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South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

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131–140 of 209 posts

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#131

As a foreigner who's spending a lot of time in South Korea and had to deal/saw people deal with the inability to do anything online without the use of a Windows client, I applaud this. Every time we need to interact with the government or a bank, we need to search around for a Windows laptop or try from a VM (doesn't always work). This makes it very hard for anyone to learn a non-Windows OS. Next step: remove the sil…

> 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.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, why do banks don't port all their code to recent and efficient languages? Pretty much the same here. All the code currently in use is written in English and it will take decades to completely transit from English to French computing (let's take the example of France, since I'm French). Add to that that all classes resources are for English programming languages and that to share knowledge between French, German…

> Pretty much the same here. 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…

> So the french can't translate german and russians can't translate german?

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.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More on TMaxSoft. 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 le…

Er... I personally feel that this comment is too harsh to TmaxSoft and the government officials. 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 bi…

You know how crucial software gains reliability through large user community. I don't want to fall into some random bs while using their 'usable' DB. condolence to programmers involved to government projects which will enforce them to use 'usable' piece of framework from domestic firm.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no issues with running Windows 7 in a VM for everything.

The point seems to be about finding a computer at all. Suppose you want to do some banking and all you have is your Android phone? According to what I'm reading from other comments, you may just need to find a Windows PC rather than handle things with your own device.

Nearly all of the banks in Korea have Android apps.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#136
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. But if Linux went mainstream it would probably undermine Apple more than Microsoft. A colleague, who is far more technical than I am, recently said, "I use Apple because it smooths out the bumps. Otherwise, I'd using Linux locally."

I use Linux over Mac at home for this exact reason. What they call "Full screen mode" on Mac is a joke. Plus it's always fun to watch people trying to get external display to work with their Macs during the meetings at work...

Can you elaborate on hardware and such? Share sites that'll help me make the shift? Especially using Linux within Win 10 Pro. Thx

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how will Martha in Accounting (or whatever the Korean equivalent of Martha in Accounting is) learn how to deal with the UX terribleness that is most of Linux? Windows she's been using all of her life, it might not be much better but she's used to it.

> But how will learn how to deal with the UX terribleness that is most of Linux? 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 learnt to deal with the terrible UX in Windows, no reason they can’t on Linux. :-)

They could, but they won’t.

They want Outlook and Word and Excel, and they’ll exhibit a mule-like stubbornness to budge.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But how will learn how to deal with the UX terribleness that is most of Linux? 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 learnt to deal with the terrible UX in Windows, no reason they can’t on Linux. :-) They could, but they won’t. They want Outlook and Word and Excel, and they’ll exhibit a mule-like stubbornness to budge.

> They want Outlook and Word and Excel

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.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#139

It will be interesting to see how it will work. 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 en…

But when I was working daily via a DaaS platform, it's not a great experience for software development. Input latency is high enough to be noticed, the virtual desktop can not put under load (e.g. using a IDE for C++ other than Source Insight). My company had to switch back to desktop PC for most developers.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”. 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…

partial story here -- lots of work was done on CJKV input systems, in each decade, but in many Asian markets (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam for SURE) piracy was rampant, which does not feed an R&D cycle. 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.

Piracy is rampant to all popular software; I’m not sure how the conclusion that Asian markets have a higher pircy rate than the western market was reached. I’m pretty sure that MS Office is pirated in the US at least as much as Korea.
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