Will Munich's Linux Desktops Be Running Windows?

An anonymous reader writes "Remember that story about the city of Munich choosing Linux to power 14,000 desktop computers? One aspect of this story that most people don't know about is that up to 80 percent of those Linux desktops will be equipped with VMWare, a virtual machine emulator, under which they will run Windows and Windows applications. That's right, folks: The majority of those 'Linux desktops' will be used to run ... Windows." This Gartner report from early June seems to be the one mentioned in the article, though I'm not sure exactly where Thurrott gets the 80% figure.

Comments

Re:Betrayal

[DNS-and-BIND]

The only reason linux was chosen is jingoism by the city of Frankfurt. They simply didn't want an American winning, and were willing to do anything, even pay more, to accomplish that goal. And who can blame them, given the attitude of the current American government?

Re:Not smart.

[TheZax]

This is just stupid

This might be a neccesity in the short term. A company cannot easily change all software out in one fell swoop. Particularly when the migration path is unclear. They could have vendor supplied apps, in-house apps, or apps required because of outside the company compatibility requirements.
Just identifying all the software used in a 14,000 seat deployment is probably hard to do, much less finding existing solutions, or rolling their own.
So this is very likely a necessity, or at least a viable option they chose, until all those apps can be replaced, which just can't happen immediately. Particularly when they are going to already be busy deploying the new desktops and training. And even then, you have issues with co-existence. The time between the first desktop getting rolled out, and the 14,00th desktop being rolled out.
So my take on it is that it is a lesser of 2 evils, and my guess is that their requirements for all new apps would be to get them off vmWare as soon as feasable.

There's always OpenOffice.org, instead of MS Office....

If you've used OpenOffice with MS docs, you probably wouldn't be so hot on it. I like OO, but I would never send out an OO doc saved in Word format, without previewing it in Word first. I have seen way to many problems with things like Table Of Contents, image embedding and things that are common in corporate documents.