China Electronics Corporation has recently released the Linux distribution openKylin 3.0, in collaboration with various Chinese organizations, educational institutions, research centers, and software and equipment manufacturers. This distribution has its own package base, developed independently of other distributions. The development is carried out under open licenses, mainly GPLv3, in repositories hosted on gitee.com. Installation assemblies are available for X86_64, ARM64, Loong64, and RISC-V architectures, in versions for servers and desktop systems source.
The openKylin 3.0 distribution features the UKUI (Ultimate Kylin User Interface), which offers a classic desktop model for PCs and an optional tablet mode controlled via touch screen with an on-screen keyboard. Initially based on the MATE desktop, the user shell has been completely redesigned and translated into components written in C++ using the Qt library, with some elements borrowed from KDE or developed from scratch source.
The distribution uses a fork of the panel from the LXQt project as the main panel, with sidebar and menu components developed in-house. The Application Control Center and Configurator are based on components from KDE. The multimedia server PipeWire is used for sound management, and the file manager offered is Peony, a fork of Caja/Nautilus from MATE rewritten in Qt source.
One of the key features of openKylin is the “Graded Freeze” process lifecycle management mechanism, which allows freezing unused applications without terminating them and returning allocated resources back to the system. Graded Freeze also enables the assignment of different execution and resource consumption priorities to different classes of applications source.