Based on the partners listed on the Ubuntu Kylin page, it has more traction with significant ISVs in China than Ubuntu Desktop has in the US.
There is a bit of irony in that the first Ubuntu Kylin OEM is HP. Presumably those machines will not be shipped from the US.
It looks like it is possible to build Ubuntu Kylin from source code. The ISVs probably have closed source apps. But it is interesting that a large swathe of users in China are being encouraged to use an OS that supports a lot of privacy-oriented software.
That's funny, when I looked at the description on Canonical's page, I had exactly the opposite intuition. (I thought "wow, I bet the China-specific apps have no end-to-end cryptographic security, and I bet several are even proprietary".)
Maybe it's a glass-is-half-full / glass-is-half-empty kind of phenomenon.
Looking more closely, I guess the Lotus IM app doesn't support OTR (but neither does the official release of Empathy) and the Kingsoft cloud storage doesn't directly support client-side encryption (but neither did Ubuntu One).
There is a bit of irony in that the first Ubuntu Kylin OEM is HP. Presumably those machines will not be shipped from the US.
It looks like it is possible to build Ubuntu Kylin from source code. The ISVs probably have closed source apps. But it is interesting that a large swathe of users in China are being encouraged to use an OS that supports a lot of privacy-oriented software.