The fact that it’s quite easy to activate Windows without money or a valid key makes this even funnier. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and neither do the people around him
Note Putin’s monitor isn’t even plugged in. Just, A+.
“You can’t go wrong.” Isn’t an observation, it’s a threat.
I suppose people allowed near him are already sufficiently background-checked and threat-impressed.
There are many fine soviet computers to use for pressing a button that does nothing.
He should have used Linux
I genuinely thought for a second that this was Putin voting in an 'Murican election Onion headline, but not the Onion…
Just saying… you don’t need to activate windows. Been using an unactivated copy for years. You lose virtually nothing.
You mean like WinRAR?
Kremlin need to step up their game and use linux.
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His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense. Why would he give money to Microsoft? In fact, why would you?
As for the PC - there are no Russian PCs, so he has to use something foreign. DELLs are very solid, and great for the price if you get them refurbished.
Not as solid as Lenovo, which also has considerably fewer American companies in its supply chain. But maybe they just got a good deal on a bunch of DELLs.
His Windows being unlicensed makes perfect sense.
No, it just shows incompetence.
pykms isn’t hard…
there are no Russian PCs
There do exist domestic-built elbrus(custom soviet arch) and baikal(ARM-derived) -based PCs. Technically, all govt employees are required to use them as there is like a 30% limit on foreign parts, but in practice it is circumvented by padding circuits with junk thats never used. And yes, they’re lagging behind cutting edge chips by a decade and a half at this point, but its still more than enough for online voting and whatever other boomer shit putin needs.
Baikal went bankrupt in 2023 because they used TSMC for chip production.
Elbrus is barely hanging on but it’s helplessly far behind, you can’t really run a modern DE and browse modern web on anything but their flagship Elbrus-16C, but that’s made for servers, AFAIK there are no “desktop” form-factor motherboards for it at all, and it’s exceptionally pricy compared to competition.
I think a more likely outcome is that russia starts bulk-purchasing chinese CPUs soon.
Well, damn. That’s honestly way more impressive than I expected from Russia. Now I’ll be reading about those instead of going to sleep lol
Of what I’ve heard about Putin and computers, it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows, or even a specialized OS developed for him specifically, and all it does is show previously prepared pictures and run some narrow-function native applications too developed specifically for the occasion.
And it’s probably not a persistent installation. And it’ll probably be destroyed after he’s done with voting or “voting”.
And I can’t imagine it not being air-gapped with the kind of security measures they write about in other things.
And I’m probably confidently wrong in many things, just the security part with computers that man seems to take seriously enough.
Honestly this is right, when you are considering how wary you should be of this or that thing, it’s good to pay attention to what powerful people are doing of what seems more or less certain. They, of course, can afford some things impractical for you or me.
it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows
Instead of using Wine it uses Vodka
Or, It’s just a newly set up computer used for a quick photo op and will either go back to whoever’s desk it was taken from or put in a cupboard somewhere. That is not a desktop set up for daily use.
Considering they don’t know about massgrave.dev to permanently activate their copy and it’s Windows 10, they probably also don’t know about extended W10 EOL updates, which means that computer likely hasn’t received a security update since October, 2025.
Look, if you want to cast one vote then Russian hardware can handle it just fine, but if you have to cast thousands, that needs something faster.
Plot twist: it’s not connected to the Internet. He has a button labeled “PRESS TO WIN ELECTION” installed in his dacha.
