One awesome thing that is easy to notice in free/libre software is how international it is.  While proprietary software is mainly based out of the US – Windows/OSX – free/libre software comes from all over the place. Mandriva is based out of Brazil and France.  SUSE was originally developed in Germany.  Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Gnome, was born in Mexico.  Choqok, the best KDE-native microblogging software is created by an Iranian.  So something that Linux has always done better than Windows is support more languages. Microsoft has to pay to create language translations so they have to make a market analysis about which languages to support (and it still doesn’t cover non-Microsoft programs)  With Linux, it’s all volunteer work (or paid by companies that care about localization) and if the programs are written correctly for KDE and Gnome, they will all be able to take advantage of the translation work for their program.  “Save” should probably translate well across all well-written programs.  I think this is one of the reason why all the regions of Spain have their own Linux distros.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that Windows probably only comes out in Castillian (official or regular Spanish) and not in Catalan, Andalusian, Basque, etc 

Now, back in 2005 I ran Gnome in Spanish for about a month. I thought I’d give it a shot in KDE and see how well the desktop environment works in Spanish.  I realize I’m not the best person to evaluate this.  While I am of Cuban ancestry, I was born in the USA and my parents taught me English as a first language.  On top of that, nearly all the Spanish I know is conversational, not tech-based.  But, in a sense, that is perfect because it can help me to learn some more technical terms in Spanish.  Interestingly, I learned last that that “the net” like the Internet is translated to “el red” which is the Spanish word for a net like what goes across a Tennis court.

I’m using Fedora 14 which has been out for about three or so months and KDE 4.5.  I use GDM because I use the main Fedora install which is based on Gnome.  I set the Gnome language to Español (United States) and logged into KDE.  There were a bunch of weird inconsistencies.  My weather widget was correctly translated to Spanish.  (Although the forecast was in English – based on where it’s scraping from, I’m sure)  However, system messages were in English and Kontact was in English.  That didn’t make any sense.  Why did the widgets get the memo, but not Kontact?  Well, I loaded up KPackagekit and it turns out that, while I had the KOffice Spanish language pack installed, I didn’t have the KDE Spanish language pack installed.  (Note, I only typed spanish and there did not appear to be a package for that specific to Gnome)  So I installed it.  What follows is a series of screenshots of the programs I use every day in English and in Spanish.