Software attributes
Other attributes
On 14 March 2011, Canaima was officially established as the default operating system for the Venezuelan public administration.
The operating system has gained a strong foothold and is one of the most used Linux distributions in Venezuela, largely because of its incorporation in public schools. It is being used in large scale projects as "Canaima Educativo", a project aimed at providing school children with a basic laptop computer with educational software nicknamed Magallanes. Use of Canaima has been presented on international congresses about the use of open standards, Despite being a young development, it has been used on the Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISOL).
In February 2013 DistroWatch ranked it the 185th most popular Linux distribution among 319 for the last 12 months.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) states that Canaima GNU/Linux is not free software. This is because some of its components are nonfree software, in particular some firmware needed for graphic cards, sound cards, printers, etc. Canaima creators opted to include these nonfree drivers in order to support as many computers being used by the Venezuelan government as possible, and to facilitate the migration from a closed source operating system to an open source but nonfree one. It is expected that Canaima, in its upcoming releases, offers an option in the installation process for nonfree drivers to be optional, being able to install a free software image of the distribution if the user choose.
