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Lack of clean air to breathe and rampant corruption and authoritarianism seem not very conducive to a successful startup culture. There is a huge churn of chinese money trying to find places to go and get a good roi. It is not clear that this will last though.

Also, I find it unlikely that without a free/open software ecosystem like linux or bsd they will get very far. Building a startup culture on a general computing foundation of massively pirated windows os is just not going to work.

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Lack of clean air to breathe and rampant corruption and authoritarianism seem not very conducive to a successful startup culture.

It's a test case to see if cyberpunk novels were accurate in describing neon-lit, polluted urban corporate wastelands like Chiba City, I guess.

I've been proselytizing linux over here. Ubuntu Kylin is pretty cool to set up for people, but the wifi cards on a lot of laptops don't take too well to it.

Jiayou! But I think there has to be innate demand for it, and for the right reasons, not just because it is cheap and available.

Why Kylin and not Xubuntu or Lubuntu?

The difference between Ubuntu and the two variants you mentioned is solely on the application layer and as long as they don't use the buggy KDE5 connection manager applet, WiFi won't be affected by Xubuntu or Lubuntu. So this boils down to preferences of desktop environments. I've always wondered why, instead of full distros, these variants weren't just supported more officially as flavors to choose or change to. Yes, you can install lubuntu-desktop from inside a stock Ubuntu install, but there's always some configuration and setup that's missing.

Well, the OS I'm running is Ubuntu, and Kylin is "Ubuntu for China", with fcitx set up for Chinese already, and a separate Software Center that has a delightful page that shows Linux alternatives for Windows software. Haven't quite gotten around to playing with other linux distros to be honest.

Interesting. The Chinese devs I work with hate Kylin (probably because it's approved by the Party) and seem to really prefer other Chinese-created variants, particularly Lubuntu and Xubuntu. I've got no experience with Kylin, so it's interesting to hear these points.

The lack of good investment options has something to do with money chasing tech startups, I agree.

> Building a startup culture on a general computing foundation of massively pirated windows os is just not going to work.

This really isn't true anymore. Much of Beijing startups are built on Linux/Android, piracy of Windows seems to be way down in general.

> I find it unlikely that without a free/open software ecosystem like linux or bsd

In Taiwan and China, it's common to use Linux in university and to work on Open Source projects (see OpenWebmail and Linux Virtual Server projects, for impressive successes.)

The Chinese government was pushing their Red Flag linux, but I'm not sure where that is now. Certainly Linux would be used in their home-grown CPU and superconductor efforts.

However, once students graduate, their employers are less likely to understand making Open Source contributions at the business level.

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