South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#181

Post by pcr910303 » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:32 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #178

pcr910303 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one in South Korea uses Photoshop, InDesign, professional video editing software or generally any kind of pro software that doesn't run on Linux 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? :-)

You mean that no one in the South Korean government does any kind of professional photo editing (or any other kind of high level professional desktop work)? It could make sense if they outsource all of that. But I doubt that out of millions of people, 100% are just low level clerks typing in forms receive from the public.

There must be people doing that, but it's not the majority. Which means that the majority of the people can just go along with Linux without Photoshop. If there are people who need them, they can use a Windows PC.

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.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#182

Post by GoblinSlayer » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 10:09 AM UTC

totorovirus wrote: post #133

pcr910303 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh? You want there was only one product and nothing else? That's quite dystopian.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#183

Post by yorwba » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

pcr910303 wrote: post #119

dmix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found a page with some information + a screenshot of Harmonica: https://linuxreviews.org/HamoniKR 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 w…

> dk 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. Well, (as you mentioned in the edit) it doesn’t create something totally new — AFAIK it uses the cinnamon DE. Also, you mentioned abou…

> 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.

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.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#184

Post by modo_mario » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 10:28 AM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #157

totorovirus wrote: post #20

South korean developer here. I am quite aware of government plans for software since I've done my service as a software developer for army. 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…

I evaluated China's Red Flag Linux back in the day, around 2010. 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.

Deepin a modern Chinese distro used in some gov i heard is also surprisingly good looking. Then there's WPS which now tends to ask me to login and whatnot a bit too much but i remember being delighted with it because back in the day it looked pretty and handled the garbage MS office stuff really well whereas libre and open office faltered here and there enough to be annoying.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#185

Post by modo_mario » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 10:30 AM UTC

throwaway1777 wrote: post #169

No one mentioned video games? An extremely high percentage of South Koreans play video games and they have many of the top competitive players and esports leagues. I find it hard to believe these will transition to Linux any time soon.

What do those have to do with what the article talks about?

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#186

Post by dntbnmpls » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 10:41 AM UTC

Qu3tzal wrote: post #132

dntbnmpls wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 compl…

> You can but then it's a work to do for each language.

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.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#187

Post by modo_mario » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 10:41 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #178

pcr910303 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one in South Korea uses Photoshop, InDesign, professional video editing software or generally any kind of pro software that doesn't run on Linux 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? :-)

You mean that no one in the South Korean government does any kind of professional photo editing (or any other kind of high level professional desktop work)? It could make sense if they outsource all of that. But I doubt that out of millions of people, 100% are just low level clerks typing in forms receive from the public.

Those people that require adobe shit are probably very rare and can still just use windows, mac a VM, Wine or an alternative like krita, inkscape or what have you. And there's probably more work like that for local governments and smaller agencies but then those either already make do with some "marta from accounting made a poster in word" type of design or outsource it since it doesn't make sense to keep someone around permanently.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#188

Post by modo_mario » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #76

hsivonen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was more South Korea’s own bad crypto policy’s fault than Microsoft’s fault, though.

It was because the U.S. government placed export restrictions on Rijndael. I mean, the alternative might have been for them to just use Rijndael anyway, and that would probably have been better in the long run, but heh. Now that that stuff is out of the way, I honestly can't see why they don't (or didn't until recently?) allow Rijndael or ChaCha20.

Wait what? How could they even put export restrictions on it?

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#189

Post by imtringued » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 11:26 AM UTC

rswail wrote: post #170

erklik wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and I think that's the question, which companies did Australia do that with? I can't ocme up with any.

Back in the 70s and 80s there were many tariffs that were directly related to the manufacturing in Australia. 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 toda…

It sounds like Australia is a victim of the resource curse. Resources bring in the money regardless of how competitive you are. There are no incentives to compete and improve because Australia can afford complacency and incompetence.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#190

Post by GoblinSlayer » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 11:48 AM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #160

rocky1138 wrote: post #54

Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it. This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or companies much harder. That's where Microsof…

It's difficult to work without ms office because the government uses it. That's why ms vigorously opposes all those "X Government Switches To Linux!" efforts, they know where the money come from.