China has released its own Linux distribution called Kylin OS. Linux-based operating system should help make the country less dependent on the West; Windows and macOS also have significant market shares in China.

Open Kylin 1.0 It was released on Wednesday and runs on Linux kernel 6.1, the latest LTS release, with support through 2026. According to Global Timeswhich is based in its data on the developer Kylinsoft itself, the open source operating system was developed by a community of 3867 developers, 74 Special interest groups and 271 companies. It does not use any other Linux distro as its base, which makes it more independent.

The operating system should run on both desktop computers and mobile phones. It’s FOSS News I took a test drive With OS It also states that Kylin OS is x86, RISC-V, and ARM compatible. The source code is available via a Getty repo. The site also posts several screenshots.

It’s FOSS test engine yielded some minor scripting bugs and glitches, but overall it’s a functional operating system, says the author. The UKUI desktop environment is described as “very nice” and “familiar”. The app launcher reminds us of the Windows Start menu. Items like file manager, multitasking, and settings were all working.

Applications such as Firefox and WPS Office are also included. The latter is a Chinese product, but Firefox developer Mozilla is an American party. It is not known whether China is also working on a replacement in this area.

This is not the first time that the Kylin name has been discussed in the context of China and operating systems. Before OpenKylin, there was Kylin based FreeBSD And Ubuntu Kylin. Another Chinese distribution is the Debian-based distribution Deepin.