Hey, Guys. I'm very grateful for your replies. Your spelling and grammar are
better than me :)
I'd like to disclose some of my personal information here.
I'm from Mainland China and I'm currently doing undergraduate in a Hong Kong
university.
I have two old PCs running GNU/Linux. One Debian and one Fedora. I know
what's good about GNU/Linux. Maybe I'd try vrms[1] some time.
I have a new Macbook Pro. I haven't used OSX before. I find myself spend much
time using MacPorts[2].
I had an iBad. But I gave it to my girlfriend :)
I keep contacting with Chinese FOSS community, both online and off-line. I'm
not sure whether open source is an offensive word here. But many people I
know about do not distinguish Free and Open Source seriously. Put it in
another way, they won't care whether there is binary driver or whether
something is open source but under a restricted license.
In my humble opinion, free software is for the general public rather than
just for technical savvy. So they should work out-of-the-box. But I met many
blockers. Let's give you a list.
1. At least a university in Guangzhou uses IE-only e-campus system. This
university is within top10 in China. Would students use free OS that cannot
register classes? I and some other people already pushed the university's
staff but in vain. Some hackers there comes with the following (in Chinese).
I respect the developer but it is still a temporarily fix. When the
developer graduate, it may not have maintenance anymore.
https://github.com/humiaozuzu/py-sysu-jwxt
2. Most Mainland China E-banking and other critical stuff is IE-only. See the
following site for details (in Chinese).
http://www.openbanks.info/
3. My university use L2TP/IPSec VPN extensively. The network manager hasn't
an official L2TP plugin it. GNU/Linux users have to use CLI if they follow
official instruction. Worse, the provided script is not perfect. I'm working
on this issue by many ways.
http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/itsc/network/vpn/index.html
4. The default input method setting detail is not good for Hong Kong people.
I wrote an issue github and some people copy my word to Launchpad and Debian
BTS.
https://github.com/acevery/ibus-table/issues/9
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ibus-table/+bug/947908
5. A very enthusiastic GNU/Linux user in another Hong Kong university told me
that WiFi performance in one of Linux laptop is worse than Windoze. So he
preserved the Windoze for that machine.
6. A very enthusiastic GNU/Linux user and Fedora packager in Guangzhou told
me that GNU/Linux uses battery twice as fast as Windoze. He can accept this
fact, though.
7. The CentOS 5.5 machines in my department do not support Chinese at all by
default. I contacted the administrator but he refuses upgrading. Recently, I
organized a workshop on how to install Chinese font and input methods to home
directory.
