Linux-based homegrown OS to replace Windows in China

Mar 25, 2020 06:19 GMT  ·  By

China’s plans to replace Windows and move to a homegrown operating system aren’t new, but this year, the whole thing could finally happen.

This is what Chinese-based Union Tech promises, as its Linux-based Unified Operating System, or UOS, has made a huge progress in the last couple of months.

More specifically, the Chinese firm has worked together with other local companies to run the Linux operating system on chips developed domestically. And according to a recent report, an important achievement was reached in January when UOS managed to boot in 30 seconds on this hardware.

UOS is an operating system based on Deepin, a Linux distribution that’s already rather popular in China. Union Tech’s general manager is none other than Liu Wenhan, the founder of Deepin who joined the company after Deepin Technology was taken over.

Stepping away from foreign software and hardware

Optimizing the Linux-based platform for locally-developed hardware is an essential part of China’s push to step away from foreign products. The Huawei struggle in the United States is seen as the living proof that relying more on local solutions is the only solution going forward.

Huawei was banned in 2019 from using products developed by American firms, including Google’s Android mobile operating system that powers its smartphones in international markets.

But now that China has its own operating system running on its own chips, the country hopes giving up on Windows would be a much easier thing to do in the long term. At this point, Chinese operating system only power some 1 percent of the systems in China, but Liu Wenhan hopes this adoption would increase substantially once UOS becomes available for everyone.

A share of 30 percent could be reached in a few years, Wenhan was quoted as saying by the cited source, especially as more efforts are directed towards developing compatible hardware.