in

China’s homemade operating system is actually picking up steam

The problem with the PC market being dominated by just two operating systems (OS X and Windows) is that consumer options are limited and lack of competition can stifle innovation. In China, however, that’s only half of the problem. The other half is that both of those operating systems are close-sourced and developed by American companies. That’s why the Chinese government has been trying get its own homemade operating system to pick up steam. Known as NeoKylin, this operating system is actually only partially homemade, as a significant chunk of NeoKylin is actually developed overseas, but that doesn’t deter from the fact that it’s actually starting to see some solid adoption in China. 

Chinese authorities have long dreamed of producing their own PC operating system with the power and public clout to rival Windows and OS X. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, it’s getting closer than you might think. Sort of. 42 percent of American computer-maker Dell’s sales in China are now PCs running NeoKylin, Dell’s greater China president Chenhong Huang told the newspaper. It’s an impressive statistic for what China calls its homegrown operating system. China has been trying to get Kylin off the ground since 2001, and in NeoKylin it might finally have a hit. Might is the key word there, though. Dell may be shipping 42 percent NeoKylin machines, but Dell has just 11 percent of China’s PC market, and it has long focused on enterprise and government clients, some of whom are required to purchase NeoKylin machines for security purposes. It’s also probably worth pointing out that NeoKylin is only sort of homemade. From the beginning, Kylin has been based on foreign-developed codebases; early versions were based on (or copied from, depending on who you ask) FreeBSD. Later versions have been Linux forks. The current iteration, NeoKylin, is based on Ubuntu Kylin, which was actually developed for Chinese authorities by British technology company Canonical. So how much of the code in NeoKylin was actually written in China? That’s an open question.

What do you think?

Avatar of Chastity Mansfield

Written by Chastity Mansfield

I'm a writer, an amateur designer, and a collector of trinkets that nobody else wants. You can find me on Noozeez, and Twitter.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings

The Snapdragon 820 is going to be ridiculously fast in every way

Production issues might delay the iPhone 6S Plus launch