Microsoft under threat of nationalization or asset seizure by Russia
Russia may attempt to take drastic measures in response to western companies stopping operations in the country.
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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.
I don’t see any option to either pirate every copy of Windows
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts 🏴☠️
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.