Fascinating news. On the statcounter site I also read that India’s Linux use stats for July, 2023 were at 14.15%. Incredible!
Take anything from India with a grain of salt. This kind announcement happened in the past but ultimately failed to gain any steam.
UPDATE:
Can’t even stop laughing LMAO 🤣🤣 🤣
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.
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.
This is such a no-brainer. Every government in the world should be doing this.
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 :(
