How is the government going to handle the use of public computers if Microsoft is getting out of Russia? I mean, I'm sure they already have a lot of pirated copies and old versions of Windows, as any (at least third world) country does, but at some point I don't see any option to either pirate every copy of Windows or start using Linux.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 years ago

I'm guessing Linux will end up being the long term solution, and they'll just keep using old versions of windows before they can phase it out. Astra Linux is the main domestic distro there and I imagine it'll be getting rolled out more aggressively now.

[–] triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don’t see any option to either pirate every copy of Windows

https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts 🏴‍☠️

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I know you can pirate it, I doubt a government will decide to launch a national scale campaign to pirate every machine with Windows, it would probably be easier to install Linux any way since you have a lot of older machines.

[–] triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think you're right that government departments would use Linux in the long term… seems to me it could take months, if not years, for workers to learn all the new ways of doing things, virtualise / wrap / port any Windows-only software they're using, replace or write drivers for any non-Linux-supporting hardware they use, and fill any holes in accessibility tech – I've heard that JAWS is a long way ahead of Linux equivalents.

Setting up a fake license server, or rolling out something like MAS using Group Policy might make a lot of sense in the meantime...

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I agree there are cases where you need specific software and in that cases it might be hard, but also there are a shit ton of other cases where everything you need is simply a word processor and spreadsheet.

[–] triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

To be clear, I hope places just cut straight to Linux, I'm saying it seems likely there'll be a transition period. It still takes time to retrain on a different word processor or spreadsheet software, especially if you've been using Microsoft's 20+ hours a week.

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I know, I know, also people who are not tech savvy, you change the smallest thing to their GUI and they get lost, you need to do some training stuff.

[–] blank_sl8@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

A while back Microsoft sent Russia the full Windows source code, per their government's request. (I doubt they licensed them to do anything with said source code, but Putin won't care).