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.
Typical plan to fish for a big investment from Microsoft? A shiny new M$ campus, thousands of jobs and everyone pretends this linux thing never happened.
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 :(
No, I want them to actually adopt it in parctice rather than creating hype. The reason they fail to do it in large scale is because of lack of people with knowledge of Linux working for the government (including defense). To change that the education sector of the country need to adopt Linux first. Currently only a elite group choosing IT during college gets exposure to Linux. Rest of the mass has no clue what Linux is or how to use it. Only handful of engineers not going to change it, they need real adoption by common people for everyday use.
Do you really think they are creating hype? If you think it’s hype then don’t engage with the content. But everyone in FOSS industry is engaging, so they just announced something, I see no evidence of a inorganic hype generation. Also if they follow through or not is secondary to me, I’m just happy somebody out there thinks this is a good idea.
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.
I hope they stick with it and not go back to Microsoft. No doubt that there will be a learning curve and some growing pains but this is ultimately for the best. I wish them all of the success!