According to a recent report, the Defence Ministry of India has decided to replace Windows with an in-house developed Linux distro called ‘Maya’ on all computers that are connected to the Internet.
While details are very slim on this distro, we know that it is based on Ubuntu and has been developed locally within a very short 6-month period.
On this, an unnamed official from the Defence Ministry had this to add: “Maya has the interface and all functionality like Windows, and users will not feel much difference as they transition to it”.
This is not really a new initiative, as BRICS countries have previously committed to implement their own Linux distributions. We’ve already seen the early initiatives from Brazil, China and Russia (South Africa has been the exception so far as their mid-2000’s project had stalled). But it does take some time to create a stable own distro, and then there needs to be the training and resilience to see the roll-out through.
Unfortunately, the prevalence of cloud services makes such a desktop roll-out way easier, but the downside is that the user data is often locked into a proprietary cloud, and it is not easy to just migrate that user data into a usable form elsewhere.