South Korean government plans shift to Linux in response to end of Extended Support for Windows 7

The South Korean government has balked at the cost of continuing to maintain Windows 7 beyond January next year

South Korea's government is considering a shift from Windows 7 to Linux in response to the cessation of Extended Support in January 2019.

Microsoft will continue to provide security patches at an escalating per-PC cost for the next three years, but South Korea's government believes it will be too expensive, according to the Korea Herald Newspaper. The Ministry of the Interior and Safety is therefore considering a switch to desktop Linux.

Such a shift will help reduce dependency on a single operating system, according to government officials, and may improve security.

The new operating system will be tested on a number of machines at the Ministry and, if goes well, Linux-based systems will be rolled out more widely across government departments.

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The Ministry's IT teams will test the new system to see if it could run on private networked devices without posing security risks. Those tests will also check the new system's compatibility with existing software and websites designed to run on Windows.

Currently, there is no information regarding which Linux distribution will be used by the government, by what date the switching process will be completed, or what steps will be taken if tests indicate that switching to Linux could be excessively difficult and/or costly.

Certainly, the experiment will be watched closely around the world - especially after the ultimate failure of Linux to take off when the City of Munich migrated to Linux.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it will stop supporting Windows 7 from 14^th January 2020, meaning that users who don't upgrade to newer versions will stop receiving security updates on their systems.

However, users - both consumer and corporate - can continue receiving essential updates for the next three years, if they pay accordingly.

It has been almost 10 years since Microsoft launched Windows 7, and about five years since the company ended mainstream support.

The transition from Windows to Linux will cost South Korea's government nearly $655 million in total, including the purchase of, and upgrades to, new PCs. While the migration will be a costly affair in the short term, the government is expecting a long term cost savings using an open source operating system.

Linux hasn't taken off on the desktop, primarily because of an excess of distributions and a lack of consistency between them. However, it's a different story in the data centre.

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