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It would be a great learning tool to have the OS (operating system) in my computer completely in Latin. Does such OS exist? Or, maybe, did such OS exist in the past, and was not longer maintained?

Apparently, recent versions of Windows do not include Latin as a Language Pack. Yet, I know Windows had dropped some languages which were available in Windows XP (e.g. Mapudungun). Maybe an older Windows version had it? Current versions of Mac OS do not support Latin either. What about other OS?

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Regarding Linux, there seem to have never existed such OS (but non existence hard to prove). As this is an open-source OS, it is based on collaboration, and as such, translation are made by enthusiasts of a given Language. There have been efforts in the past, like KDE and Gnome, but both seem dead.

The only project I could find to be still "alive", albeit with very low activity, is Ubuntu. At the moment not a single package has been fully translated, and there are 245,352 entries (phrases) waiting to be translated. Therefore, at least from the Ubuntu community, a fully Latin OS might not arrive very soon.

(PS: The advantage of Ubuntu in terms of translations, and what makes a Latin OS a real possibility, is that any translation made in the past are rolled into new distributions (when possible), and as such, are not lost. That means that valid translations last for long. There is no need to re-translate it for new releases.)

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    Since you're working on it, have this as something that is potentially useful: latin.stackexchange.com/questions/550/… – C. M. Weimer May 7 '17 at 22:40
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    Here's the translation link for Ubuntu 18.04. Currently 311,887 strings to go, but, to be fair, many of them are repeats. If we got all 123 Latin SE users in the reputation leagues to participate, the translation would probably get done reasonably soon – jpyams Mar 3 '18 at 20:50
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The classical operating system MULTICS wasn't completely in Latin, but it included a famous error message in Latin: HODIE NATUS EST RADICI FRATER. The linked webpage on multicians.org gives the full story.

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  • Did it include something else in Latin, other than that message? – luchonacho May 10 '17 at 6:37
  • @luchonacho: I am not aware of more Latin in Multics, but I do not have in-depth knowledge of the Multics internals. – jknappen - Reinstate Monica May 10 '17 at 8:30

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