The South Korean Government is on the verge of migrating from Windows 7 to Linux on the desktop. This began back in May 2019, when South Korea’s Interior Ministry announced the plans to look into making the switch. 

Since that initial date, the South Korean Ministry of Strategy and Planning announced the government is now exploring migrating over three million Windows 7 desktops over to Linux. According to Choi Jang-hyuk (head of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance), South Korea will resolve their dependency on Microsoft while reducing the budget by migrating to an open source operating system. 

What is driving this migration? It’s primarily a financial decision. The cost of migrating so many desktops from Windows 7 to Windows 10 would reach over $650 million dollars. With the Ministry of National Defense and the National Police Agency already using Harmonica OS 3.0 (based on Ubuntu Linux 18.04), and the Defense and the Ministry of Public Administration and Security using Gooroom Cloud OS (based on Debian), the choice to make the nation-wide switch to Linux made perfect sense. Once the migration officially begins, the Korean Postal Service will be moving to Korean-based TMaxOS, which includes a unique desktop environment and uses ToGate, a Chromium-based web browser.

Although this may be nothing more than a bid to get Microsoft to offer South Korea a significant discount for a Windows 7 to 10 migration, until that comes to fruition, it looks as though the move to Linux is happening.

Source: https://www.fosslinux.com/29117/south-korea-switching-their-3-3-million-pcs-to-linux.htm