my biggest hope with this is more contributors for LibreOffice, so people can stop requiring Excel and then they can move to Linux
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
147 points (99.3% liked)
Linux
14739 readers
471 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Anyone know what this is?
[Windows 10 China Government Edition...] and support for Chinese cryptographic standards.
It's Windows 10 but an edition suitable for the China Government.
yea but what are the cryptographic standards they need that aren't included in other editions of Windows?
Hey Canada, why are we not doing this?
Carney.
Why move off of Windows while seling the whole country to corporations?
Why not Windows 11? Because China, like many other non-US governments, no longer trusts American companies with their software and services. This approach is all about digital sovereignty.
I never understood why any country would allow their government computers to run proprietary software from a foreign (to them) company.
I'm sure that China had access to a lot of Windows source code as part of their previous agreement, but it's far too big a risk, really, for any country, even the United States, to run Windows.
As far as I'm concerned, China is decades late in making this decision, and it's still ahead of a lot of (most?) governments.
I'd argue that Linux has only within the last 3 to 5 years become "good enough" to use as a daily driver for the casual, tech illiterate government official. I've tried different flavors on and off for the past decade and never stuck with any of them due to instability or UX problems. It was only at the beginning of this year that I found a Linux flavor I could actually stick with and use as my daily driver (CachyOS).
Linux was ready for tech savvy enthusiasts 10+ years ago, but Government is never that.
Edit: Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn't until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.
I don't always say this, but good job China!
I bring it up any opportunity I get at work, but nothing yet. Unfortunately, our IT team does not have the skills or experience working with Linux, so it would probably be a rocky and dicey transition. As a dev, I think I can maybe convince the right people that our team should go Linux and we could be the test cases. We would all survive without the MS suite, but a lot of tools would have to change, like Jetbrains instead of Visual Studio.
That's amazing, especially considering China has even more people than the entirety of Europe combined, may we soon follow over here
To be clear, articles like this are saying “China”, “Belgium”, etc. as shorthand for the national government of that country.
Not that everyone in that country must switch; only that the country-level government is declaring they will switch computers they use.
This does have a strong effect on what other organisations and individuals use, but it lags a long way and certainly doesn't directly affect everyone in the country.
With that said: Yeah the Chinese government is made up of a great many more people than European national governments. It's a big move.