OpenHarmony, HarmonyOS Next, Deepin, Kylin, and openKylin: How China's Various Manoeuvres Away From Windows Get Covered in the West
Fear of the 'beast' from the East (or "sleeping giant")
AHEAD of a potential air/ground/sea invasion of Taiwan - to "reassert" its supposed "authority" - China is making headlines for trying to become more self-sufficient in every way, as it foresees further and wider-ranging sanctions. In the digital realm, both hardware and software, China had been at it for years (even before Taiwan's sovereignty was talked about much).
About a week ago we saw this article entitled "China's homegrown OS fires back at AI PCs — openKylin gets AI assistant, text-to-image generation, and local LLM support", stating: "The new version of openKylin launched Sunday, and is "deeply" integrated with AI, featuring support for on-device large language models (LLMs), an AI-assistant, and text-to-image generation, according to a report by the South China Morning Post."
Prior to this Kylin was openly based on Ubuntu, i.e. on Debian further up the tree (there's also Deepin). Does China still trust Debian? There were concerns openly expressed in the mailing lists about NSA involvement or potential interference.
Those concerns were (sadly) not baseless.
Kylin or "open" Kylin aside, last week we also saw this article:
In 2021 Huawei's HarmonyOS had already completed 150 million upgrades. This targets mobile too. As a reference, consider Windows falling to about 25% in China:
Or under 80% for desktops/laptops in isolation:
statCounter uses old (outdated) software for parsing user agents, so it has no concept of OpenHarmony, HarmonyOS Next, and openKylin etc. How many people around the world use these and might not even be aware of it (appliances come with some of those)?
There's a big story hiding beneath the surface. China being relatively secretive makes the task harder. █