I hope they stick with it and not go back to Microsoft. No doubt that there will be a learning curve and some growing pains but this is ultimately for the best. I wish them all of the success!
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Take anything from India with a grain of salt. This kind announcement happened in the past but ultimately failed to gain any steam.
What are you expecting? Should they put out a big billboard saying "We've switched to Linux!"?
No, I want them to actually adopt it in parctice rather than creating hype. The reason they fail to do it in large scale is because of lack of people with knowledge of Linux working for the government (including defense). To change that the education sector of the country need to adopt Linux first. Currently only a elite group choosing IT during college gets exposure to Linux. Rest of the mass has no clue what Linux is or how to use it. Only handful of engineers not going to change it, they need real adoption by common people for everyday use.
Do you really think they are creating hype? If you think it's hype then don't engage with the content. But everyone in FOSS industry is engaging, so they just announced something, I see no evidence of a inorganic hype generation. Also if they follow through or not is secondary to me, I'm just happy somebody out there thinks this is a good idea.
India feels like the country equivalent of Elon Musk when it comes to announcements. They always announce some incredible goal (man on Mars, Superpower 2020, whatever) lap up all the good vibes of that announcement, and then drop the ball on implementation. Then they quietly shift the deadline to 5 years later and make a new announcement.
Not clear on what systems they are switching operating systems. Assuming workstations operated by people? I’m sure there’s a lot of Linux there already on servers. Apparently there’s at least 1.4 million people in the Indian Ministry of Defence so I’m worried this is one of those announcements to get a licensing discount from Microsoft :(
This is such a no-brainer. Every government in the world should be doing this.
The more that do and contribute the more of a no brainier it will be too!
Yeah until they start buying missiles and drones from the US that require windows 95 with back doors to function
Good for them.
Fascinating news. On the statcounter site I also read that India's Linux use stats for July, 2023 were at 14.15%. Incredible!
Schools use Ubuntu LTS based distro in my state too
Tamilnadu government has also shifted to linux afaik correct me if i'm wrong
Kite Gnu/linux 20.04
How are YOU finding me everywhere?lol
Ennalakum thannalakum varamakumo
Searched for your name in user got listed your posts and comments down
Think ishould create a new account
മൊതലാളി ഒരു ചെറ്റയാണ്
nice. I'm sure there's no way the NSA can spy on foreign governments and citizens now! /s
WTF is this link? Lol
Invidious. Privacy friendly decentralised youtube tunnel
You could replace that domain with youtube.com . These are typically custom self-hosted frontends for youtube.
Most have the google tracking and analytics removed while others do a bunch more.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Lr-9aCMUXzI&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Typical plan to fish for a big investment from Microsoft? A shiny new M$ campus, thousands of jobs and everyone pretends this linux thing never happened.
All the apprehension in the comments are valid. Many govt departments have adopted linux in the past but continues using Windows. Seen a few govt supplied devices come with dual boot with Win and some custom debian distro but those are seldom used.
Most of India, like the world, is heavily reliant on MSOffice suite. And the govt cant get enough of documents, so unless they have a good migration plan off of office or have them pre-installed on their linux distro, this itself would be a major pain point.
Other than that, of the govt employees I've seen in the education field, most are pretty computer illiterate. They basically use the browser, file explorer and office and only learn enough to do that. So migrating them to linux would work if they are willing to learn the minimal platform differences with those.
So unless these departments have incompatible software or sites that only work on IE this might work. You might think its cant be that bad but many places used floppy till some 5-7 years and have successfully transitioned to CDs for submitting internal department documentations. Although recently many use whatsapp and use DVDs for archival. Then theres are the poorly designed portals launched with every new government scheme. Many of those function poorly on firefox.