Russia wants to replace Windows with Linux

for several weeks now a conflict has been developing between the nations of Russia and Ukraine, of which I will refrain from commenting and that I only mention because of that, various nations, companies and associations have shown their support for the latter (ukraine), while for Russia they have applied various sanctions in their “way”.

For the software part large renowned companies have withdrawn their product from the Russian market to what has led the nation to have an inclination towards the side of free software, but due to the latter, it has become a weight on the side of the balance to decide, since for several months now in Russia have made several implementations of Linux in government areas.

And it is that now Russia wants to get rid of Windows in favor of Linux due to Western sanctions, in addition, the tech giant, among other things, blocked Windows 10 and Windows 11 updates in Russia.

In addition, it should be mentioned that Russia also saw a huge increase in piracy within companies using Windows. Now that Microsoft has cordoned off Russia from its products, the Windows black market is starting to grow. And this may have ramifications outside of Russia as the country's methods begin to spread across the Internet.

Therefore, the country's Ministry of Digital Security intends to induce publishers to adapt their Linux solutions under penalty of exclusion from the national software registry.

And it is that as already mentioned Russia announcing its intention to ditch Windows in favor of Linux is not new. In fact, in 2016, the Putin administration announced its intention to remove software from US publishers such as Microsoft, Oracle or IBM from sensitive local entities out of fear that the US would use it to infiltrate Russian systems.

It was in this sense that in January 2018, The Russian Defense Ministry announced that intended to migrate military systems running Windows to Astra Linux, highlighting the fact that Microsoft's closed source approach would only serve to hide the backdoors built into Windows that can be exploited by US intelligence for cyber espionage purposes.

Therefore, efforts in the direction of leading to a sovereign operating system are not new. The Astra Linux example illustrates this perfectly. The Russian authorities can easily rely on distributions like Linux Lite to achieve their goal. Therefore, the operating system is already available if it is necessary to do it with Linux as prescribed by the authorities. The thorn in Linux would be the absence of a "platform" which makes it difficult to develop applications for different distributions.

Various sources point out that local authorities are making changes of system in several devices associated with the government, installing adapted versions of Linux in them.

However, this task can be quite difficult to implement, considering that Windows is still the dominant system for computers in Russia. Currently it is estimated that 95% of systems in Russia have the Microsoft operating system.

Even so, it is estimated that the transition will be slow, and may even take years to fully complete, and given the problems arising from the conflict with Ukraine, this task may be further complicated.

On the part of Astra Linux, as already mentioned, this is already suitable for use in production since even in China the system has already been adopted to be implemented within some teams, because in China, there are many interesting laptops from local manufacturers. These are models from companies such as Xiaomi, Lenovo and Hiper.

The release of the first batch of laptops with a volume of 2200 devices is reported. It should go on sale in October. In the future, the number of devices is expected to increase.

Hyper representatives announced that the Hyper Workbook series will include models with Intel Core i3, i5, i7, i9 and AMD Ryzen 5 processors depending on the modification.