As part of China’s orders to all government agencies and state-supported companies to replace all overseas-branded PCs with Chinese models, these new computers will also have to be fitted with open source operating system Linux.

Given that China’s reasoning is to “remove foreign operating systems” in order to control its own operating systems, this effectively amounts to a ban on Windows, the OS these “foreign” machines were running.

The move, mandated by central government, will see at least 50 million PCs replaced “on a central-government level alone”.

There is a two-year deadline for when this must occur.

The German government recently ditched Windows in favour of Linux, however this was in a move to save licensing costs and promote open source software.