The latest Steam Survey had a huge surge of Simplified Chinese

Quoting: HxEThe reason why linux is not popular in china is simple: piracy, piracy and piracy. China doesn't care about copyright stuff at all. If you don't want piracy, there are "smuggled" windows oem keys for as low price as 2-5$. Some chinese fake company pretends to make 100000 windows tablets, and issues the same amount of oem codes from microsoft, then sells it. And as they don't care about open source, or the philosophy behind it, there is no any need or desire for them to adopt linux in any way. Also the asian culture is way more conformist-ish. Windows is the standard thing, and most of people use it without questioning. And let's admit it for once, it is a bit easier to use, and has more hardware support.

So we have multiple factors that set things as they are.

Piracy has little to do with this. The vast majority of those who use Linux have no problem shelling out $100 for a Windows license; they choose Linux for reasons other than cost. The reality is that the culture of open source almost does not exist in China, nor anywhere else outside of Europe and North America. For some reason people there simply do not understand the reason why openness is important, or just do not care.

Quoting: sarmadPiracy has little to do with this. The vast majority of those who use Linux have no problem shelling out $100 for a Windows license; they choose Linux for reasons other than cost. The reality is that the culture of open source almost does not exist in China, nor anywhere else outside of Europe and North America. For some reason people there simply do not understand the reason why openness is important, or just do not care.

Well, there's larger problems than software freedoms in some parts of the world outside US and Europe to be fair. (Of course, that's also true here, but to a lesser and less acute way.)

Quoting: darkxylese

Quoting: MercifulBossTo be fair Linux is rather popular in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia and Ukraine. There's a fairly large community in those countries that use Linux, they even have their own distros optimized for their language. I think this stems from the "hacker culture" from the early 2000's and the pirated games you could get in flea markets at the time. As far as I'm aware, asia never had that to the same extent and was more console focused in general, hence why no interest in linux there.

Many Eastern European distros have patched language support (for example Ark on KDE does not show proper cyrillic names) and they have browsers (like Yandex Browser) that automatically translates all english text to Russian/translates english videos to Russian in realtime. Until this happens for Chinese language, it likely won't pickup popularity.

Can't really speak for Russia, but I'm from Ukraine and (I think) the biggest reason for higher adoption of Linux is that Ukraine supplies a lot of programmers to the world. The economy (buying power) in Ukraine is the weakest compared with other European countries, that going into IT can land you a really good salary compared with the rest of professions. Thus Ukraine is pretty ahead of other countries with digital innovation - we have Diia, which is an app that has all of your IDs, court summons, social support, and like half a year ago they added the ability to get married in the app. You just pick the date of your wedding and you're set.

As for Yandex browser, that is only really in Russia. Their government is trying to copy China, and so they their own website ssl certificates, that come preinstalled with Yandex, which makes is the easiest browser to use in Russia. They also have packet sniffing countrywide. All of this after a law passed in 2016.

As for translation, Chrome does literally the same thing, with addon equivalents in Firefox.

I am from Ukraine as well - IT is profitable in all of Eastern Europe, but IT has been strong in EE since the fall of the USSR and continues to be so simply because of superior Soviet education in maths and sciences (that hasn't been entirely ruined by capitalism). However, as Ukraine "desovietizes" progressively more, I expect this too to change and Ukrainian IT to fall by the wayside

The reason for Russia having its own SSL certificates (and "autonomous internet" that everyone laughed at back when it launched) is the same reason that they have the credit card Mir - to not be susceptible to being cut off from the rest of the world. I suspect they were preparing for the war.

As for "packet sniffing" its quite common in many countries. Even Ukraine. Try saying something positive (or speak in support of Russia) in Ukraine and see how long it takes the SBU to arrive at your door.


Last edited by MercifulBoss on 26 April 2023 at 1:40 am UTC