…but not legal. Being poor doesn’t necessarily mean you’re inclined to break the law. Besides, Linux is useful if you perhaps want to later get a job in the tech field.

why go through the trouble when linux is free?

While it is free to download it, the license still costs. Though they seem to let you use it unlicensed for an unlimited amount of time with some restrictions (like not being able to change the background image and an ever present watermark). At least this was true for windows 10. No telling if/when they will drop that feature though, especially if loads of people start using it unlicensed like that (though I doubt that has any effect on people using it that way or not).

Only for existing users+machines who are upgrading. New machines gotta pay up.

Was, but no longer is. It is officially discontinued, making the ₹500 note the largest for now. I would expect the Government to quickly launch a new large-denomination note. India is still a largely cash society and the largest note being worth 6 USD is surely going to be inconvenient for everyday citizens.

The Government demonetised ₹1000 and ₹2000 banknotes a few years back as part of a campaign against “black money”. The Government’s thinking was that criminal organisations hoarded large amounts of cash in these large-denomination notes, and by forcing everyone to deposit the notes immediately into the bank, it would bring light to the flow of money.

It was not particularly successful and mostly all it did was lead to a week of chaos and long queues outside banks.

Underpay and overwork their Indian workers like a motherfucker.

Return to office is mandated back to 5 days a week and 9 hours a day minimum at some of these places. The company makes bank but the workers get cents on a dollar.

deleted by creator

chatiya? chetiya? chitiya? chotiya? chutiya?

Why are you censoring yourself? I’m not sure that word means anything in English.

Removed by mod

ironically enough i think microsoft (at least until very recently) has had a very lenient stance on piracy exactly because of this

piracy is the key to the consumer market in developing countries, consumer market is the key to enterprise (where the actual money lies)

I remember switching to linux because windows was shit and because I was afraid of getting caught using pirated warez. Is there no fear of that there?

It feels like those kinds of countries are perfect targets for linux and FLOSS.

Windows maintenance free? Are you kidding?

Actually It is Lubuntu with LXDE.

That would be a permanent increase /decrease.

I would assume that “market share” is related to the relative number of units sold/number of active subscriptions/fraction of total sales in terms in revenue, or some similar metric. I run a variety of different distributions on servers (bare metal, VMs and containers) and desktop computers. Do they all count equally? Without giving it more thought, I wouldn’t even know how to determine the market share of Ubuntu in my own home in a sensible way.

With Windows, I can just count the number of active licenses. Oh wait, its zero.

Just tossing a guess, would love for someone who actually knows to chime in though: in their language they’re probably taught to refer to strangers with the respective word for “sir” as a formal construct, so they apply the same to English even though the culture is different, because they will probably be taught this way as sometimes happens, school teachers don’t actually pass on the cultural uses/ways of talking of the countries where the language is spoken alongside the language itself, so it’s easier to stick to plain translation in some cases

Not sure about the colonial mindset or the caste practices of centuries but Indian culture is extremely hierarchial in almost all facets of life. Elders, seniors, higher officials, etc all expect to be respected even if it is just one year difference, etc.

One of the ways to show respect it to not use names and call as sir,madam, teacher, officer or at best elder brothers/sisters for college seniors. All this works well in the regional languages of India but sounds weird in English.

Directly calling names of elders is still seen as bad and if needed would use their name appended with sir madam uncle aunt etc.

This is less practiced in IT field in my experience. After years of schooling and college calling my teachers sir and maam it was hard to shake off the habit. A few of my managers had to remind me a bunch of times to call them by their name and not as sir / maam in the beginning. Even then I avoidedcallintg out their names and just started speaking to get their attention. Now I almost call everyone by name by default in office setting. It is still fun when freshers join and are asked to use names of 15+ year elders and them wondering if we are joking.

It’s due to the nature of social interactions in India (more broadly, South Asia).

In most of our native languages, we don’t directly address someone by their name, unless we’ve been acquainted before (sometimes even after, if it was just a formal acquaintance). We add a little something for politeness and respect. So it’s always ‘firstname’-ji or ‘lastname’-ji, for example, in Hindi.

Since there isn’t a direct carry over for this in English, people adopted sir or ma’am as replacement.

That’s more or less it. It’s about respect when interacting with someone else.

You’ll notice that people who have been brought up in or are more familiar with western culture don’t really do this.

EDIT: Unless ofcourse, your question was regarding the accent. In that case, most south asian written scripts lack certain soft tonal pronunciations of English alphabets, so most conversions result in hard sounding words, due to which you get the characteristic Indian (or again, more accurately, South Asian) accent.

Ah. This makes sense! Thanks!