Linux desktop in China

Linux desktop in China

Posted Feb 2, 2008 4:03 UTC (Sat) by minghua (subscriber, #39620)
Parent article: Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

In China, Linux has something like 15 percent of the desktop and most of that is KDE.

I don't know where Mr. Seigo got his numbers from, but I think this is way too high.

I have been away from China for quite a few years, but I still read news about Linux in China and is involved in Chinese Linux community. From what I see, Linux desktop is pretty much unusable for an ordinary user -- many Chinese websites render in IE only, and a lot of them, all bank websites included, require ActiveX plugins; localization of many desktop apps are still poor; and data exchange is still a PITA with most people taking MS Office formats and Windows media formats as standard.

My guess would be the number comes from some uneducated statistics which underestimate the total number of desktops (many people buy individual parts and assemble the computer themselves) and overestimate the number of Linux installations (yes, many low end computers are sold with Linux installed, but most buyers just wipe the hard drive and install pirated Windows).

Or worse, it can come from some Chinese Linux company that deliberately distort the numbers to make it appear more important and more successful than it really is. (This is just a wild guess without any evidence, but given said company's past behavior, and that its Linux distribution uses KDE as the default desktop, I won't be surprised if it turns out to be true. I'm always a pessimist, what can you say.)

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