Chinese OS and software ecosystem

daifo

Major
Registered Member
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Good video showing current capabilities of the HarmonyOS PC. It definitely seems much better developed than previous Chinese OS like UOS or Kylin

You can only download apps from official store at the moment. There are things like WPS, and chinese alternatives of video editing and photoshop, which seem to work well. Browser is chrome 114 and webkit 537

Aesthetics wise, it looks incredible. It's really like a best of both worlds from Mac and Windows. Looks easy to pick up and nice file system. Much nicer animations and sophistication than Windows (in fact looks even better than Mac to me).

Overall I think definitely a viable choice for mainly word/excel type business users who have lots of money and want to support Huawei

I guess time will tell. Right now, it seems like it sits between a chromebook and a mac. The "apps" selection are closer to a chromebook while the price will likely be similar to a expanded macbook pro.

There is some indication that it will be able to run some windows app using binary translation and "wine" , similar to loongson's approach. There doesn't seem to be any indication that it comes with a linux subsystem but maybe it will come later from huawei or "3rd party" which I think is a big miss opportunity. If it was fully capable of running Linux container and x window server, it could be an option for millions of developers from day 1.
 

Phead128

Major
Staff member
Moderator - World Affairs
Just for my knowledge, say if I bought a Huawei laptop running on Kirin X90 chip with HarmonyOS 5, can I run windows applications (specifically Microsoft Office, like Word/Excel?) I mostly use Word/Excel, not sure how HarmonyOS 5 handles that.
 

huemens

Junior Member
Registered Member
Just for my knowledge, say if I bought a Huawei laptop running on Kirin X90 chip with HarmonyOS 5, can I run windows applications (specifically Microsoft Office, like Word/Excel?) I mostly use Word/Excel, not sure how HarmonyOS 5 handles that.

Based on the videos that are appearing, it has WPS Office, which can handle Office documents. WPS office provides similar functionality to MS Office. There's also a Virtualizer called OSEasy (someone posted a video above), which will allow you to install a full-fledged Windows VM. Then within the VM you can install any apps that can run on Windows ARM devices. The ARM version of Windows has built-in emulation for x86_32 (Windows 10) and x86_64 (since Windows 11). So technically you would be able to run x86 Windows apps too.
 
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ember

New Member
Registered Member
HarmonyOS PC running on a new huawei folding laptop

Turns out Windows was seriously holding Huawei back.

They also revealed the pricing for the MateBook Pro, starting at just 8,000 RMB, while their Linux laptops cost at least 2k more. Guess Intel's chip pricing was choking them too.

The only thing missing now is a Huawei desktop PC with an Ascend GPU to replace Nvidia.
 
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