Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 15, 2006 02:00 AM
As one living on a non english speaking country, and helping many friends to switch to Linux I wanted to add a consideration.
Non english speakers coming to Linux from a windows background have hard time to find the software they needs. For a given usage, the applications names changes (eg. their "photoshop" becomes a "gimp", etc) and they can't guess those software names. But the packages management applications of all the distro I tried (Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu and Suse) always displays packages descriptions in plain english
That's because packages descriptions aren't localized, and it's a showstopper imho.
And yes, that's true: developpers and geeks don't figure how deep is the problem, since they all know english. I guess that Linux compagnies like Red Hat don't care either, because they clients (large corporations, etc.) don't really needs that the end user can find and install his softwares by himself.
Anyway, to come back to this story, localisation of an office suite is great deal, believe me. Not only it's a very important step for the Linux desktop to become usable in a given language. And you must also remember that the (upcoming) spell checking Firefox feature uses the OOo languages files ; and so does the vim spellchecking feature. So every improvment in OOo localisation is really an huge benefit for the FOSS users !
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Package descriptions need localizatin, too !
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 15, 2006 02:00 AMNon english speakers coming to Linux from a windows background have hard time to find the software they needs. For a given usage, the applications names changes (eg. their "photoshop" becomes a "gimp", etc) and they can't guess those software names. But the packages management applications of all the distro I tried (Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu and Suse) always displays packages descriptions in plain english
That's because packages descriptions aren't localized, and it's a showstopper imho.
And yes, that's true: developpers and geeks don't figure how deep is the problem, since they all know english. I guess that Linux compagnies like Red Hat don't care either, because they clients (large corporations, etc.) don't really needs that the end user can find and install his softwares by himself.
Anyway, to come back to this story, localisation of an office suite is great deal, believe me. Not only it's a very important step for the Linux desktop to become usable in a given language. And you must also remember that the (upcoming) spell checking Firefox feature uses the OOo languages files ; and so does the vim spellchecking feature. So every improvment in OOo localisation is really an huge benefit for the FOSS users !
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