What is the point? (Score 1)

What is the point of duplicating an operating system? More precisely, what is the point of producing an OS solely for the purpose of supporting another OS' exposed programming API? The hurdles facing the Chinese operating system markets are two fold. First, there is the support to the Chinese national characters, which consist of BIG5 (for traditional Chinese, applicable to Taiwan and Hong Kong) and GB (for simplified Chinese, applicable to mainland China). Windows 98 has very bad support of either encoding methods since it has no internal support for Unicode characters and therefore must rely on double byte character encoding. What that means is that the win98 subset of win32 API has no intrinsic support of the Chinese language which simultaneously supports other Unicode languages. Or more precisely, the support for both traditional and simplified Chinese requires some really sophisticated character recognition algorithms. That speaks nothing of the other languages which a generalized OS such as Linux and Windows NT/2000/XP should conceptually support. Even if the complex problem of language support is ironed out, it says nothing to the sophisticated use of fonts in the Chinese language including word processing (yes, word processing requires very sophisticated manipulation of fonts), typesetting, and inter-OS communications requisite in a modern working environment. Instead of concentrating on creating another OS, China should focus its academic attention on augmenting the Chinese support of existing Linux variants. Which currently sucks imo compared to existing standards on WinXP and MacOS.