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City of Vienna Chooses Linux
Bill Kendrick writes "Back in January, ZDNet reported that the city of Vienna, Austria was looking to move at least a portion of its desktops to Linux. Well, it looks like it happened (in German; use the fish). Their official distro is based on Debian with KDE, and is called WEINUX." Update: 07/06 12:49 GMT by T : Several readers wrote to correct the spelling here: the correct name of the distro is "WIENUX."
That's a very ambitious target if they are only offering it, not saying "you will use this".
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We get the report when a decent sized city and/or organization switches to Linux? I would rather read some reports of how the transition to Linux was, what software they use, initial user reactions to the OS. You know basic shit like that.
I like the idea and the approach, that the city turn s to linux on the desktop AND using a own distro for this.
After all, with this everything is implemented THEY need, nothing more and nothing less...they take advantage of the biggest advantage of OSS:
Choice!
Instead of using a company or existing product per se (I know, its based in Debian), they changed it to their needs and they offer a voluntary change for the employees (at least at the beginning).
I wish them luck and hope they will make progress fast.
My advice to people is, if you want something easy and are willing to spend $100, get SuSE in the box. There are a ton of applications to help you configure your system. You can use SuSE to run a server, and not worry about downtime (unlike Mandrake which will crash, I have seen it happen at a linux fest, where 12 of us stood in disbelief looking at the new blue screen of death). I knew another guy who had a webserver and ssh set up on SuSE and it ran for over 200 days without a glitch (he took it down when he upgraded his system).
For someone not wanting to start a distro war you do an amazingly good job of starting one using little more than anecdotal evidence. My Mandrake box which I use for all my computer work has been running for almost 420 days now without a reboot. Just goes to show how much a single experience is worth.
The "basic user" who is only using it for email/internet/office is going to be very afraid to switch, unwilling, upset and just generally not happy about the change. I've seen it happen in my workplace, where a large number of the workers are just barely competant in Windows to do what they want. Try to force a new operating system on them, and you'll have mass revolt.
It's better to offer it as an option, and slowly push it. It also gives them a chance to work out the kinks on the users who don't mind as much (since they were willing to be earlier-adopters).
Eventually, the afraid huddling masses will say, "Hey, how did you do that? That's pretty cool, I can't do that on my Windows system" and they'll train each other on it. But that will take time.
So... that's the extremely drawn out answer of 'why' they won't immediately make it the standard.
Redundant or offtopic, don't care:
;)
Lets just say Gnome is better than KDE regardless of distro.
And you get Informative when starting an post with that line.
Go Gnome-ers, just please, keep it [i.e. Gnome] out of my face.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Kind of like some of the countless U.S. reality shows where people and houses are made over (e.g. - The Swan, The Biggest Loser, Extreme Home Makeover). Rather than short term focus I'd love to see the shows check in a year later to see how things look. That's more indicative of true success and failure.
we don't eat much sauerkraut. That's what Germans do.
No, we don't. Well, at least most of us don't - you couldn't force me to eat that crap. But there are weirdos everywhere...