Since 2001, China has been working on developing its own operating system that is independent of other states or companies. Version 1.0 of the state Linux distribution openKylin has now been released. In the Unix world, this usually indicates that the developers consider the software to be stable and mature.
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The development has made some detours. Initially, the operating system was based on FreeBSD, later the base changed to Linux. Canonical had developed Ubuntu Kylin in cooperation with Chinese organizations, but there was also a Fedora fork called NeoKylin. openKylin, on the other hand, seems to be an independent, community-driven distribution.
China Linux: A Community Project
On the openKylin website, the project gives some numbers. The project includes 271 members, from non-profit organizations, community institutions, colleges and universities to scientific institutions and individual developers. A total of 4028 people contributed to the project. openKylin already has almost 850,000 users.
openKylin 1.0 is available for the processor architectures x86_64, RISC-V and ARM. The Visionfive2, HiFive, Lotus2 or LicheePi4A with RISC-V CPUs or Raspberry Pi, Cool Pi and Chillie Pi with ARM processors are particularly supported. Those interested can find images to download on the openKylin download website. The installation instructions offered there are currently only available in Chinese.
How Reuters reports, the development of an operating system independent of US technology has been an important goal for China’s technology industry in recent years, and many companies and organizations have contributed to the development of the openKylin system. More than a dozen Chinese companies are trying to develop operating systems that can replace Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s macOS operating systems.
The current state of the most important Unix and Linux distributions:
(dmk)