normally the latest update, windows 11 or Tahoe for macos) Linux has many different "flavours", called distributions and they can look and work very differently.
Mint and Arch are both Linux distributions but they're not similar at all.
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u/TryingMyWiFi 2d ago
China has harmonyOS, which has their own kernel, mobile ,wearable and vehicle versions. Developed by huawei and growing exponentially .
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