this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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India is the eye opener .... an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS ... ~~it's going to turn into a futuristic dystopia down there ... people living in slums but scrounging up old neglected and forgotten hardware to bring them back online with Open Source Software.~~
Edit: I don't normally make big corrections or changes to my comments but after rereading this, I think I went a bit too far with my assumptions about another country and culture ... thanks @embed_me@programming.dev for putting it to my attention
Ok as an Indian allow me to interject. The reason people use linux is not because of poverty. Even the cheapest laptops come preloaded with activated windows.
We get introduced to Linux based OSs in schools. That plus people are heavily pushed into engineering and lately computer science and software engineering.
I was probably too hasty in my assumptions ... simplistic, stereotypical maybe even a bit racist
I just thought it made economic sense ... why build an entire economy or business using foreign owned software and basing it all on a foreign company, especially one with unknown loopholes that would put the company's and country at risk by a foreign power.
Thanks for the correction and insight ... I'll be more careful about my assumptions in the future.
Thanks for acknowledging it.
Also another thing you are wrong about: You may be surprised to know that the second hand market for computer electronics is non-existent. As far as I know, there are only a handful of cities in the whole country where there is a second hand local market. Cheap electronics don't last that much and in laptops there are only so many components you can buy separately and install. (Overwhelming majority of the computers are laptops, not the traditional CPU towers)
Also another thing I failed to mention is, the government tried to make a distro for govt use at one point but idk if anything came out of that. But I want to say there's definitely a growing presence of linux here
That sounds like a great education setup. Hope we mirror that in the west.
Are you from kerala?
No. What prompted such a random guess?
It was not so common to use linux in schools in other states and in kerala, all government schools use a Kite Ubuntu which is fork of lts ubuntu. Its like the law to use free software for education in kerala. Me also got introduced to linux from school so i expected you are from kerala too. And Free software is most popular in kerala afaik.
The intensity of free software user group in kerala shows it too https://fsug.in/
Oh. I studied under a Gujarat board school. We had mint in our computer labs and textbooks 8 years ago. Idk what they're now
Most people in software around me in Europe are moving to OSX for the convenience and better hardware. How does it look like in India?
Honestly I'm a little surprised it's so low relative to linux. It definitely has a strong presence. I'm thinking it won't be as popular because of the lower cost to value ratio
piracy is still a thing, though
Indian here. The reason isn't Windows' price tag - pirated Windows is very cheap and common - but a government push to make us less dependent on foreign (i.e. US / Chinese) companies. Schools, government offices, hospitals etc. have shifted to, or are shifting to, Linux (mostly Ubuntu and Mint). This shift started over a decade ago, but the US sanctions on Russia have spooked the government into speeding things up now.