Developers behind openKylin, the desktop Linux distro backed by China's National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, have decided local users need to take advantage of Intel's Meteor Lake silicon and the neural processing units it includes, tuning the latest release of the OS to Chipzilla's AI PC SoC.
The openKylin community operates 112 – yes, one hundred and twelve! – special interest groups, nine of them dedicated to AI. They've clearly been busy because openKylin 2.0, which debuts today, has added the "Kylin AI Assistant" that offers natural language processing to allow voice control of PCs. The tool is said to handle chores like opening or closing system applications, or activating Bluetooth.
Text-to-image generation is another addition, as is a meeting assistant that can analyze recordings of vidchats and spit out a written summary. A writing assistant can "expand, polish, or translate" text, and a schedule manager can discern text in an email pertaining to a meeting and – if you select the relevant words – convert them into an appointment in your calendar.
Developers haven't been forgotten: a "Smart Code Analysis and Completion" tool will peruse your code and suggest useful additions. An AI Framework Installation Assistant Tool offers one-click install of models.
A ShinyHappy vid of the OS in action can be viewed here.
- China's openKylin 1.0 arrives. Our verdict? Not a bad-looking, er, Ubuntu remix
- Oracle, IBM losing ground to local databases in China, says IDC
- China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows
- China's Kylin Linux targets second RISC-V platform
Downloads of the OS are already available here for x86, Arm, and four machines running RISC-V processors – including at least one afflicted with the shocking security flaws revealed this week in some RISC-V silicon.
When openKylin 1.0 debuted last year we rated it a decent Ubuntu remix that omitted some packages that other distros often include, with an impressively polished UI.
The new version certainly remains pretty. Whether its AI functions are at all useful, or stable, remains unclear at this stage. But the bar for AI software is somewhat low, at least in your correspondent's experience Microsoft's Copilot muffs most jobs, either by producing poor search results, bad images, or just giving up and signing me out.
Even if openKylin 2.0 is worse, Chinese users may soon find they're encouraged to use it, given Beijing's desire to use more local tech. ®