Canonical Teams With China to Create National OS

[K2N hater]

[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]But the Chinese government wants even better spying on its citizens. MS isn't allowed to do that by US laws and the Western publicity.One CPU (hardware spying and blocking).One OS (software spying and blocking).Eventually, One GPU, RAM, HDD, and mobo?Hm, unless if China continues to pour large amount of money into such venture, those One systems maybe vulnerable to hacking as a system with 1 billion users is going to be an irresistible target.[/citation]
MS has been planting an NSA backdoor on Windows since NT 4.0. The chinese government is just pirating the idea.

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]memadmax[/nom]I feel sorry for the people of china sometimes, this will just be another way for their gov'ment to keep control over them....[/citation]

Take off your tinfoil hat or backup your claim please.

 

[unksol]

The company said that this lab will pool engineers from each organization to accelerate the development of China's Ubuntu-based Windows killer for the desktop and cloud.

"Windows killer" is a little far fetched. It's more like "zombie windows killer" considering the levels of piracy in China, which means lack of security updates and malware. I think we can all agree killing off a couple hundred million zombie PCs running XP and IE 6 is a good thing. Microsoft was never going to get money for windows from these people anyway.

 

[A Bad Day]

EDIT: Whoops, I quoted the wrong person. Sorry.

[citation][nom]K2N hater[/nom]MS has been planting an NSA backdoor on Windows since NT 4.0. The chinese government is just pirating the idea.[/citation]

Take off your tinfoil hat or backup your claim please.

 

[Espen Lund]

[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]But the Chinese government wants even better spying on its citizens. MS isn't allowed to do that by US laws and the Western publicity.One CPU (hardware spying and blocking).One OS (software spying and blocking).Eventually, One GPU, RAM, HDD, and mobo?Hm, unless if China continues to pour large amount of money into such venture, those One systems maybe vulnerable to hacking as a system with 1 billion users is going to be an irresistible target.[/citation]

Thought this would be appropiate here:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9vUzzri-e...0c/s1600/the-world-according-to-america-2.png

 

[Espen Lund]

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9vUzzri-e20/ULzzRk3AlUI/AAAAAAAAEqA/AeczqC5Oc0c/s1600/the-world-according-to-america-2.png

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]rajangel[/nom]I will no longer support ubuntu. Time to move on to another linux OS.[/citation]I'd recommend Linux Mint, at the moment.[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]Not quite. They (Chinese govt) can't/wont prevent people from installing Windows or another flavor of Linux. It creates a standard for their country/industry to use.As it is, with MS being over 90% of the desktops - THAT is a monopoly.
...
Metro on touchscreen is still badly designed compared to Android or iOS[/citation]China isn't the West. If they feel the need, they can and will force a specific processor and OS on their people. You say they aren't preventing people from using Windows, but try to install Windows on a MIPS device. I don't know if they will take it that far, but don't act like they can't or won't force people - if they feel it is in their best interest, they WILL. Also, regardless of whether or not they move to actively block x86 and Windows, they will be pushing MIPS and a modified Ubuntu onto a large percentage of users.

Second, Microsoft having a large desktop marketshare is NOT a monopoly. Public education (of which you are a product) must have decided to redefine the word "monopoly" at some point. You can choose to use whatever you want. OEMs can install whatever they want. This is quite different. Having the Chinese government saying to OEMs "You will use MIPS64. You will use ChinaUbuntu." - if that comes to bear, now that's a monopoly.

Also, Modern UI works great on a touchscreen. I've played around with several WinRT/Win8 tablets, they are pretty slick. You're just showing off your bias and ignorance. MS just can't win with people like you. If they left the interface alone, it would be completely unusable on a touchscreen, and you'd trash them. They release a new UI, and it's new and different, and you trash them. Win8 still has desktop, too. You can even put back the start menu if you're a diehard.

 

[belardo]

I think you have a point there. The Chinese govt. is far stronger on how it handles it's population than the west. If what wall street did to the us which resulted in the bailout happened, those people would have been executed. But market forces will have ms windows demands for quite a long time. It wouldn't hurt the Linux market, but can effect the future of MS in China.

But by all means MS has used its monopoly strength to control the desktop market. Why the hell would anyone buy a POS MsDos computer from the 80s-90s with its severely substandard cli OS? Hell, it wasn't until 1995 that ms released their first consumer GUI OS. Year for 10 years, more advance computers have been in the market. Yeah, their failures is somewhat their own. But MS has done many things to screw over other companies. Period. They rarely actually make anything original that hasn't been bought since they purchased their CP/M clone OS stuck the MS sticker on it and sold it to IBM.

Er... Oh, you mean TIFKAM (metro), only Microsoft reps calls TIFKAM "modern" which is as tacky and unoriginal as the win8 development team. Metro works great on a phone, what they made for tablets is so-so. The lack of visual clues on its operation shows piss poor design.

Hell, Microsoft did such a crappy design of metro that it requires keyboard shortcuts to use it. Think I'm kidding? This comes from microsofts own PR... They sell keyboards with short cuts. That's not a good touch design. Yeah the win8 start screen is slick... It's also functionally stupid. There no back button, no home button, no status bar, you have to right click on somethings, but not other. Tasks are on bottom or on the side... Depending on what it is, the operation and usage is not well though out

Win8 is already a crappy desktop OS. So bad, many people who like it say "it's not so bad". And NO, I shouldn't need to spend $5 to fix a broken product... Even when it was $40. I and anyone else should not and DO NOT reward Microsoft when they sell crap.

I've not trashed win8 because it's different. I never have. If you could view a history of my posts from 12 months ago, I though metro would be great, it looked slick. Loved using metro on my phone. But after using it... It's crap, it's ugly, it's badly designed. And the sales numbers shows that. Worst than vista. They were warned. They could have resolved this with very little effort. The fact that they didn't and even worse, went out of their way to make win8 into the crap that it is, shows that the company is managed by complete morons.

And yes, win8 has made me start using Linux... Wow, it's different from windows. OMG... Wait... It has a desktop GUI that fracking works.

I use win7, android and iOS everyday. There isn't anything difficult about learning something new. But I choose to not use or buy shit.

 

[janetonly42]

[citation][nom]rajangel[/nom]I will no longer support ubuntu. Time to move on to another linux OS.[/citation]
I'm thinking the same thing, which one would you recommend. Sorry STEAM, maybe you should rethink sticking solely with Ubuntu. I may go to the mothership of many linux distribution and go Debian. Ubuntu is based on Debian. Or there is Open SUSE that is RPM-based. Then there is Fedora-based but it doesn't appeal to me.

 

[kenjitamura]

[citation][nom]house70[/nom]It makes sense, since Ubuntu for smartphones is already finished, launched and matured.Oh, wait....As far as Windows taking a hit, it could have happened for as long as Ubuntu (and Linux-based OSes) have been out there. Nothing beats free, right? I use Ubuntu on some of my systems, I would switch in a heartbeat to it as my one-and-only OS, but there is this "slight" compatibility problem for a bunch of applications, not to mention gaming support being still in it's infancy. Searching the web for a compatible version of an application, then searching what repositories to add (and how), getting the packages and finally installing them is not exactly what general populace is looking for in an OS.[/citation]

This post made me happy. It's nice to see people politely list out the real problems with linux and not just the normal FUD that specifies concerns that were relevant 5 or 6 years ago but not today. There are many proprietary programs made specifically for Windows that still aren't supported well, or at all, by wine and that would be a concern for most lay PC users. And I do think if new ubuntu users had to add specific repositories to their software sources, to get whatever program they googled up, it would be challenging for them. And there are also the lack of commercial games which falls under the incompatible program list.

These problems aren't fixed yet, but Ubuntu is working on them. They're trying to make their software store umbrella over all linux native applications so that people don't have to search for independent repositories and, like you said, the gaming movement for linux is still in a developmental stage.

 

[kenjitamura]

[citation][nom]janetonly42[/nom]I'm thinking the same thing, which one would you recommend. Sorry STEAM, maybe you should rethink sticking solely with Ubuntu. I may go to the mothership of many linux distribution and go Debian. Ubuntu is based on Debian. Or there is Open SUSE that is RPM-based. Then there is Fedora-based but it doesn't appeal to me.[/citation]

Steam isn't sticking solely with Ubuntu, they've opened up their license to allow other Linux OS'es to port the client to their distributions. Last I heard it was working well for many people using opensuse. And I personally haven't been all that upset by Ubuntu, they've begun to accommodate many commercial software companies but Ubuntu themselves haven't dropped Open Source development for their platform. The only reason I can find to switch from Ubuntu itself is because a lot of its included software has become bogged down. They've made the included software a good deal more user friendly but I hear it slows down the operating environments responsiveness in doing so.

 

[COLGeek]

Even if an "official" national OS is developed, even China can't really enforce its use. I really don't see much impact either way with this distro.

 

[abbadon_34]

1 billion user botnet. Sounds useful, especially in a (cyber) war

 

[twelch82]

[citation][nom]manofchalk[/nom]On one hand, it could rapidly promote Linux software development as now China (a very large population, therefore large amounts of money) will largely be running Linux machines. So everyone will now have to start developing for Linux of they want this market.On the other, its a government instigated and created OS. The Great Firewall of China could now be extended into the desktop quite easily with this kind of control.[/citation]

Well that depends. It being open source, if ordinary Chinese citizens have the ability to download, peruse, and modify the source code, then they could relatively easily find - and potentially remove - any government additions to the OS. The people to do that would still need to be software developers, but in a country of several billion, there are bound to be a number of people who would be interested in investigating that sort of thing.

 

[f-14]

yes very good, they shall call it " RINDOWS " the back ground will be your choice of chinese national flag with extra sparklie hammer and sickle and sporting an extra large star-a portrait of your favorite chinese communist dictator / a picture of Mao / global map of the Chinese Empire (including purchase agreement of new territory located in western seaboard of mid north america)

*Firewall is MANDATORY! no internet connection required, some restrictions WILL apply no protections given to non dictator communist party members and officials, all copies are subject to government approval, random government controlled communist party eaves dropping will be if not required full time, every thing you do will be recorded and manipulated in a sham court of law if you are deemed a threat for immediate removal, no communist chinese government agent shall be held liable.
**by not accepting the terms and conditions of this license agreement you will still be bound, gagged, tortured and subject to random permanent disappearance from society.
*** all sales are final, non refundable, and subject to 300% tax (where do you think apple learned it from)
****all rights reserved to the chinese communist national authority and is a registered ® trademark of communism™

 

[jerryblack]

This will get Ubuntu a big boost in terms of market share if the Chinese are serious about their push for Ubuntu. This could be the critical mass that Ubuntu needs to become a <a href="http://techdomino.com/china-ubuntu-market-share-boost/">mainstream OS</a>.