What languages ​​do our users speak?

The fact that in KolibriOS there are not Russian- speaking developers (although there are very few of them), some of you already know from my previous post . However, the developers themselves, in turn, are interested to know if we have non-Russian-speaking users.

Before we asked this question, KolibriOS was produced in 2 languages: Russian and English. Accordingly, each new feature and each editing of the program / core required the programmer who made them to add / correct all messages, buttons and labels in both languages. ¹ Perhaps it is advisable to stop releasing the English assembly, and concentrate all their efforts on the Russian?

¹ Frankly speaking, since our project is free and free, and all our programmers work on a voluntary basis, no one can force them to make changes / write programs in both languages. So we have developers who display all messages / buttons / labels only in English (the same hidnplayr , for example, although he does it for an understandable reason - he does not know Russian), and there are those who write everything only in Russian (therefore, their programs / games are included only in the Russian assembly). Unfortunately, with this approach, users of either of the two KolibriOS assemblies do not receive the " full experience " (either localization is incomplete or there is no program at all).

To have a rough idea of ​​the subject, we conducted a survey among the members of our group on Facebook . Today, there are about 350 people in the group (about 100-150 ² of them voted), so the sample can be considered quite complete. The voting results are shown in the screenshot:
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² This inaccuracy in the counting of votes is due to the fact that Facebook does not provide any way to save the survey results to a file, and the question was asked: " What languages ​​do you speak? ". Consequently, users had to mark all the languages ​​they know, which they did. Facebook , for one reason known to him, shows the total number of votes (in our case, 237 ), and not the number of voters. Since one person may know several languages, the total number of votes says nothing. I had to manually click on the pluses and count the participants, but very quickly I got tired of it (and the results change faster than I manage to recount everything), so 100-150 people voted, or rather I will not say. “Ticks” mark those languages ​​in which I speak myself (or at least understand). These are English, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian and Hebrew. Facebook counts them for 5 votes ( instead of 1 voted ).

As we see, native speakers of English are the most ( 79 people ), which is, in general, logical (English is the language of world communication). Behind them, there are native Spanish speakers ³ languages ​​(28 people), which is also natural, because Spanish is spoken, except for Spain itself, almost all of its former American colonies (Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, etc.) .

³ Yes, yes, it is Spanish, despite the fact that the second in the list is Russian. The brazen Facebook sorted the list as it saw fit, without asking if it suits me, and without providing any options for choosing the sorting itself. I thought for a long time what kind of logic is in such sorting, but finally I understood: the list is first sorted by the number of people in my friends (including myself) who voted for each answer, and only then by the number of votes in general. That is why, 3> 6, and 20> 28

Then there will be a surprise - the third number in the list ( 21 people ) suddenly goes Persian , it is the language of the people of Iran (and some neighboring countries). At first, I thought it was either a botnet / hacker attack, or a poorly disguised attempt to find out my military secret (I will explain for those who have just joined us: I am a Jew from Israel, the administrator of the official KolibriOS group on Facebook . About Iran’s relations with Israel, I think, do not need to tell. ). But it turned out - no, ordinary IT-Schnick and users, not hackers and not from intelligence. That's what attracts them so much our operating system, remains a mystery to me. We have one assumption similar to the truth: Since the United States has imposed an embargo on Iran, then Microsoft , being a company registered in the United States, has no right to sell them licensed copies of Windows , and they have no place to pirate them to protect and protect against viruses, again, no access to Microsoft servers. Therefore, the Iranians are forced to use open source software (free software), and they also consider KolibriOS as an option. But this is only our assumption - we have no evidence. Maybe someone from the readers will clarify? The Persians themselves behave reclusive in our group, almost do not participate in discussions.

The fourth and sixth places are Russian and Ukrainian languages ​​- they are known to 20 and 10 people , respectively. But here the statistics are lying, because in fact there are much more of them (just native speakers of Russian / Ukrainian language are mainly used by VKontakte , not Facebook ). Therefore, we will assume that the majority of Russian speakers (more than 1,600 people in our VKontakte group, even if only every tenth of them are actually KolibriOS users, still get 160 people - 2 times more than English-speaking).

The fifth in a row is Italian ( 11 people ). The rest are not so interesting (less than 10 voted).

Epilogue

As a result of the voting, it became clear that English should, of course, be left, and continue to assemble the English assembly on a par with Russian. Moreover, two members of our Facebook group (Spanish-speaking from Uruguay and Italian-speaking from Italy) offered us their help in localizing KolibriOS into Spanish and Italian, respectively. We refused for a long time, because now programmers will need to make every revision in four languages. We gladly accepted this assistance, and more recently on our official website KolibriOS is available for download in four languages: Russian, English, Spanish and Italian.