According to the military magazine Kanwa Asian Defence, it will not be the year of the Linux desktop in China either. The Chinese will develop a custom OS.

Apparently the Chinese are aware of the US' hefty arsenal of hacking tools for Linux, iOS and Windows and think that the only way to avoid the problem is to build something from scratch.

The Chinese government's plan is to adopt a "security by obscurity" approach and run a custom operating system that will make it harder for foreign threat actors -- mainly the US -- to spy on Chinese military operations.

The task of developing the new OS and replacing Windows will fall to a new "Internet Security Information Leadership Group".

This new group answers directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), being separate from the rest of the military and intelligence apparatus.

In the late 90s, North Korea also developed a custom operating system for use inside the country, called Red Star OS. The OS is still alive, it is a Linux distro, but it never became the "only" official OS for government agencies, which continued to use Windows, Mac, and Linux.