South Korean Government and Army will be switching to Linux
Both the South Korean government and it's army will be switching to a Linux distribution called Hamoni which is adopted to Korean conditions. Harmoni is essentially on Linux Mint with some custom PPA repositories on top. Most South Korean people do not use Linux but those in the government, military and educational institutions will soon enjoy the benefits of free software.
written by Öyvind Sæther 2019-06-06 - last edited 2020-02-12. © CC BY
Our source in South Korea, Son Geon, who's blog is at jen6.github.io, confirms that not only is the government switching to Linux - something we reported on two weeks ago - the military is also making a move away from Windows-based systems.
Q: Is it true that the government in South Korea will switch to Linux, and do you think they should do it?
"Yup, it's true and Korea army is also planning to use Linux. By the government leading project, we made our own Linux distribution call "Harmonica".
I'm not sure about we have to do this but I think it's a nice challenge.
In Korea, most people think OS is equal Windows and think they should buy it.
If little changes work well many people can know about what is the open source and there are many alternatives."
Q: How common is Linux in South Korea?
"I'm not sure about it but it is really rare to use Linux.
In government statistics from 2016 98.64% of users were using the Windows.
In my opinion, In Korea, our own word processor named "Hancom Office" does not offer good support for another operating systems.
Also, some banking or government services are not working on Linux or Mac. But it's getting better and better."
Son Geon is a skilled programmer who's currently working on a light-weight WYSIWIG markdown viewer for KDE in the Google Summer of Code program. He is a big fan of the k-pop group SNSD.
You can read our full review of the Linux-Mint based South Korean distribution HamoniKR ("harmonica") here.
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