So it’s no secret that some parts of the army in the USA and my country (UK) sometimes use legacy software like DOS for niche roles as they’re robust including older versions of Windows.
But… where does Linux fit in this? It’s a kernel OS that’s used in top of the line supercomputers, workstations, medical equipment and weather stations.
I imagine some aspects of this would be military secrets but how do they use it? I know that Linux was used for certain space projects with NASA but I’m talking about army applications.
TLDR : Does the penguin OS power shooty shooty machines and tanks
Check out the World of Tanks forums for information.
Oh you got a good chuckle out of me
Didn’t they at one point use a bank of PS3s when they still allowed for Linux boot options?
Yeah I recall the USAF deploying a ps3 cluster years ago
I’m not sure about the military, but yes a number of researchers used PS3s for cheap computing power.
We used it as OS for the tank and airplane simulators, just because it made them cheaper compared to buying 500 Windows licenses
I imagine they use it in much the same way as any enterprise. Running servers and workstations, mostly.
F16’s run Kubenetes clusters.
Lots of individual bits of hardware on specialized devices will be running embedded operating systems. QNX is big in automotive for the same reasons it’d work on a rocket.
Also big in healthcare/medical products,btw.
Most of that information is actually publicly available.
Stuff like this https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=624182a957cfea14bc90717fb91ec1f8
Linux distro NixOS is used by mil-tech company Anduril
I’ve heard of Palantir, now Anduril… What’s next, Saruman Ltd.? Uruk-Hai-corp? Poor Tolkien doesn’t deserve his mythology being co-opted by war profiteers. :(
BTW: Anduril is a startup from Luckey Palmer, the guy that built the Oculus VR headset in his garage. The later sold Oculus to Meta for 2 billion $. 3 ex Palantir guys started Anduril together with him.
I’m not so worried about stormtroopers using linux as much as guns, bombs, prisons, cops, torture, genocide, nukes, etc.
When I was in the army the S1 desk jockeys were using dedicated word processors with 8" floppies. Get off my lawn! :-)
Knowing what the army is like, that could have been in 2010 lol
Turkish military uses Pardus, a Turkish Linux distro, but I’m not sure to what extent.
I saw a youtuber once reviewing the distro that the Russian military uses. It had some crusty retro desktop environment iirc.
Tvwm ought to be good enough for anyone!
Why are you asking? Yes it is used but obviously the exact systems are kept secret. As far as I know it is a mixed environment. I do know the US Air Force uses Kubernetes
I ask because using the funni penguin kernel in a weapons grade equipment is funny
A picture is worth a thousand words,
I’ve heard that the DoD uses RHEL pretty extensively. RHEL in the US Military
That article says that the US military has the largest single install base for RHEL in the world, but that was about 15 years ago, I don’t know if that’s still true.
Apparently back then the US nuclear sub fleet and its sonar systems also ran on RHEL.
I suspect lots of military hardware runs some form of *Nix or BSD type system. Many embedded systems run some *Nix type OS, and a huge portion of the developed world’s weaponry is smart, so it it full of low power embedded systems and custom SoCs.
Red Hat has long benefitted from being the primary enterprise Linux company based in the US (no, we don’t count Oracle). SUSE created US-based Rancher Government Solutions to get some of that business and it seems to have been getting a lot of interest, despite being early days. They did a good job of focusing on modern technologies and immutable systems.
I’m super excited to see SLES more in the US government space with RGS. RedHat was my goto champion of FOSS in public sector but since they have gone less Libre/FOSS SUSE is last big commercial Linux company still going commuting to FOSS.