looking for examples of countries whose governments, school system,health system, wjatever, use mostly GNU/Linux

geoma@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 96 points –

I know 100℅ of the world top 500 supercomputers use linux, and around 65℅ of world servers. I want more info like this to help me campaign towards GNU/Linux use. Thanks.

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I believe Germany is working on that. Recently they have started to migrate 30K systems or so from windows to Linux.

Yes, Germany likes to spend money going back and forth between FOSS and Microsoft.

In 2003, Munich announced it would be moving some 14,000 PCs off Windows and to Linux. In 2013, the LiMux project finished, but high associated costs and user dissatisfaction resulted in Munich announcing in 2017 that it would spend the next three years reverting back to Windows.

Germany be like: let's move to Linux in the hardest and most likely way to fail. You know, gotta find creative ways to fill your consulting "friends" pockets. :)

Afaik the stated reasons for moving back were pure BS, or at least blown out of proportion. It mainly came down to the people in charge being very "friendly" with M$. Munich got a new major, he publicly called software-freedom "idiological nonsense", asked a consulting firm that partners with and sells M$ products to analyse the situation, and everyone was shocked when they recommended M$.

Afaik the stated reasons for moving back were pure BS, or at least blown out of proportion. It mainly came down to the people in charge being very “friendly” with M$

I know! Profits.

As much as im a foss person I could see if failing on "merits" in the sense it started in 2003. SuSE might have been worked out but they took 10 years and if at that point they were still using something decided in 2003 it was bound to be messed up. Seriously we are talking when open office was nascent and star office was a thing.

That's one region in Germany. The rest is not. Actually, a few in Germany tried moving to Linux in the past and gave up, unfortunately.

More will follow with their EU data privacy laws violated by use of office365

In brazil, in the city I live, computers in public schools have been using linux for as long as I remember until 2015 when I finished high school. They used a mix of ubuntu machines and a distro called Linux Educacional which was made in some brazilian university I can't remember. They used KDE Plasma, one of the reasons I still prefer it to this day.

The US’s Department of Defense is one of Red Hat’s biggest customers. Other than that, the US government theoretically uses Linux quite extensively, going as far as making significant contributions such as SELinux. It was mentioned already, but academia uses Linux a lot, too. I saw lots of machines at SLAC running CentOS 7.

China : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system)

We're moving to Linux but still mostly use Windows.

Also, more people use uOS.

Edit: At least the public sector is greatly incentivizing it.

Edit: Somebody below said that 90% of the government used Linux, apparently? I wonder how much of that is servers and what's the relevant percentage for the US. I've only found that the US had 25% in 2001.

I would not trust any government made distro. Especially in China.

To all the commenters here writing that Brazil is testing Linux. There was a recent post on Reddit which got linked on Lemmy. That (unknown ?) poster on Reddit wrote about a test on 800 computers for some part of Brazil, if all goes well, it's for 22k computers. https://lemmy.ml/post/14397254 Now try to guess or imagine how many inhabitants the whole of Brazil has that use computers :)

Russian military stated in the news they use AstraOS, some another fork. All other government institutions are too used to MS Word\Excel and the population in these places are usually aged conformists, so it won't change soon. Some schools experimented with Linux but for their budget it makes more sense to keep using outdated Windows PCs. With the whole culture built around formatting and reprinting, signing papers in closed formats that don't render the same even in different versions of Office, the whole generation should die off for some change. One exclusion - cloud editing in cooperation in Google is popular, but that's about it.

If im right brazil is trying out linux. A lot of people already use linux there because its free.

I believe in Greece, the military is using Mint.

It goes well with Lamb Kofta

Greeks don't eat lamb kofta. They eat gyros (which is shaved pork meat, not lamb ground, which is middle-eastern).

According to...?

According to all the Greeks. Including myself.

You held a national poll, including yourself?

Please stop trolling. I'm Greek, I live in Greece, and that's how things are. Greeks don't eat lamb kofta or kebab, that's a middle eastern thing only. Greeks eat shaved pork, or shaved chicken. No beef or lamb ground meat in their fast food. They might look similar, but they're not. The West has this idea that Greeks eat kebab, because many Middle Eastern people have opened shops in Europe and US calling their shops "mediterranean" or even "Greek", while not being so. I've lived for 25 years in Germany, UK and US, and especially in the US, the only "Greek" souvlaki shops I could find in California were actually not Greek, they were kebab houses. Authentic greek souvlaki/pitas I found only in NY, and in 1 shop in Utah all these years. None in California (they were real Greek restaurants, but not souvlaki/pita places -- these are different, since they're street food).

Dude calm down. Nobody cares that much, and I'm sure you don't speak for every Greek person in the world.

China

Sorry to burst your hexbear bubble, China mostly use out-dated Windows, even though they want to switch to linux, it is not even close to being done.

Even wechat is unsupported on linux, which makes linux unusable for most people in China. Plus most people need mirrors to use most FOSS software in China, with most of the privacy centric ones are completely blocked.

This is an example of such mirror: https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/ , a more complete list can be found here: https://github.com/vra/mirrors-china. Most popular distros are included in these mirrors.

Basically there is few ways to get FOSS software and update directly from the developers in China, which tends to be the most secure way.

This is true of the consumer market, but the OP asked about governments, and 90% of government computers in China run Kylin or NeoKylin, with plans to consolidate the two into a single os. This follows the overall trend of China's tech sector seeking to replace imports (and copied versions of foreign tech) with fully domestic alternatives.

The link they give leads to a 404 page, which is disappointing. I have a few friend and family member works in the public sector and government of China, as far as I know, none of them have heard about linux.

So probably not 90% yet.

Link worked for me, but here's a copy : https://web.archive.org/web/20240405081510/https://www.zdnet.com/article/two-of-chinas-largest-tech-firms-are-uniting-to-create-a-new-domestic-os/

Sorry, I was referring to the links given in the article, not the article itself. Specifically, the source of their "90%" claim: http://www.cec.com.cn/jtxw/2019/1209/8ac085cc6e112a0f016ee947c8ac00b5.html

I have found a article (in Chinese, by Chinese media, to eliminate "western bias") documenting the current state of transition:

https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_23639950

Although this article states that the transition is happening, but it seems like it is no where near mainstream in Chinese government.

There are also a Chinese government version of windows : https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/05/23/announcing-windows-10-china-government-edition-new-surface-pro/ , which seems like a strong competitor of linux.

I think India? I don't have a source for this. It's something I think I remember reading on a forum.

Nah, All of India's govt system mostly run pirated Windows. The southern state of Kerala has switched to Linux though. Every 2-3 years or so, the central government announces switching to Linux and then forgets about it.