The Wikipedia articles all just say things like “specialized support” or “special needs”. I would have assumed that the key requirement is Hangul input, which presumably other word processing and spreadsheet programs could do just fine.

Hangul support was a key feature in the 80s where everything was MS-DOS; and it wasn’t prevalent then where a lot of hangul-supporting word processors were on the market.

The killer feature of the Hangul Word Processor to most users is that it allows substantial control on the layout of the document... in a way that westerners don’t really care. (That’s a direct quote from a foreigner I know, maybe an over-generalization.) So the Korean Government and a lot of corporations were very committed on transitioning documents that were written by hand, to computers, and they also wanted to have this exact layout and form that was used before. Most forms are based out of tables — and I can’t really explain this in text, but it gives you the power to layout the text the exact way you want, while in Word, you feel like you’re wrestling with the layout engine. (Kinda like... if Word is old CSS where you had to use all kinds of float hacks to make your fragile layout, HWP gives you flexbox and grids... etc....) Some says that HWP is more like a DTD program like InDesign (I’ve never used it so I can’t really comment) rather than a usual word processor that other countries use... but everybody is just super used to having all that control, so nobody can really transition back to Word.

That's an understatement, the UX for that in Word is pretty awful without some deep familiarity. Even using tables to format stuff was difficult and choppy.

Although I've never had to use Word professionally and fortunately most of my education just required the standard format + some spacing requirements, which were easy.

Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?)

First of all, QuarkXPress had shitty, really shitty language support. You might be surprised when you know that most pro apps have really, really poor CJK support — apps like Photoshop currently has really hacky input support bolted on later, and frequently a problem. Even big, user facing apps like Microsoft Excel still has lots of problems with input. So back in the days where the word processor market was more diverse, QuarkXPress was not an option.

Then also, there is the popularity problem where people have not used or even heard about DTD software like this, and it’s not really a friendly interface for users to create and modify documents.

This is a side story but... publishers that needed DTD software used QuarkXPress back in the day. The company backing the software had frequent conflicts with the local publishers with license pricing, and the publishers decided to protest by not upgrading to the latest version — and AFAIK lots of small publishers that didn’t have the manpower to convert all of it’s files to InDesign still buys used PowerMacs to run the version(I’m not sure but something like 3.3 — released in 1996!) that they use.

> Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?)

> presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”.

Yeah, pretty much true too.

Having lots of templates in HWP is one of the reason why HWP isn’t disappearing; there is vendor lock-in due to custom file formats, and people don’t feel any reason to move to another one.

Unicode was standardized, then the utf8 format after that, which *nix took full advantage of, but other legacy software (see paragraph 1) did not evolve in some cases.

While other global programs could be shoehorned into their use case, it still means poor customizability for specific Korean issues. In particular being optimized for the most common Korean use case vs western designers use cases.

There’s a lot of these local brew word processor in the CJK world, and it’s often more than just language support: there will be hooks for common legal formatting, better handling of common transformations, sometimes a dedicated IME working better for long form writing. It also means more culturally useful templates from first party source, which is surprisingly nice to have IMO.

It’s also interesting that local companies/gov. can pay for additional features or adaptations, have the talent move to other entities in the local economy, etc. which is a way higher hurdle for an Adobe or Microsoft.

There's a similar tendency in Japan to use MS Excel for a lot of documents that westerners would use MS Word for for the same reason - detailed, rigid, layout.

Microsoft will just offer Windows for free and Office at a steep discount and nothing will change. Mark my words :-)

Which... doesn’t have a really incentive now in because all of the legacy components that required Windows in the first place are all broken on Win10...

> Office at a steep discount

... and we don’t really rely on Microsoft Office that much (compared to other countries). The dominant word processor is from a local company (side note: Word is just awful... seriously. Maybe it’s due to no competition., and the local company has viable solutions that provide very high compatibility (seriously, l just can’t believe how they did it, it’s super compatible) with Word, Excel & Powerpoint. (AFAIK they export them to other countries governments as well.)

They learnt to deal with the terrible UX in Windows, no reason they can’t on Linux. :-)

> it might not be much better but she's used to it.

It’s her work, she better get used to it too keep working; That’s a pretty compelling reason to get used to Linux, right?

Linux's terrible UIs change pretty much every month as Linux GUI devs get bored and decide to reinvent everything for no reason. Microsoft has only recently started doing that and it's still at a much slower pace.

But you know, there are versions with commercial support out there. And governments could have the budget to actually maintain their own version. (they do btw.)

They could, but they won’t.

They want Outlook and Word and Excel, and they’ll exhibit a mule-like stubbornness to budge.

I’ve mentioned that we don’t use Word, (BTW, seriously, is there anyone who uses Outlook anymore?) and the dominant word processor used in South Korea had a port to Linux that is fully featured and has a very high compatibility since 2008.

Outlook is still huge amongst professions that have to deal with people a lot. The calendaring is better than online solutions (by a lot) and the plugins, I am told, for stuff like Salesforce are awesome.

They are redesigned every version though, there's nothing fixed to want from them.

Linux has an upper hand in terms of UX since Windows Vista, and the gap widened greatly since then, go read what people think about metro.

A little hard to complain when we can take dlls that are 10-12 years old shove them into something like server 2019/SQL 2019, and not think about compatibility.

Same goes for client apps, was your app shit 10 years ago? It's not going to change 10 years later. Did it work in word 10 years ago, it will most likely work 10 years later with zero changes.

See other comments here

Of course not! :-) I don’t run Linux myself for these reasons... but the government agency PCs has no requirement to run these. The officials shouldn’t run useless programs on work, right? :-)

Also, as a side point, AFAIK all of the operating systems that are mentioned in the article has native support for executing Windows applications using Wine - as there are still programs that only support Windows. Unlike other Linux distributions where Wine is a second level citizen, the distributions have preinstalled Wine wrappers for the dominant IM in South Korea so if the government wants it, wrapping up a version of Photoshop that works on Wine won't be that hard.