South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux
fosslinux.com
fosslinux.com
There is a company called TmaxSoft which advertises itfself as only builders to the 'Korean OS'. Fueled by relatively high patriotism shared by average koreans, the government had been subsidizing this firm for more than 10 years. Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a private US firm this wasn't successful so far: first they tried to build their own kernel which froze at the public demo. After realizing it was dumb to write kernel from scratch, they began focusing on tuning the visual interface. The result was criticism that is was just a pathetic clone of MintOS(linux distro).
Due to bureaucratic debt over 10+ years, I think those government officials are desparately trying to meet an end to this mad project. The money and time they've spent well deserves a spot in governmental future plan in converting all american OS: Windows into Homemade korean government friendly OS.
There's no shame in trying, and no shame in pivoting after a cost/benefit analysis, and sticking with Windows.
In contrast, North Korea maintains its own Linux distro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS#Version_4.0) and has for ten to twenty years, probably because they can't trust any proprietary software and they're not tied to Windows-happy U.S. DoD, and I would rather live in South Korea and use Windows than live in North Korea and use Linux.
> There's no shame in trying, and no shame in pivoting after a cost/benefit analysis, and sticking with Windows.
It wouldn’t been a shame if TmaxOS was advertised as a BSD distribution with Windows integration through Wine from the start — it advertises itself as a ‘pure korean OS’ without any mentions of BSD (which I’m pretty sure is a license violation) our Wine.
It later moved onto the Linux kernel and a more standard Linux environment (with some BSD components left over), and a custom DE, and is currently advertising itself as a Linux distribution. I’ve heard it is actually in a fairly useable state... but the OS already got a really bad rap.
> The result was criticism that is was just a pathetic clone of MintOS(linux distro).
I’m pretty sure you’re mixing up Harmonica with Tmax — Harmonica is based on Linux Mint (and is a pretty well operated open source project) while Tmax uses the Linux kernel, some BSD components and a custom desktop environment that features a rip-off interface of Windows.
There wasn't any english stuff for Tmax distro that I could find...
idk why they don't just adopt Debian + Gnome for their desktop stuff with some Korean development work on top of that. It's a great looking UI/UX and would be perfect especially if most of the software is via the browser/SaaS anyway. Or some occasional wine translations where needed.
But I guess that's just how governments work and their constant obsessions with the sunk cost fallacy.
Edit: Harmonica seems to be doing the right thing already, from the review:
> However, it is, at it's core, just Linux Minux with two special PPAs for Koreans on top.
This isn't something to shame them for, this is how it should be done.
Well, (as you mentioned in the edit) it doesn’t create something totally new — AFAIK it uses the cinnamon DE. Also, you mentioned about being ‘perfect’... but you will be surprised in the level of CJK support on any open source software. Even the big ones don’t support CJK well, unless the software uses the OS toolkit & operating system gives you for free — and Linux doesn’t. Software like Firefox’s CJK input is frequently broken in macOS (they don’t use Cocoa), and on most Linux distributions everything is just terrible (including Ubuntu). That’s the reason for using a local distribution.
> This isn't something to shame them for, this is how it should be done.
It could be great if we could just use Linux Mint or Ubuntu and call it a day; Linux people, please stop considering input managers and other UTF-8 stuff as bloat... or you will never get meaningful adoption to ordinary users in the CJK.
What specific CJK support is lacking on Linux? I only have experience with CJ on Ubuntu, where I didn't really find anything lacking. Noto fonts give sufficient Unicode coverage, everything speaks UTF-8 and fcitx is an adequate input method engine, even if its text prediction isn't Google-level smart.
This software firm builds many 'hard' softwares like OS, DBMS or even MapReduce data processing cluster(like hadoop and spark). One might naturally ask 'why build a wheel while there are plenty already built by open source developers?' and economically aware person might also ask 'how are selling their products while competing against ubuntu, postgresql, spark?'
Cloning something from scratch and learning advanced technology in its process is a familiar thing in Korea. Enforcing home grown products to average customers, subsidizing one specific firm to take all domestic market share is how Samsung and Hyundai made its way to top global firms. So I guess the mental background for replacing OS by home made OS is similar to that which successfully grew Samsung. They are willing to pay off a lot of money so that a Korean firm outgrows Google, Facebook or Apple. An average developer knows it is a stupid plan to replicate linux or mysql from scratch. But government officials' heart still remain in the golden age when the very strategy they are executing with was valid for Samsung or Hyundai.
The way this firm hires its employees is tighly coupled with government. In our country all men are obliged to military service. However there are couple of options:
1. B.S holders: no exemption. 2 years in a random role. 2. M.S holders: you get to work for private firm for 3 years. Called 'special research agents'. Mostly work for engineering related firms. 3. Ph.D holders: you are exempted as soon as you become a Ph.D holder.
All these exemption rules according to the level of scholastic degree is to foster R&D capability of our nation. And here comes a perky question: 'What happens to Ph.D dropouts?' As some might have guessed: 'You go to TmaxSoft, get hefty salary, get a girl, get married.'
I wouldn't say much about it if there weren't a fact that really bugs me. They do hoard M.S holders from best colleges, however the graduate students they hire aren't limited to CS majors. I've seen multiple chemistry majors or industrial engineering majors who dropped out of Ph.D course doing software engineering there. I have no idea how they could 'train' a non CS major to write code for hard core stuffs like OS or DBMS. And they tell the government officials that they have the best pool of engineers from prestigious colleges, which would ease the government to making decision to subsidize this firm.
Koreans just cant really do b2c products that well that are not hardware.
The timezone is similar: India is 10 hours forward from America/New_York, RoK is 12 hours forward. Flights to RoK (12-14 hours) are actually significantly shorter than flights to India (20 hours).
Indians are probably paid less than Koreans, but I don't know. And I cannot speak to the technical proficiencies of either.
I'd definitely like to open an office in RoK some time.
If anyone on here has done so or is interested, send me an email.
I can see how this would ensure domestic success, but how does that translate to 'top global firm' status unless the products / features & pricing are significantly superior?
At least in hardware/manufacturing, both South Korea and China have done this with great success thus far.
Yes, I get that. It's basic tariff protectionism. Many countries have done, and continue to, do this.
Here in Australia we've done it for decades, but with no global success.
> The hope then is that in the future ...
I hope that isn't the official strategy. ; |
The stronger financial footing (also achievable via vanilla domestic success sans tarrifs) doesn't necessarily guarantee global success, especially if other nation states are adopting similar fiscal & trade policies ... which it's fair to say they are.
Examples? We have some of the most open markets in the world. We’re one of the only countries the US has a trade surplus with...
There are major Australian companies out there; the Atlassians, BHPs and CSL's of the world. They aren't Samsung by any stretch.
Our management and government are incredibly risk-averse and we follow trends and popular management theories instead of creating them.
I think this is called "dutch disease" by economists: the high wages paid by the dirt-digging (early on) mean that you can't simultaneously be competitive in metal-bashing, which makes it hard to develop other industries.
However, our tariffs were more about protecting jobs than protecting and developing industries. Australia has always been a "taker" when it comes to investment and we are shite at developing our own industries that aren't purely primary (ie extractive like mining or agricultural).
We have some companies today that are global but have nothing to do with tariffs. Atlassian in software, some mining related engineering and services companies.
There are others like CSL which was spun out of government, Brambles/CHEP that again, was spun out of government (CHEP stood for Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool in WW2).
But our governments are terrible at promoting secondary industry or supporting them. Our R&D grants are complicated and are focused on compliance, not on results.
Australia is the "lucky country" but the full quote is:
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
I guess the obvious example would be the car industry - mostly cars were just assembled in Australia in the most recent past, but previously there were some designed and built. Tariffs were applied to protect that industry (nominally the jobs associated with same) but despite the Australian car assembly sector basically being zero now, the tariffs still exist. It's almost like it's just a revenue generation scheme.
There's a long history of tariffs and duties within Australia [1] but none of those (to my knowledge) resulted in a thriving multi-national corporation (I'll exclude mining companies as they're primary industries, reliant on the lottery of resource availability rather than any particular commercial skill).
Perhaps Murdoch's News Limited, which undoubtedly obtained government support during its nascent era, but I'm not sure how comparable it is to the Samsung and Hyundais of the world (referring back to GP's claims).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tariffs_in_Australi...
At least in Korea. In less successful countries, domestic top dogs were simply protected, and were quite happy to keep making cars from the '50s.
An excellent book on this story is "How Asia Works" by Joe Studwell. (On which I'd be interested to hear any opinions from actual Koreans.)
And thank you - I've added How Asia Works to my reading stack.
Yeah, TmaxSoft builds and sells compatible DBMS/parallel computing solutions to the government — but I feel that it’s entirely understandable to use domestic software for things like that. The killer features there wasn’t that it was domestic — it was that it’s cheaper that the alternatives and it’s compatible with the big ones, ensuring no vendor lock-in.
It’s definitely not a plan to make TmaxSoft some global company like Samsung or Hyundai; its not the 70s where the country has no big companies for the global market. The government has no incentives to do that, when Samsung’s software is used over the world. It’s just the preference of domestic software, and that TmaxSoft delivered actually usable software (not great, but is usable) to the government.
So the government essentially uses people to subsidize businesses?
There is probably someone better fit to describe this [hah!] but schools aren't really designed to teach something specific. It is more about creating hard working drones. Doing anything meaningful in [say] chemistry is harder than brainfuck.
So? Linux, Windows, Mac OS, have all frozen during all kinds of public demos.
>After realizing it was dumb to write kernel from scratch
Is it? A nation state, especially one the size of Korea, should have no problem finding resources for writing a kernel from scratch - to a level suitable for running POSIX software and a modern UNIX-like userland.
The question I have is isn’t it obvious?
Do you have a video of this? I found mention of it, and many videos of TmaxDay and the like; but without more context or speaking Korean, I'm finding it hard to locate.
One of the engineer was debugging the scheduler a day before demo day, poking here and there, inserting sleep(10); to random places. He merged his debug commit without deleting sleeps so the OS froze on demo.
what this implies: they don't have tests, no code review. And they're still developing OS.
... and their new TMax OS is just BSD w/ WINE.
Oh god...
They took a common linux distro, added Chinese fonts, and made a nice graphical login screen. I was impressed at how smooth the final result was actually.
If you're familiar with the final linux distros based on KDE (pre-Gnome 3), that's what it looked like.
So if you're a government IT staffer, study the history of Red Flag Linux.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/26/linux-pioneer-munich-swi...
The project didn't fail, it was on pace to succeed, which made Microsoft swoop in and basically bribe them to switch back.
The lesson being, switch to Linux. Either you'll switch and save money, or Microsoft will bribe you not to and you'll save money.
> Linux in Munich: 'No compelling technical reason to return to Windows,' says city's IT chief
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-comp...
The reason was probably a shift in IT management who wanted to keep things "simple" with some vague thing about keeping one platform since they had kept previous windows machines around which were apparently "absolutely needed". It takes heart in the management to keep Linux around, which isn't always a reliable thing. Even when there was no "technical" need to use the more expensive Windows option.
But this sounds 100% like a Microsoft sales/marketing job, which they are amazing at. They've really perfected selling to big firms, which you could see with the growth of Azure. Which I witnessed when they unleashed their sales machine on startups to get them to use it, and it was quite interesting to see in action.
Taxes. Politicians still think Microsoft pays taxes. Though 60M [1] per year in taxes while paying much more for their software is technically a retarded thing to do deal-wise.
[1] https://www.northdata.de/Microsoft+Deutschland+GmbH,+München...
It only makes sense to take the bribe in that case. It always makes sense to prepare for the switch, because if they won't bribe you enough to stop then you can always actually do the switch, which is still better than the status quo.
But agree with your point on Office, there are many large organisations which are literally running on Excel, and which IT budget would have to grow 10 times if they were to replace all these excel based processes.
And I must say that I haven’t seen any good alternative to Excel for a non programmer to set up a custom set of calculations, or deal with data. I am trying to get more people to learn SQL in my company, which shouldn’t be too difficult. But you are not going to write a company valuation model in SQL. And I had poor results at getting non programmers to pick up coding (I offered 1 week external in class courses, lots of people volunteered but 80% did not really do anything with it).
Wine suddenly gets really really good, maybe?
It's part of the reason Microsoft is playing to their strength with Office 365, it's almost impossible to replace at this point.
Actually, Korean military had an experimental VDI program years ago, but the program failed mainly because of the price, most of which had to be spent on Windows license. IIRC, after creating a small prototype, the program is eventually scrapped.
So, no, this is not a negotiating move. Also, I believe this will definitely happen, because Windows 10 is stupidly expensive.
The official announcement from Korean government (Korean): https://www.mois.go.kr/frt/bbs/type010/commonSelectBoardArti...
Next step: remove the silly Korean phone number requirement from your online services.
Never going to happen as long as the Korean nanny state needs to keep tabs on its citizens.
South Korea has a deep legacy of MS-DOS/Windows, and it’s reliance of Microsoft’s OS is very high. This mostly is due to two reasons: the high use of the unique word processor(Hangul Word Processor) and the legacy ActiveX plugins used for cryptography when banking.
In the 90s, multiple internet service providers used ActiveX technology (for people who doesn’t know, it’s basically binary plugin technology to provide unlimited access to the local environment) to provide services. They were used to provide VOD services, etc... and when online shopping & banking started in the mid 90s the government mandated use of a 128bit crypto algorithm. At that time, the dominant browser IE only had 40 bit crypto due to US’s export restrictions — so the 128 bit algorithm they decided to use was a independently developed algorithm called SEED, which was then implemented in ActiveX by the banks and shopping malls. This became a legacy, and for a long time even after the restriction was removed, people were forced to use ActiveX plugins until the smartphones came and the banks were forced to rewrite the system. There are still a lot of banks mandating the use of Windows for desktops — that’s one reason why the Windows was so popular.
Windows 10 AFAIK (I’ve never used it, so I’m not really sure) is much more strict to the binary plugins, and Internet Explorer is almost going to die — so a lot of people were staying on Windows 7, including most of the government. By the deprecation of Windows 7, the government thought that this was a good time to remove much of the legacy that enforces Windows, and is considering Linux for one of its options.
One of the reasons why I have some hope on this project is because the government’s use of Windows is basically for two things — the ActiveX plugins in the web (which are mostly disappeared thanks to smartphones) and the Hangul Word Processor, which was exclusively only on Windows until about 2008, when a Linux version was released for a short period of time (and was removed due to the lack of interest). If the government decides to transition to Linux, Hancom(HWP’s developer) can prioritize the Linux port — which, in 2008 was already fully featured and has almost zero compatibility problems! (People using Linux still use the 2008 version by dockerizing the whole environment.)
Some context on the operating systems that were mentioned:
The Harmonica OS is a Linux Mint-based distribution that is localized thoroughly and has a lot of baseline programs (like the input methods) installed, and is pretty great for daily use.
The Tmax OS is... basically a scam OS that... well uses a big mix of Linux, BSD, and Wine’s code, a homemade custom DE that is a poor ripoff of the windows interface and tries to integrate them (unsuccessfully)... and advertise as a ‘pure Korean OS’ to the officials.
Microsoft will just offer Windows for free and Office at a steep discount and nothing will change. Mark my words :-)
Which... doesn’t have a really incentive now in because all of the legacy components that required Windows in the first place are all broken on Win10...
> Office at a steep discount
... and we don’t really rely on Microsoft Office that much (compared to other countries). The dominant word processor is from a local company (side note: Word is just awful... seriously. Maybe it’s due to no competition., and the local company has viable solutions that provide very high compatibility (seriously, l just can’t believe how they did it, it’s super compatible) with Word, Excel & Powerpoint. (AFAIK they export them to other countries governments as well.)
A little hard to complain when we can take dlls that are 10-12 years old shove them into something like server 2019/SQL 2019, and not think about compatibility.
Same goes for client apps, was your app shit 10 years ago? It's not going to change 10 years later. Did it work in word 10 years ago, it will most likely work 10 years later with zero changes.
See other comments here
Of course not! :-) I don’t run Linux myself for these reasons... but the government agency PCs has no requirement to run these. The officials shouldn’t run useless programs on work, right? :-)
Also, as a side point, AFAIK all of the operating systems that are mentioned in the article has native support for executing Windows applications using Wine - as there are still programs that only support Windows. Unlike other Linux distributions where Wine is a second level citizen, the distributions have preinstalled Wine wrappers for the dominant IM in South Korea so if the government wants it, wrapping up a version of Photoshop that works on Wine won't be that hard.
They learnt to deal with the terrible UX in Windows, no reason they can’t on Linux. :-)
> it might not be much better but she's used to it.
It’s her work, she better get used to it too keep working; That’s a pretty compelling reason to get used to Linux, right?
They could, but they won’t.
They want Outlook and Word and Excel, and they’ll exhibit a mule-like stubbornness to budge.
I’ve mentioned that we don’t use Word, (BTW, seriously, is there anyone who uses Outlook anymore?) and the dominant word processor used in South Korea had a port to Linux that is fully featured and has a very high compatibility since 2008.
Outlook is still huge amongst professions that have to deal with people a lot. The calendaring is better than online solutions (by a lot) and the plugins, I am told, for stuff like Salesforce are awesome.
They are redesigned every version though, there's nothing fixed to want from them.
Linux's terrible UIs change pretty much every month as Linux GUI devs get bored and decide to reinvent everything for no reason. Microsoft has only recently started doing that and it's still at a much slower pace.
But you know, there are versions with commercial support out there. And governments could have the budget to actually maintain their own version. (they do btw.)
Linux has an upper hand in terms of UX since Windows Vista, and the gap widened greatly since then, go read what people think about metro.
The Wikipedia articles all just say things like “specialized support” or “special needs”. I would have assumed that the key requirement is Hangul input, which presumably other word processing and spreadsheet programs could do just fine.
Hangul support was a key feature in the 80s where everything was MS-DOS; and it wasn’t prevalent then where a lot of hangul-supporting word processors were on the market.
The killer feature of the Hangul Word Processor to most users is that it allows substantial control on the layout of the document... in a way that westerners don’t really care. (That’s a direct quote from a foreigner I know, maybe an over-generalization.) So the Korean Government and a lot of corporations were very committed on transitioning documents that were written by hand, to computers, and they also wanted to have this exact layout and form that was used before. Most forms are based out of tables — and I can’t really explain this in text, but it gives you the power to layout the text the exact way you want, while in Word, you feel like you’re wrestling with the layout engine. (Kinda like... if Word is old CSS where you had to use all kinds of float hacks to make your fragile layout, HWP gives you flexbox and grids... etc....) Some says that HWP is more like a DTD program like InDesign (I’ve never used it so I can’t really comment) rather than a usual word processor that other countries use... but everybody is just super used to having all that control, so nobody can really transition back to Word.
Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?)
While other global programs could be shoehorned into their use case, it still means poor customizability for specific Korean issues. In particular being optimized for the most common Korean use case vs western designers use cases.
There’s a lot of these local brew word processor in the CJK world, and it’s often more than just language support: there will be hooks for common legal formatting, better handling of common transformations, sometimes a dedicated IME working better for long form writing. It also means more culturally useful templates from first party source, which is surprisingly nice to have IMO.
It’s also interesting that local companies/gov. can pay for additional features or adaptations, have the talent move to other entities in the local economy, etc. which is a way higher hurdle for an Adobe or Microsoft.
First of all, QuarkXPress had shitty, really shitty language support. You might be surprised when you know that most pro apps have really, really poor CJK support — apps like Photoshop currently has really hacky input support bolted on later, and frequently a problem. Even big, user facing apps like Microsoft Excel still has lots of problems with input. So back in the days where the word processor market was more diverse, QuarkXPress was not an option.
Then also, there is the popularity problem where people have not used or even heard about DTD software like this, and it’s not really a friendly interface for users to create and modify documents.
This is a side story but... publishers that needed DTD software used QuarkXPress back in the day. The company backing the software had frequent conflicts with the local publishers with license pricing, and the publishers decided to protest by not upgrading to the latest version — and AFAIK lots of small publishers that didn’t have the manpower to convert all of it’s files to InDesign still buys used PowerMacs to run the version(I’m not sure but something like 3.3 — released in 1996!) that they use.
> Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?)
> presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”.
Yeah, pretty much true too.
Having lots of templates in HWP is one of the reason why HWP isn’t disappearing; there is vendor lock-in due to custom file formats, and people don’t feel any reason to move to another one.
Unicode was standardized, then the utf8 format after that, which *nix took full advantage of, but other legacy software (see paragraph 1) did not evolve in some cases.
That's an understatement, the UX for that in Word is pretty awful without some deep familiarity. Even using tables to format stuff was difficult and choppy.
Although I've never had to use Word professionally and fortunately most of my education just required the standard format + some spacing requirements, which were easy.
There's a similar tendency in Japan to use MS Excel for a lot of documents that westerners would use MS Word for for the same reason - detailed, rigid, layout.
South Korean here, I wouldn’t say it was the government’s fault to enforce better security/crypto tech on the web when banking, right? To be strict, everything really started because of the US’s IMO useless export restrictions. Then it became a legacy that couldn’t be third of for ~20 yrs. I don’t think the policy was great, but it was reasonable at the time.
So far so good, but then how do you disseminate this wonderful piece of security technology? By creating an ActiveX plugin and make every user download and install it before they can use your website. And since those pesky new versions of Windows will keep warning "This program may harm your computer, continue?", we just have to tell users to click "OK".
But what if users are trained to always click OK and accidentally stumbles upon a fishing website? Stupid dummy users, they shouldn't have done that! If they accidentally went to a fishing website, downloaded a bad security plugin, and uploaded all their banking credentials, it's their fault!
IIRC Microsoft practically begged South Korea to please stop using ActiveX, it was never a great technology and it outlived its usefulness a long time ago, could we please move on?
Edit: As far as I remember, real fun started when you needed to access two banking websites. Now their security plugins start to fight each other!
You can trace all of this directly back to the combination of Microsoft and the US Government. Microsoft should have pushed back on the government's stupid demand or educated them on why it was stupid, and the government shouldn't have made that demand in the first place.
* https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-koreans-use-internet-exp...
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/11/30/south-...
Oh, and some required apps simply don't have mac equivalents. Fun times.
It's funny because S.Korea is otherwise quite advanced. It's just their banking/online shopping is a huge hassle compared to using foreign cards.
In order to use my Korean card online, I had to go to the bank, set a password there (valid for 1 year) and have a randomly generated numbers-lookup card printed. I forget the exact term for it. So when I used my bank's debit card online, I guess it would go "type in the number next to 20 on your numbers card". Totally ridiculous. I just never used it because I realized sites like gmarket allowed foreigners to use their cards anyways.
https://linuxreviews.org/30%2B_South_Korean_Governmental_Org...
If they have been Windows for so long and all the way up to Windows 7, they must have a lot of software and more interestingly hardware that Win7 manages to get working.
All sorts of bits and bobs hardware will potentially make trouble.
I also see in the article: "The South Korean government also plans to implement a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) that uses a virtual PC environment that runs on a cloud by the second half of 2020. The South Korean ministry expects a 72% savings in cost with the DaaS move. Security standards and DaaS models are currently in development, and pilot tests are scheduled to start in October of this year."
This does make a lot of sense in a two-stage program, switch out the desktop to become thin-clients that connects to the DaaS. Then they can allow end user to connect to a Daas of Windows7, Windows10, Linux, DOS, I mean whatever.
I use Ubuntu 19.10 eoan for my daily driver replacing Windows 10 Professional for Workstations, and I can tell you that the drivers are _definitely_ worse, updates are manual, apps are updated last of the major OSes, and if I wasn't a SWE but I needed to use a computer for my job it wouldn't be as pleasant as Windows.
also these days my first suggestion for most users would be chromeOS or similar.
Linux has tons of auto update solutions. E.g. on Debian you can configure the unattended-upgrades package to do it for you. There are plenty of nice GUIs for most tasks if you use the right distro. Ultimately, it's up to the admins of the deployments to take care of updates, not up to the end users.
As for the vendor maintained drivers that Windows has, it's often the same in Linux actually. Often, the maintainers of the mainline drivers are employees of the vendors. As it should be.
These suggestions are still problems for many Linux distros these days and for general users there should be one sane default solution for 'auto-updating', just like Windows and macOS. No user should have to configure packagename-1.0 to do automatic upgrades for the user, it should be in the default install and configurable via the settings GUI with a simple checkbox. Finally, to further confuse the end-user to switch to a Linux distro is when they have to choose 'the right distro'. Windows and macOS come in one recognisable desktop form, Linux still suffers from an identity crisis on the desktop for end-users.
Unfortunately, it isn't possible for me to recommend a Linux distro to an end-user only for them to end up being frustrated with the switching process and eventually going back to Windows or macOS. Ubuntu and ChromeOS may suffice for some users but the other distros will confuse them further.
Like Win10 home, pro, server, or enterprise?
https://home.cern/news/news/computing/migrating-open-source-...
The institute is big enough that it might be a source of inspiration or knowledge for local governments in Europe.
Windows was for a few desktops, administrative staff and optionally email (some Exchange or OWA stuff or sth).
And everyone at HLT has ditched their Apple laptops?
I thought Scientific Linux was no longer a thing (I was a beta user back in the initial release).
It is probably more to do with the cultural influence of the Imperial examination
End Users: Who are addicted to using Outlook being their job.
End Users: Who still need to inter-operate with others using MS products.
MS Access possibly being the 'best' CRUD interface. (I think it even comes with an expense database template? I think it might also connect to ODBC setups, which are their own nightmare but at least multi-user.)
Various literal corner cases that break workflows. Such as the RTF support LibreOffice lacking the ability to understand feature Y which other file formats can handle (E.G. repeat header row on new pages), or those same import/exports not looking exactly the same in other 'office' software.
==
As a suggestion, even though I'm not familiar with the LibreOffice XML formats offhand, it would be nice if we took a modern, big computer, look at digital typesetting, text area layouts and flow rules. With documents containing multiple types of data and multiple presentation modes (for one document), with a required 'generic' mode that matches traditional web pages, layouts specific to paper sizes / screen sizes, and layout support for anchoring / positioning within those layouts. There also wouldn't be a strong differentiation between 4th dimensional content (moving screens/pages), tables, charts/drawings, or any other type of elements. That might be 'better enough' that MS has to adopt it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
German Wikipedia's München article does mention it:
(Deutsch) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_M%C3%BCnchens
(English) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3...
Edit: Sorry, actually my trail was
1) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchen
From the end of [0]:
> At the time Munich began the move to LiMux in 2004, it was one of the largest organizations to reject Windows, and Microsoft took the city's leaving so seriously that its then CEO Steve Ballmer flew to Munich, but the mayor at the time, Christian Ude, stood firm.
> More recently, Microsoft last year moved its German company headquarters to Munich.
[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-comp...
I wouldn't be surprised if the switch didn't help their problems at all, since if they didn't get rid of Windows 2000 when switching to Linux, they're likely still running some legacy applications on their homegrown LiMux systems and suffering from the resulting interoperability problems.
Remains to be seen what happens now, though only vauguely comparable situation, whith much of Linux in the hands of US-based corporations.
With the exception of the hypothetical corruption, I don’t blame them.
Something like a server version of ReactOS[1] would allow existing infrastructure to continue to work as governments and corporations phase out their reliance on a foreign company's product.
I a recent convert to Linux desktop, and it's not as far behind as I thought it would be.
I doubt it. There's a lot of reasons developers don't target Linux and "it doesn't have users" is only one. Look at the several game devs who decided to stop supporting Linux after trying it. Linux Desktop's software distribution mechanism of choice is to insert community repo maintainers between developers and users, there are some 300 distributions all of which potentially have completely different base libraries, drivers are generally worse and no one takes responsibility for fixing them, etc.
So, why not pick -one- major distro (Debian family, Ubuntu say) and support it? win-win. (In everyday use,'thousand' doesn't mean much. 'Handful' is closer to the ground.)
No, the government is mandating nothing, users can pick from the most popular OS and that are now Windows 10 and Windows 7. If you let users pick a Linux, any Linux, they will pick them all, unless the government really forces everyone to pick a single version - probably that is the point of the the version in the spotlight.
How many people around the world are simply discouraged from programming because of added burden of having to learn english? How much are we losing out because of that?
This might be difficult for smaller and poorer nations, but what is the excuse for germany, france, spain, japan, brazil, etc with large enough populations to justify porting "computing" for their people?
But don't be fooled, in most companies all the comments and documentation are written in French. Variables are in English because it's the only language that only use the ASCII charset. Only recent languages have the support for Unicode identifiers names.
English reading comprehension (at the very least) is a mandatory skill to have in our modern world.
It isn't. I'm talking about systematic change, not updating existing code. Like how latin was used to teach everything until nations decided to port religion, science, math, literature, etc to their native languages. Look at how much that changed the world. Rather than a select lucky few having access to knowledge tied to a language, it was ported and made available to all the peoples of a nation.
> Add to that that all classes resources are for English programming languages and that to share knowledge between French, German and Russian programmers English is the only way to go.
The only way to share knowledge is through english? So the french can't translate german and russians can't translate german? What about all the french, german and russians who don't know english? Are they supposed to languish in ignorance?
> Variables are in English because it's the only language that only use the ASCII charset.
Variables, keywords, the standard libraries, runtime, kernel, assembly, etc.
> Only recent languages have the support for Unicode identifiers names.
You make it sound like you can't change it. Like older languages are set in stone.
> English reading comprehension (at the very least) is a mandatory skill to have in our modern world.
This is simply not true as most of the modern world does not have basic english reading comprehension skills. And as I said, this type of thinking is holding back much of the world. And needing to have basic english reading comprehension doesn't mean that computation shouldn't be ported to one's native language.
The selfish few used to keep the masses ignorant through language exclusivity ( latin ). Seems like the same thing is happening here. Maybe it's not selfishness, but laziness or learned helplessness.
I know if I had to learn french in order to code, I wouldn't be a programming. And I'm sure it's the truth for the vast majority of american programmers. I think most people are similar throughout the world and having to learn a foreign language to program is an insurmountable obstacle for many.
You can but then it's a work to do for each language. That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals.
> You make it sound like you can't change it. Like older languages are set in stone.
Do you suggest adding a layer of dependencies and complexity to the build systems to preprocess the source code to make it compilable by GCC/clang/Visual?
And it would make sharing open-source project limited to their language speakers, until you have someone translating the project. And what happens when that person can't keep up with the pace of the original project? Just look at all the material in Chinese on Github that is just inaccessible to non-chinese speakers.
All engineering schools in France require a minimum score on tests like TOEIC/TOEFL (in my school it was TOEIC 785 / 990, got raised to 800). High school graduation requires a CEFR level of B2 (even if not all students reach it) in English.
> I know if I had to learn french in order to code, I wouldn't be a programming. And I'm sure it's the truth for the vast majority of american programmers.
Except that a lot of the world is already exposed to English in movies, series, books, websites, memes, YouTube, work. American are not exposed to French, German, Japanese, Chinese.
You make it sound like that's a bad thing. Once again, I'm not sure whether it is laziness or just learned helplessness.
> That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals.
That's not why. It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to think that just because each nation/language has their own ecosystem that somehow the world will stop communicating with each other. You think english will cease to be the lingua franca of science. Nothing will really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't program in english would program in french. You can still program in english if you want. You can communicate in english. Your country would just have more options.
> Do you suggest adding a layer of dependencies and complexity to the build systems to preprocess the source code to make it compilable by GCC/clang/Visual?
No. Is there an added layer of dependencies and complexity to compiling languages in english?
> Just look at all the material in Chinese on Github that is just inaccessible to non-chinese speakers.
So translate it. What is with the helpless attitude? Do you feel helpless that russian literature is in russian and you can't read russian? No, you'd find a french translation of russian literature right? Would you rather 1.4 billion chinese be able to use the chinese material or would you rather the 1.4 billion learn english first?
> American are not exposed to French, German, Japanese, Chinese.
Sure, not as much, but that doesn't take away from my point. There would be far less american programmers if we had to learn another language to program. It's common sense.
Do you think more americans would watch Parasite or Amelie if we had to learn korean or french first? Or more watch the movies once those movies were subtitled/dubbed in english first?
All I'm saying is that porting the ecosystem into people's native languages would boost the numbers of programmers and advance technology. It won't take away from those like you who want to program in english and it certainly won't take away from dominance of the english language in international communication.
Just like you can watch an american movie without subs/dubs. But most of your countrymen can't. Would you be against subbing/dubbing of english language movies to disadvantage your countrymen? I doubt it.
True, it would not but the communication surface would be much smaller, we would depend on a few bilinguals.
> Nothing will really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't program in english would program in french. You can still program in english if you want.
People barely speak English already so if you remove the need for some English keyword to do development, you can be sure you are heading toward a generation that doesn't know how and doesn't care about speaking English.
> No. Is there an added layer of dependencies and complexity to compiling languages in english?
No because they are built from the ground up to use English. So if I understand your idea, by creating languages that are based on each local language we would not be able to share source code without having to translate it into our own language?
> So translate it.
So I need to learn Chinese. And English. And Russian. Or, more realistically, I need to depend on someone to do the translation for me. Automatic translation is not really that good for books and websites from the experience I have. Just taking cppreference which translates automatically, most of the time it's non-sense.
> Do you feel helpless that russian literature is in russian and you can't read russian? No, you'd find a french translation of russian literature right?
Yes but I miss on a lot of Russian literature.
I agree with you that if we had a programming language in French of the quality of Java or C or Python it would allow some individuals, that see English as a barrier, to get into programming. But the cons and the issues it brins largely outweight, in my opinion, this benefit.
So be it if it means more programmers in france, china, russia, etc.
> No because they are built from the ground up to use English.
Yeah, and you can do the same in other major languages. It should be easier since we already did most of the work for you.
> So if I understand your idea, by creating languages that are based on each local language we would not be able to share source code without having to translate it into our own language?
Yes. You'd be able to share the libraries and executables, but not the source unless you know the language.
> So I need to learn Chinese. And English. And Russian.
No. The chinese, english, russian, etc has to be translated into french. Have you ever read a book by a non-french author?
> Automatic translation is not really that good for books and websites from the experience I have.
That's my point. You are a worse programmer than you could be because you are coding in a foreign language. If you coded in french, you'd be a better programmer. After all, programming is an art, like literature.
> I agree with you that if we had a programming language in French of the quality of Java or C or Python it would allow some individuals
You completely missed my point. You could convert Java, C, Python, etc into french or any other language. It's simply updating the grammar where you could do a simple 1 to 1 conversion of the keywords. It's so simple that an ambitious and competent person could do it over a weekend. The hard part is translating the libraries and the executables - the actual code in the wild. But it's doable if given enough resources.
Like you said, people translate documents in many languages already. Why not take the extra step and translate the source as well?
I think that number is very very small. Learning English is something that every teenager with access to the internet is capable of.
Not saying it's my favorite thing, but rolling updates and decent built-in anti-malware make it a fairly good option these days, and with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and Multipass, there's a lot of Linux stuff that can be done on Windows.
IMO, Windows 10, the separated kernel stuff they're doing, and their current support for Open Source software is the best thing Microsoft has done in a long time.
Hopefully they don't get to Extinguish this time.
Those are great features and welcome to keep Windows 10 machines from turning into yet another botnet. But for some people the concern isn't about updates, it's about privacy. And frankly unless you otherwise need to use your Windows PC, there's no compelling reason to use it over a Linux machine.
>IMO, Windows 10, the separated kernel stuff they're doing, and their current support for Open Source software is the best thing Microsoft has done in a long time.
Yes they're doing a great job of improving Windows and converging Windows into a useful platform for Linux developers. However Microsoft being Microsoft there's always the fear this is another Embrace, Extend, Extinguish initiative. And here's the irony - as it becomes easier to do Linuxy things in Windows, it also becomes apparent that except for Windows-only tasks, there's no compelling reason to prefer Windows over Linux. Particularly in light of their mandatory user data collection.
At some point perhaps Microsoft will relent and make their Semi-annual Channel and Long Term Service Channel licenses more generally available. But for now their data collection is turning some privacy-minded people away from Windows.
If I could pay a reasonable price and reclaim my privacy I suppose I would, despite the fact this is Microsoft taking something from me and then charging me to get it back. But the cost of entry for a legitimate license to a less invasive version of Windows is just too high; hundreds for a mini purchase of servers + some CALs, or several hundred for a Visual Studio (formerly MSDN) Subscription.
I've met Microsoft in the middle and purchased a license but run it in a VM. The VM is on just long enough to patch itself and do the Windows-only things I need to do such as run Tax Cut to fill out this year's tax return. Sure I could ditch Windows and do my taxes online but that's just feeding my data into another marketing machine. I can't and don't claim to represent the majority view, but I doubt I'm alone in having marketing / data collection fatigue. And frankly I do resent Microsoft's deciding data collection is the new minimum price of entry to use their software.
In short: you're right they're doing some great things, but (for some of us) it's not about that. My apologies if that comes off a bit ranty. I suppose it's a hot button issue for me.