[chdir]

It's ironical that the top rated comment on HN for the past few hours is going against the "hacker" culture just because it's a government that's doing it?

There's no need to for them to match Intel at any level. The current generation of tablets & mobiles is ample proof that an open source OS and with ARM based processor is a good alternative for technical productivity and may very well replace Intel/MS for generic office tasks in the future.

As a country in post Snowden/NSA era, it makes absolute sense if they don't want to rely on US companies.