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Turbolinux Not Dead Yet
Abdul Nabi writes "I found this article on Linux Today which is a response from Turbolinux to the recent rumors of a shutdown. The responds contends that they are restructuring rather than shutting down." Ya know, I can't
think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has
something to do with their problems.
Basically, they are shutting down their US dependance to reduce cost. The US market is overcrowded with Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and Caldera who all try to sell support and services, too. So Turbolinux is going back to their home market where the competition is not that stiff.
We've already seen this with SuSE back in August last year when they layed off 30 of their US staff.
I was recently in a bit of a sporting mood so I downloaded TurboLinux 7 workstation.. I wouldn't recommend it at all to anyone, it's terrible.. sorta seems like someone takes a linux kernel, installs windows on top of it and hands it to you.. I'm running a 1ghz p3 with 512mb of ram (PC133@Cas 2) and after a standard boot of it I had something like 33mb of ram free.. thats just terrible! my xp machine isn't even THAT bad.
Turbo to this day has an installer that can compete only with slackware and debian, if you noticed neither of those installers are actually what anyone would call "user friendly". But they weren't designed to be user friendly they were designed to install their distribution. Turbo's marketshare is in Asia and Southern America. Europe and the US see RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian and think that the other distros of the past are dead.
Has anyone here every looked at the list of linux distributions out there today? It's not like there is a perfect distro for everyone. I wouldn't say Turbo was dead, just like I wouldn't say that and OSS project is dead. A dead OSS project is unknown because someone has forgotten about it. If there is at least one person who knows and uses a distro/software then it's not dead.
On a wee bit of a side note, if you want to count how success and whether or not something is alive by monetary values. How much money can one really expect to make on something that is free? I'm not trying to start a Open Source flamefest, but just identifying the original intent of Open Source, freedom. Can you put a price on freedom? I can't.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
People wonder about why TurboLinux is still around when they know nobody who uses it. The reason it's still around is because it has one killer feature: Japanese support. It is the only distro with good Japanese support. Other distros have a hodgepodge of Japanese implemented but they are nowhere near as thorough (sure Japanese might work in the installer, but will it work in your shell? Will your file manager let you easily see Japanese filenames? etc.)
:-)
In addition it also supports other East Asian languages better than any other distro but Japanese is the most important since Japan has the best track record for actually paying money for software.
You see, supporting languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. is not just a matter of translating the text in your application. The big problem is actually supporting the multibyte text format itself in every display. Most applications expect text to be one byte per character, and they format text that way and always render as ASCII. You can patch the graphical text rendering functions to render Japanese automatically but if the application still assumes that the text area is a certain size it will look fucked up. Not only that, but Linux uses a real hodgepodge of display mechanisms so you have to frantically patch to get them all.
TurboLinux is still behind Japanese Windows and Japanese MacOS in terms of ability to use Japanese/Chinese/Korean text anywhere you can use Roman text. This has really hurt the acceptance of Linux in East Asia.... but TurboLinux is getting better at least.
So far no other distro has come anywhere near as close as Turbo in support. If Turbo dies then Linux in East Asia will suffer a major blow from which it may not recover. (Red Flag Linux might survive, but RFL *STILL* not as good in terms of Chinese-language support as Turbo).
If you want to find a user of Turbo in the U.S. to see, look for someone who speaks Japanese.
Not really. Japan is pretty much sewn up by VineLinux (a Japanese-only distribution, which is why you've never heard of it).
TurboLinux was reasonably popular a couple of years ago, but they switched from selling a packaged distribution to having it pre-installed on servers sold by large manufacturers. I don't actually know anybody using it, though...