| ▲ | thaumasiotes 2 hours ago | |
> But the idea that Windows is a "better OS" really seems accurate for people in the Third World. This is because Korean language support on Linux is terrible Who in the third world is supposed to speak Korean? | ||
| ▲ | jdw64 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
In this case, I'd appreciate it if you could understand it as my 'native language.' When you input a language that isn't English into a computer, it often doesn't work well with ASCII—it frequently breaks in many places. Because the standards for computer work are mostly set by the US, people in Asia often call the ASCII system 'the privilege of one byte.' A single hardware switch maps directly to one byte of memory. You don't need an IME—Linux requires programmers to configure that manually. For native languages like Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, you can't just type characters onto the screen directly. IME daemons like ibus or fcitx run in the background, intercept key events, and compose them in buffers. In that regard, Windows is much better. And this ties in well with the topic of this post Using Linux outside the English speaking world means you have to study encoding history and filesystem structures just to open a document. It practically becomes a hobby. It's awful. But Windows solves that problem first, because it wants to sell Windows in those countries. NTFS stores filenames in UTF-16, so multilingual input is standard. When you open a terminal in Linux, you get the horrible experience of seeing your native language rendered as broken characters. I do use Linux, of course. I think its lightweight nature is a plus, but in my work environment, Linux is hard to use properly except on servers | ||