Maintainer of Linux Distro AnduinOS Revealed to Be Microsoft Employee (neowin.net)
- Reference: 0177392475
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/05/08/1912204/maintainer-of-linux-distro-anduinos-revealed-to-be-microsoft-employee
- Source link: https://www.neowin.net/news/the-sole-maintainer-of-linux-distribution-anduinos-turns-out-to-be-a-microsoft-employee/
> As a Software Engineer 2 at Microsoft (he doesn't work on Windows), Anduin Xue says he's financially stable and sees no need to commercialize AnduinOS. Explaining the financial aspects of the project, he said: "Many have asked why I don't accept donations, how I profit, and if I plan to commercialize AnduinOS. Truthfully, I haven't thoroughly considered these issues. It's not my main job, and I don't plan to rely on it for a living. Each month, I dedicate only a few hours to maintaining it. Perhaps in the future, I might consider providing enterprise solutions based on AnduinOS, but I won't compromise its original simplicity. It has always been about providing myself with a comfortably themed Ubuntu."
>
> In our coverage of the AnduinOS 1.3 release last week, one commenter pointed out that the distro is from China. For some, this will raise issues, but Anduin Xue addressed this in his blog post, too, saying that the source code is available to the public. For this reason, he told lacing the operating system with backdoors for the Chinese government would be "irrational and easily exposed." For those worried that the distribution may be abandoned, Anduin Xue said that he intends to continue supporting it and may even maintain it full-time if sponsorship or corporate cooperation emerges.
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/arduinos-13-is-a-linux-distro-that-looks-like-windows-11-now-with-gnome-48-and-hdr-support/
[2] https://distrowatch.com/?newsid=12436
[3] https://www.anduinos.com/
[4] https://www.neowin.net/news/the-sole-maintainer-of-linux-distribution-anduinos-turns-out-to-be-a-microsoft-employee/
[5] https://news.anduinos.com/post/2025/5/6/story-behind-anduinos-a-letter-from-anduin
"based on Ubuntu" (Score:1)
so it is just Ubuntu with a windows 11 looking skin, heck I can take any distro and install a skin and call it another distro, but I will NOT do it, "just because you can do something does not mean you should".
Re: (Score:2)
I do not use Windows at all, so there is zero appeal to me to make my Linux instances more like Windows.
Now, almost 10y ago I tried to make a Lenovo laptop running Linux behave more like macOS. My primary complaints were the keyboard shortcuts, which are inconsistent from one Linux GUI app to the other, and the trackpad/mouse behavior. I was able to connect a magic trackpad and Magic Mouse to the machine but the accelaration, gestures all felt very 'off'. It felt like going from driving an automatic car to
Re: "based on Ubuntu" (Score:2)
Mostly it is anything Apple stuff that consistently fails to work with anything else. Can't say I have had any mouse feel 'off', ever.
we've all been there (Score:1)
-Install Linux
-Theme it to look like macOS or Windows after your first week.
-Tell our tech-illiterate techbro gamer friends herp derp what version of Windows do you think this is? Oh it's acksually Linux! Har har har
-Someone says oh wow you're a genius you are literally Linus Torvalds himself or probably just Steve Jobs since everyone knows that guy
-You sit back and reflect what a smart genius you are and decide to roll your own distro
-It's really just Ubuntu underneath. Which is really just Debian undernea
Re: (Score:1)
> Steve Ballmer Said: "Linux is worse than cancer"
He would certainly know, since he was cancer himself.
Re: (Score:1)
jesus christ for being advocates of a free and superior os you sure act like eternal victims sometimes
ballmer's last day at microsoft was february 2013, he can't hurt you anymore
Re: Steve Ballmer Said (Score:1)
Yeah, nothing that happened 12 years ago has any lasting effects today!
Re: (Score:1)
> he can't hurt you anymore
In the same way that radioactive materials cannot hurt you after lethal exposure? /j
Companies and products the size of MS/Windows carry a lot of momentum. Regardless of ones opinions of the choices he made, it's probable that his decisions still affect the modern user.
Re: (Score:2)
> Companies and products the size of MS/Windows carry a lot of momentum. Regardless of ones opinions of the choices he made, it's probable that his decisions still affect the modern user.
His decisions around Windows Phone, effectively killing the platform probably affect people now.
*Former* Microsoft Employee (Score:2, Flamebait)
I have little doubt that Microsoft is not going to be happy about this at all.
Doesn't accept donations / sponshorship (Score:1)
Article makes no sense.
First says he doesn't accept donations.
Then he talks about sponsorship.
So does he take money or not?
No work agreement with MS? How could he? (Score:3)
I am under en exclusive agreement with my employer that pretty much makes all software (and possibly more) I produce to be owned by my employer. Whether related to the business or not, the language is very vague could even cover gardening tools as we do produce hardware... This also shuts down any contribution to OSS, sadly.
Does MS not have such agreements in place?
let me get this straight (Score:2)
A chinese dev who works for Microsoft who doesn't want to commercialize it or take donations and does this in his spare time releases an embedded OS based on Ubuntu and designed to resemble Windows?
Did I miss anything?
This doesn't sound like an embedded OS to me. It sounds like the worst of all worlds, with the most dubious of explanations... or possibly the setup for a joke. If you're smart enough to be doing embedded development, you should be smart enough to know this is not the right foundation for your
He just admitted that it contains backdoors. (Score:1)
Problem is if you take the installed version and you check the checksums for the binaries, they're different, so its reasonable to assert its possible that it does have some backdoors added, based only on the evidence that is easily checked.
After all if it was Really about themes and making things look different it would be about configuration that's different, not binaries with different hashes than expected or odd Chinese strings found when strings is used on binaries.
So why are so many binaries different