German Foreign Office Going Back To Windows

vbraga writes "The German government has confirmed that the German Foreign Office is to switch back to Windows desktop systems. The Foreign Office started migrating its servers to Linux in 2001 and since 2005 has also used open source software such as Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on its desktop systems. The government's response to the SPD's question states that, although open source has demonstrated its worth, particularly on servers, the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated. The extent to which the potential savings trumpeted in 2007 have proved realizable has, according to the government, been limited – though it declines to give any actual figures. Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."

Comments

Sad

[Mostly a lurker]

I find it curious that Linux on the desktop should be so well accepted in some markets (especially Latin America) and resisted so vigorously in others. Anyway, this is sad news, whatever the reasons.

Re:Sad

[TheDarkMaster]

I'm from Latin America. And honestly, most Linux users here use it for not having a choice (no money for a copy of Windows or by imposition of the work).

And I must make it clear: The problem is the Linux desktop , not the Linux server. The server works perfectly, but the desktop depends on much more than a good kernel to be useful for the average user.

Re:Sad

[lennier1]

Apples and oranges.

Germans don't have as much of a need for credit cards because they either prefer to pay cash or they use their bank cards (basically authorizes the store to debit the money straight from the respective bank account). Not that different from the US where people are still using checks but simply without the need to waste tons of paper and thanks to international agreements the electronic payments are possible across borders.

That's why credit cards are looked at in this manner. They're either used to buy something on credit (read: pay with money you don't have) or in most cases an inconvenient necessity to buy from foreign vendors or for the occasional foreign customers.

Re:Sad

[Joce640k]

It's all down to how much your time is worth.

If your time isn't worth much then spending all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working is OK.

If you're a big government then paying admins/consultants to fiddle with machines rapidly becomes very expensive.

In my own experience of getting ordinary people to use computers, Linux computers needed a lot more fiddling then Windows machines. I suspect the German government is finding out the same thing.

Re:Sad

[cHALiTO]

Well,, I'm from Argentina, and I disagree. I know TONS of people (even non-geeks) that use ubuntu or some other flavor of linux on the desktop willingly, and the cost of a copy of windows here is absolutely irrelevant, as almost everyone pirates it, unless it came preloaded with a notebook or a brand pc (and even then, many notebooks come with win7 home or starter and it gets replaced with a pirated copy of win7 pro or ultimate).

Also while I agree there must be a few, I haven't seen any jobs where you're forced to use linux on the desktop, but so far I've worked on 3 companies that either let me install it on my desktop, or already had a corporate approved image with all the corresponding software to use at the workplace (i.e. with lotus notes etc)

Re:Sad

[Yvanhoe]

The main reason being likely the corruption. The more centralized is the decision making, the more likely it is to happen.

I find it strange that amid the wikileaks debacle and now that some of the black-hat works ordered by US govt is becoming publicized ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/black-ops-how-hbgary-wrote-backdoors-and-rootkits-for-the-government.ars/ ) I find it strange that a strategical office like foreign affairs is going back to the vendor-lock-in cradle of MS products.

Re:Sad

[josech]

Truly sad and as a matter of fact, Linux is not well accepted in Latinamerica as a whole. Mexico -my country- is highly dependant on the US trends and policies. We not only have to fight against Microsoft anticompetitive practices, but with nearsighted government officials. This news certainly are a huge blow against the open source promotion in government, particlrarly in Mexico.

Re:Sad

[kiwimate]

Look, I understand the passion that people feel for Linux, FOSS, etc., but why is it sad news? If you step back and look at it from a 65,000 foot level, there are a few notes to take away.

First, try and understand why they made the switch back. It's probably not licensing fees, right? So it's more likely to be difficulty in switching, missing functionality, etc. What are the lessons to be learned?

Second, don't be sad. Seriously. I've said this before - it's supposed to be about choice. If someone chooses to use Windows/other Microsoft products/other closed source products, well then isn't that their choice? I know some people will say "but it's wrong, abc product always crashes, MS can't build secure software" and so on. But - a technologist's job is to find the best solution, for whatever value of best applies to the particular customer in their particular context. And sometimes that may be a Microsoft product, or some other closed source product.* No product is a one-size-fits-all item. If you try and force something to fit the problem, or argue from politics or ideals rather than logic, you're less likely to make a positive impression.

Sometimes it seems as though people on this site want Linux to be everything to everyone, everywhere. I suppose it's not technically a monopoly, and maybe it's harder to argue that there's a lack of freedom of choice if there are different distributions - but I think it goes against the spirit of freedom and competition.

* Except for CA. They're dreadful, and there is never a context where CA is the best solution.

Re:Sad

[elrous0]

How DARE you speak rationally about FOSS on /. sir! You're supposed to rant and rave about how FOSS is the *only* software anyone should use.

Re:Sad

[smash]

Well, in the real world, seamless interoperability with hardware and other businesses (who, like it or not, are on Windows + Office) is important. Staff re-training is important.

The year of linux isn't quite here yet, however if google apps gain traction then it won't be far off. I think perhaps the germans were a little early and are perhaps just abandoning the platform as it comes of age. However after trying for *years* to realize promised savings, you can see why the bean counters have likely said "enough".

Once the "cloud" services take off, desktop os platform (for business use, anyway) becomes a lot less relevant and you'll see the cheaper alternatives flourish.

Re:Sad

[smash]

Germans are well, germans, there is a reason why their industries are known for high quality. And it's a culture thing. Germans seems not the change easily. They seem to keep to ways of old, that have been proved to work.

So thats why they were "early" linux adopters, right?

No this is a symptom of the platform not performing as expected. The irony is that they're changing back just as cloud services are going to make their switch to linux more attractive.

Re:Sad

[multisync]

It's all down to how much your time is worth.

If your time isn't worth much then spending all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working is OK.

So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?

Re:Sad

[smash]

Sorry, but if you have a competent Windows admin, you can get a lot done with minimal daily "fiddling".

You spend the money on quality hardware (then a huge number of driver related stability problems just vanish), licenses and monitoring, then move on to something more interesting than fucking around with the platform.

The downfall of an open source platform is that if you've customized it in any way to get the job done (as you often are required to do) then you need a high-value ($$$$$) resource to fix problems if you are either unavailable or don't have time.

Windows resources grow on trees. You can easily hire one from a third party to fix the issue and shift blame^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H get on with something else.

Re:Sad

[juasko]

Nope, have you traveld there, I my self hava a Credit card, with a bank card. I only choose Debit or credit. Abroad, credit is always used. But it's the same card.

I got 2 Credit cards, one MasterCard one Visa both have Debit which are connected to the same bank account. Traveling in Germany/Australia, there was few shops that had Maestro, something that is old and dead in the country I live in. While traveling in Poland and Czech I never had a problem with buying food or gas to the car.

Germany and Australia turned out to be a nightmare. Buying food in a store chain that exists here in finland where they accept all from Visa to American express. Would only accept Maestro. An that was in a place not long away from dense tourist are during winter times. We quite fast learned to make sure to fill up gas in the bigger cities. And not even there where you able to go to any gasoline station.

Remember quite well also some 17 years ago traveling with my dad trough Europe. As he had his own company he had Shell Cards, Germans hadn't even seen such a thing, on the Shell stations. Where you in rest of europe could drive up to an shell station give them the card and fill up.

Where I am from, only those with creditability get an credit card. That means If you have a credit card you've already proven that you have the money. And the seller will always get his money never the less. So why bother, here people without credit cards are the one unable to pay. Both Master and Visa will cancel your card if you don't pay. I was traveling and ended up being late with one payment. Visa did close my card. Master Card didn't. Since then I've made sure they have different due dates. So incase while abroad one would be closed I would have the other.

Back home I payed the bills and couple of days later Visa was opened.

It's not rocket science.

Re:Sad

[smash]

+1.

OS platforms are tools. Much like hammers and screwdrivers, one tool does not fit all. Pick the best tool for the job, move on. Ideology be damned. Hammering nails with a screwdriver just because of some religious devotion when you could get the work done far quicker with a hammer is retarded. In the business world, that sort of shit will get you fired (eventually).

There are things that linux (or bsd) do very well. There are others that they don't (and often these are areas where Windows or OS X excel). Work out what you want t do then choose the appropriate platform. Much of the time this will result in a mixed environment.

Re:Sad

[drinkypoo]

The downfall of an open source platform is that if you've customized it in any way to get the job done (as you often are required to do) then you need a high-value ($$$$$) resource to fix problems if you are either unavailable or don't have time.

The downfall of a closed source platform is that if you need to customize it in any way to get the job done (as you are often required to do) then you need a high-value (Micro$oft) resource to make source code available to you, which they are not going to do unless you are a massive enterprise customer.

Windows resources grow on trees. You can easily hire one from a third party to fix the issue and shift blame^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H get on with something else.

Yes, it is about blame, which is about perceptions, and has nothing to do with quality of software.

Re:Sad

[nullifi]

I "fiddle" more with Windows than I do Linux. At least with Linux there's log files, text config files, and generally if it's broke, you broke it and have an idea of where to go to fix it. With Windows, one day it's broke, reboot and it's fine. You will never know what happened.

Re:Sad

[TheDarkMaster]

Well, here if you want a legal copy of Windows 7 (for example), you need to pay approximately $ 200 ($ 300 or $ 400 for the "Ultimate" version in U.S. dollars). Here is the version Microsoft sells "starter edition", but as you know is an operating system lie.

You have freedom, but freedom costs money.

Re:Sad

[janisozaur]

Second, don't be sad. Seriously. I've said this before - it's supposed to be about choice. If someone chooses to use Windows/other Microsoft products/other closed source products, well then isn't that their choice?

Your argument may be valid when it comes to private companies or private users, but this is government that we're talking about. A government that is sponsored by the public taxes. I do not wish to spend my hard earned money on proprietary software that cannot be accessed. The money spend should come back to citizens, whether it is by building roads, schools or using/contributing to open source - a software that anyone can use. As such, it is not up to government to choose but to citizens of the country, and I am certainly sure that those who care, are all in favor for using open source. I do not live in germany, but it saddens me how public institutions, which I pay for, cover themselves by unrealistic clauses in public bidding to make sure only MS software gets through. Once again - it might be about the choice, but I am the one who chooses.

Re:Sad

[lennier1]

Lived there for several years.

Germany abandoned the Eurocheque system in favor of Maestro within the last decade and their current cards are still hybrids (additionally the bank where I have my German account has its own additional international agreements and also throws in a free regular MasterCard).

Re:Sad

[juasko]

And shopping with the Master Card, is non problematic?

Re:Sad

[tom17]

I'm sorry, I lived in Munich for 7 years since 2000, using my credit card and debit card in most shops without issue. The only place you don't use it *as much* is in the beer gardens & restaurants, though you can still use them just fine in most (it' just annoys them cos it's slower). Some places do not accept it, just like over here (Thanks, No Frills!).

Also, pretty much every German I knew there had a credit card. It's standard issue to offer you a credit card when you open a new bank account there. What is different is how they use it. They typically do not get into debt there. That CC's are used as a debt-inducing tool in most of the western world is not a fault of the Cc's. I have *never* carried a balance on any of my CCs.

Cheques, on the other hand, are useless there. They look at you, wondering what in the hell you are giving them (this is the bank tellers, I am talking about), then they go look for a special form and come back 5 mins later and accept your cheque. This is a good thing as it's an utterly dated payment method. It's retarded that it's still in use in modern countries.

If anything, Germany is AHEAD of the times in these regards, everything financial is super efficient and fast as it's all electronic (Except giving your Euros to the beer lady :) )

Re:Sad

[tom17]

Hmm, maybe I got a little ahead of myself as you said coins & paper cash. It was this that I was reacting to and in my typede (like I stampede? I dunno), I forgot that I mostly used my CC for online stuff and online bills. It was my EC card (Direct debit) that I was using daily. Ooops. it's been a while and I have been using my CC over here exclusively to get the points. It has skewed my memory of how I used my CC over there.

My point was it is still primarily plastic, not coins & paper...

As for the CC thing. Yeah people do have them and do use them, just not as much as over here.

Sorry I ranted there :)

Re:Sad

[kiwimate]

I don't like Computer Associates. Bad, bloated solutions and dreadful technical support. The appalling level of support is the same world wide (and I've had to suffer it in multiple different regions, so this is not some random bloviating on my part).

I once had a site where the anti-virus solution from CA was slowing the entire network to a crawl because it was checking files it shouldn't have been checking, and the exclusion lists simply didn't work. I logged a call to the Asia-Pacific help desk. They had to escalate to North America. Forget a quick response, they apparently didn't have 24x7 support. Everything was a three way conversation - me to Australia, Australia to US, with no way to cut out the middle man. I followed up a week later, and they hadn't done anything. They e-mailed me several days after that with some vague promise of "look for a couple of dll files in your e-mail, that'll fix it". No e-mail. Repeated this a couple of times, still no results.

Finally, after a month of this nonsense, I told my client I was installing something else and binning the CA product. Bang, everything just worked.

CA called back two months after the original call. "Hi, this is so-and-so from Computer Associates, checking on the status of ticket number ...". I told him we'd uninstalled the product and replaced it with their competitor's solution. "Oh...so I can close the ticket, then?"

CA is number one on my list of companies to avoid.

Re:Sad

[lennier1]

Sure, if you need to access the funds from that account in a country where the regular bank card isn't accepted but credit cards are.
It's to prevent the reverse of what you described (and for some online stores).

Re:Sad

[TaoPhoenix]

"Choice" is not quite the end all. The problem is in the class of Tragedy of the Commons problems, layered with companies with a vested in damaging choice.

So it's "Sad" because Linux is clearly in the discussion with much to offer, and the German office tried it, but then went back to the company that caused 20 years of lock-in issues.

Re:Sad

[juasko]

inside germany i meant or austria for that matter.

Well next time travel trough EU i will not only avoid France, but the german speaking countries too. That is my lesson learned. Avoiding france is though of very different reasons.

Re:Sad

[tabrnaker]

I'm pretty sure that the mexican government would not go for linux regardless of what any other country does. First, no kickbacks, and second, how do you skim money from support services when there aren't any support services and third, all the computer geeks/nerds i've met here are far behind in terms of education and hacking skills.

Though it would make a lot of sense since all the computers i've seen in governement offices are ancient things and look basically just like terminals, something Linux would be excellent for.

I've often thought of working in the government to help introduce change, but seeing how 'American' everything is here i won't give up my Canadian citizenship to bang my head against a wall.

Besides, the whole free thing hardly means anything here when everybody just pirates things. Still puzzled why there's always police at the tianguis yet they do nothing to the ~12 stands of pirated movies/video games/music. I'm a little too afraid of what would happen if i asked them.

Re:Sad

[ThePhilips]

It's all down to how much your time is worth.

If your time isn't worth much then spending all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working is OK.

So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?

Yes. Of course. And it always was. I mean, this is different cost center (== costs are booked on different part of budget) so we don't care.

The whole idea of Linux on desktop is silly: Windows OS much better at accommodating the herd mentality.

[/sarcasm] *sad*

Re:Sad

[juasko]

Well it's been a while, but in 2006 It was hard to find places that would accept my Visa in both Germany and Austria. Poland where I thought I would run into problems I had no issues in. Neither in Czech. Both countries that I believed could give me trouble, I didn't expect Germany and Austria to be one of them.

An other problem I had was road signs but that I could solve with a local map. But I had Euro road numbers with me in GPS software. Which worked in well. But in Germany I had to buy a local map to translate the road numbers. But that that is now almost 5 years ago. Czech was the most updated country of the 4 I traveled in.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be pretty incompetent to think windows has no logging facilities.

Re:Sad

[operagost]

You know, we have debit cards in the USA. Checks are basically only used to pay landlords and independent contractors. If you use them for anything else, you're probably over 70. If you think Americans still use checks all the time or consider that explaining "a credit card uses money you don't have" is insightful, you're probably on Slashdot.

Re:Sad

[The Psyko]

What time fiddling? When was the last time you used Windows?

Re:Sad

[krunk7]

I'm a true blue *nix junky. I only use windows if absolutely necessary and I've worked as a Linux and OSX sysadmin. But I must admit that Windows one shining strength is just how turnkey it can be. There's really not much fiddling to be done at all. In fact, the entire Windows client OS model revolves around preventing fiddling. An ethos that is the polar opposite of the Linux model of being designed around facilitating fiddling by the user.

Re:Sad

[nmb3000]

It's all down to how much your time is worth.

If your time isn't worth much then spending all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working is OK.

So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?

If the time spent is orders of magnitude less than getting an equivalent Linux desktop working the way you want, then yes. Especially when you start talking about thousands of machines, the relative cost of the Windows "fiddling" approaches zero.

This is especially true once you start looking at using Group Policy management and software deployment.

Re:Sad

[Actually, I do RTFA]

So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?

I have a Windows machine and a Ubuntu machine. The Windows machine gets used for a lot more, while the Ubuntu machine gets used primarily for surfing/word processing (without Flash). The Ubuntu machine locks up (in Firefox) and needs to be rebooted more often than the Windows machine.

That is to say, I spend less time fiddling with Windows

Also, will someone please explain to me why I have /bin and /read-write/bin and /readonly/bin (and then every other directory doing the same thing)?

Re:Sad

[StikyPad]

Exactly. I don't touch Linux for day-to-day tasks (web browsing, multimedia, or "Office" type work), but it's invaluable for compiling with custom toolchains, performing pen tests, and other more specialized activities. Linux also runs our web server, and I wouldn't think of trying to replace that with Win Server & IIS. Yes, either OS can technically perform all of the above functions, but it's all about using the best tool for the job.

Re:Sad

[TheDarkMaster]

Basically, the kernel or the distro used in this issue do not matter, because the big problem here are the applications, not the kernel. It's no use you have the "best operating system in the world" when the applications - which are what matter for the Average Joe - vary from bad to mediocre.

But to satisfy your curiosity, I have used Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and currently I use Slackware as standard, the most suitable for mad scientists like me.

Re:Sad

[blahplusplus]

"I find it curious that Linux on the desktop should be so well accepted in some markets (especially Latin America) and resisted so vigorously in others. Anyway, this is sad news, whatever the reasons."

People just don't want to learn new things, the truth is linux distro's that wanted to be desktops really should have copied windows UI and apps and just cloned them for wider acceptance, to take the learning curve out of it. Linux is evidence of what happens when you leave development of an OS to programmer and engineering types - they develop for themselves rather for the masses more often then not.

Re:Sad

[moco]

all the computer geeks/nerds i've met here are far behind in terms of education and hacking skills.

Maybe you haven't looked hard enough or in the correct places, eh?

Seriously though, one of the things that I've learned in Mexico is that people consider "impolite" to contradict you. When you think "wow, I can't believe they didn't know that", they are most likely thinking "gringo estupido, I can't believe he thinks we didn't know that". Anyway, there's tons of talent in Mexico, but you need to understand the culture or you'll end up feeling very frustrated.

Re:Sad

[jimicus]

It's all down to how much your time is worth.

If your time isn't worth much then spending all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working is OK.

So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?

No, but you quoted the parent out of context:

In my own experience of getting ordinary people to use computers, Linux computers needed a lot more fiddling then Windows machines. I suspect the German government is finding out the same thing.

Emphasis mine.

I can well believe it. It's not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with any of the major desktop environments - or for that matter much of the underlying software - it's just that there's a whole plethora of tiny little things which work slightly differently to Windows - or indeed don't work at all out of the box. The latter is what you encounter around the time you find yourself saying things like "I thought I told you to buy a scanner made by $COMPANY?"

Most of these things are pretty insignificant, but you add up the time taken to deal with every last one of them over the course of a few months and it's death by a thousand cuts.

FWIW, I find the transition from Windows XP to 7 just as bloody awful - it's superficially similar but as soon as you scratch the surface and dig into things like Control Panel, it's totally different. But Microsoft did get one thing right there - a dirty great context-sensitive search bar in the top right of almost everything in the OS itself. Search in Control Panel, it brings up control panel items that you couldn't otherwise find. Search in Explorer, it looks for files.

Re:Sad

[judeancodersfront]

So it's the fault of German culture even though very few governments in Europe would even attempt moving away from Windows?

Re:Sad

[DerekLyons]

The problem is, while you say you want to chose, you're not actually making a choice - you're dictating a solution based on ideological goals.
 

I do not live in germany, but it saddens me how public institutions, which I pay for, cover themselves by unrealistic clauses in public bidding to make sure only MS software gets through.

And how is that worse than forcing the software of your choice down their throats?

Re:Sad

[Luckyo]

Surroundings. Problem is, German foreign office has to work with a lot of both national and foreign entities. Key documents not rendering correctly on other party's machine (that runs windows and office) can cause problems far greater then simple cost savings.

Essentially the issue is that even if they're on linux and OO, they still have to work with people who have windows and MS office. And that is a problem.

As they can't force other to switch to linux, they are forced to go to windows themselves for interoperability reasons.

Re:Sad

[hesiod]

and Stallman had come over

I'm sorry. At least that wasn't enough to deter them!

Re:Sad

[tabrnaker]

I'm mexican and so are all my ancestors since there's been a Mexico, i'm pretty sure i understand the culture.

Computer courses here do not compare to anything given in the states or canada, unless you go to a very expensive internationally recognized University which a huge section of the population can't even dream to afford.

Re:Sad

[tabrnaker]

oops, should have added 'what a stupid gringo talking sh!t they don't know anything about as usual' to my last post.

Re:Sad

[jedidiah]

The moment you start talking about "competent admins" you've completely lost the argument.

That's rather the point.

Alleged ease of Windows is a total sham.

Re:Sad

[SleazyRidr]

Read the penultimate sentence.

Re:Sad

[drechsau]

Same reason Apple based systems are making headway - if your time is worth nothing, then fiddle away, if it is worth something, then be productive.

Just a fanboi, with my flame suit on, and I like pancakes.

Re:Sad

[moco]

I'll contradict you, even if that is impolite... :) On the BSc level, the course curriculum in the "average" university is very similar to the ones taught in "average" universities in the US or Europe. That is, you are taught the same theory by teachers that may or may not have a clue about it, or about teaching. As in every place, It is the student that makes the difference in those cases. I have worked with great people that went to "very expensive internationally recognized universities" as well as the state funded ones. And I've met not-so-good engineers graduating from both also.

Make sure you are not comparing apples to oranges, the "Ingeniería en Computación" program by the state university where I live is very similar to the Computer Science program of the University of Toronto for example.

Re:Sad

[jimicus]

You must be pretty incompetent to think windows has no logging facilities.

As are an awful lot of Windows application writers - I can't count the number of times I've seen things fail with not a sausage written to the event log.

Re:Sad

[jimicus]

This pervades everything in Linux, which is part of the reason why there is still so much fiddling involved in setting up a bunch of desktops and locking them down so no matter how much or little the end user knows, they can't mess it up.

And by can't mess it up, I mean literally cannot mess it up. Not "can mess it up but you can easily fix it by SSH'ing in as root and typing rm -rf ~user/.profile ; rm -rf ~user/.gnome-profile - or they can log in on a text terminal and do the same", cannot mess it up.

You ask about this on any Linux mailing list, I guarantee you'll be asked "why would you want to?" long before you get any helpful replies.

(For anyone about to ask "why would you want to?" - Simple. A desktop that is so locked down it's practically a dumb terminal is one that can't be messed up and is much less likely to result in calls to the helpdesk as a result. "Boot from a server and centralise the entire desktop setup" (the usual recommended solution) doesn't work very well when you've got people all over the place, some on dog-slow connections and others on laptops that may only appear on the company network once in a blue moon.)

Re:Sad

[janisozaur]

The problem is, while you say you want to chose, you're not actually making a choice - you're dictating a solution based on ideological goals.

I believe that since it is *my* money, then it is also *my* choice.

Re:Sad

[hrimhari]

Try reading the post till the end (I hope you do in my case):

In my own experience of getting ordinary people to use computers, Linux computers needed a lot more fiddling then Windows machines.

He's right, you know? I have never, ever been able to install Ubuntu on any laptop without having to spend days, sometimes weeks to solve basic functionality problems such as wireless, TV out...

For the huge majority, Windows works. For people like me which likes a little more flexibility, it's not enough. But although Linux provides this flexibility, it still fails miserably on the "just works" category of Windows and MacOS. And time is money.

For the end user, it's irrelevant that it doesn't "just work" because hardware and big software companies don't invest in Linux. It's the final result that matters.

Re:Sad

[inglorion_on_the_net]

You are quite right, but my experience has been the exact opposite of yours. Free software *nix systems in general, but certain Linux distros in particular (Debian and Ubuntu being two) require very little maintenance once set up, and even the initial setup is often very cheap. By comparison, Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) takes a long time to install, doesn't usually work right out of the box, needs a lot of time for software installation, and tends to require a fair bit of maintenance after the initial setup. And then it boots slower, runs slower, and distracts users with all kinds of attention-grabbing annoyances.

Of all the people who ask me for help with their computers, it's always the Windows users who are having the weird problems that take hours to diagnose or solve. Linux users, I don't get to hear a lot of complaints from, other than "I can't run software X", which, usually, indeed they just can't. It's only the tech-savvy ones who choose to tinker with their computers and then get questions like "I got a new graphics card and I want to try the development version of the driver, how do I do that?" that seem to be spending a lot of time working for the system instead of having the system work for them.

I'm not saying my experience is typical, but I am not alone in this, either. No doubt getting Linux to work and learning to work with it cost time, but it isn't necessarily more than with Windows, and sometimes, it's actually the other way around.

Re:Sad

[Darinbob]

Because you tend to have users who are not trained to think much. They know how to use Word and complain when they have to use something a bit different. They hire IT techs at the lowest possible salary and then are surprised that they don't adapt very well to anything not covered in the MS Certification classes. You get employees who worry about their next job if their Windows skills start to get rusty. You find that your pool of consultants and contractors is very small if you aren't 100% windows.

Re:Sad

[Darinbob]

Except most users when you come down to it, Linux or Windows or Macs or whatever, do the same thing. Some email, some presentations, some spreadsheets, etc. You don't need to fiddle. Many companies actually forbid you to fiddle with Windows, they're locked down and automatically configured remotely by IT. All you can do is change your desktop background or font size, if you're lucky.

Of course slashdotters don't fit into the generic mold, we probably see fiddling with the OS as an inalienable workers's right.

Re:Sad

[rahvin112]

Yes. All that admin and user time spent on antivirus or rebooting and reimaging machines is absolutely never ever counted on the Windows side. That they waste more money every year on this stuff isn't an issue to them because their windows admins already know how to do it. When confronted with a system like Linux those same admins simply don't like having to expend the effort to discover the real problem.

Re:Sad

[westlake]

I find it curious that Linux on the desktop should be so well accepted in some markets (especially Latin America) and resisted so vigorously in others. Anyway, this is sad news, whatever the reasons.

Statcounter publishes free global breakdowns of its webstats - and, to be perfectly honest about it, the numbers for Linux range from dismal to also-ran.

South America
Argentina
Brazil

Europe
Finland
Germany

The most significant thing about both Apple and Microsoft is that both began with the stand-alone PC for the non-technical end user.

The PC that was often sold directly to the end-user.

There is some truth to the notion that the PC worked its way into the enterprise by stealth - from the bottom-up rather than from the top down -

and that the geek, when looked at closely, tends to be a top-down sort of guy.

Re:Sad

[shutdown -p now]

Your argument may be valid when it comes to private companies or private users, but this is government that we're talking about. A government that is sponsored by the public taxes. I do not wish to spend my hard earned money on proprietary software that cannot be accessed.

So long as all their output (reports etc) is in open formats, and they accept such for input, why would you care whether the software that produces or handles the data is open source or not?

Re:Sad

[smash]

Windows doesn't sell due to ease of use. It sells due support for commercial software and hardware. Given the choice between maintaining sendmail/postfix or exchange, I know which one is way easier, and its NOT exchange.

Re:Sad

[WorBlux]

There isn't any sort of enterprise management tools for the linux desktop. There are several tools to lock down and standardize windows in an enterprise environment, but not windows.

Re:Sad

[Alex Belits]

Oh for fuck sake, you have posted vague complaints about supposed usability problems, and you pretend to use Slackware, the only Linux distribution without a package manager?

Re:Sad

[Alex Belits]

3. Who spends all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working OK?

Microsoft marketing consultant does. He spends the next day googling for "ubuntu problem".

Re:Sad

[Alex Belits]

At home I run Win7 and tinker with a render-farm running Linux.

No, you don't. Anything that counts as a "render farm" produces the amount of noise that can not be possibly tolerated in any kind of house.

Re:Sad

[Alex Belits]

He's right, you know?

No, he is not.

I have never, ever been able to install Ubuntu on any laptop without having to spend days, sometimes weeks to solve basic functionality problems such as wireless, TV out...

Formally you are right, because you never installed Ubuntu on any laptop at all.

Also lol at TV out on a laptop.

Re:Sad

[Shemmie]

Seriously. I've said this before - it's supposed to be about choice. If someone chooses to use Windows/other Microsoft products/other closed source products, well then isn't that their choice? I know some people will say "but it's wrong, abc product always crashes, MS can't build secure software" and so on. But - a technologist's job is to find the best solution, for whatever value of best applies to the particular customer in their particular context. And sometimes that may be a Microsoft product, or some other closed source product.* No product is a one-size-fits-all item. If you try and force something to fit the problem, or argue from politics or ideals rather than logic, you're less likely to make a positive impression.

Sometimes it seems as though people on this site want Linux to be everything to everyone, everywhere. I suppose it's not technically a monopoly, and maybe it's harder to argue that there's a lack of freedom of choice if there are different distributions - but I think it goes against the spirit of freedom and competition.

* Except for CA. They're dreadful, and there is never a context where CA is the best solution.

If someone chooses to use Windows/other Microsoft products/other closed source products, well then isn't that their choice? I know some people will say "but it's wrong, abc product always crashes, MS can't build secure software" and so on. But - a technologist's job is to find the best solution, for whatever value of best applies to the particular customer in their particular context. And sometimes that may be a Microsoft product, or some other closed source product.* No product is a one-size-fits-all item. If you try and force something to fit the problem, or argue from politics or ideals rather than logic, you're less likely to make a positive impression.

Sometimes it seems as though people on this site want Linux to be everything to everyone, everywhere. I suppose it's not technically a monopoly, and maybe it's harder to argue that there's a lack of freedom of choice if there are different distributions - but I think it goes against the spirit of freedom and competition.

* Except for CA. They're dreadful, and there is never a context where CA is the best solution.

Will someone please hit this man with a +5 Insightful? Superb piece. Choice - it's about choice. Not "This is better for you, take it otherwise you must be stupid". Technologists offer choices - offer opinions, and offer advice. But they shouldn't be getting sad if it doesn't go the way they'd prefer.

Re:Sad

[TheDarkMaster]

And what is the relationship between package management and usability of applications, grasshopper? hehe

Read again my previous comment... There, I made it clear that the problem is not the distro, are the applications. The problem is not just make the kernel work (the distros solve it for you reasonably well), or be able to install most applications (Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros do it reasonably well too). The problem is having to deal with atrocities such as OpenOffice, that commit gross errors of kerning, rendering and manipulation of file formats (he can not even deal with the ODF in a manner compatible with other applications like KOffice).

The problem is having to go to the command line and put commands that look like alien language to the Average Joe for any less used function of the application which says it has a GUI, but it is actually a poor and sloppy "shell" on top of a CLI program.

Re:Sad

[Requiem18th]

It is sad use because Linux support depends on Linux popularity. In other words, the probability of printer makers writing Linux drivers increases whit the number of Linux desktops that would use it. Germany dropping Linux means printer makers in Germany won't ever make Linux drivers now that they know they can wait for the client to get tired and revert to Windows.
Of course less incentive for hardware support means less incentive for desktop software support. It all spirals in reducing Linux support --and more to the point-- freedom from vendor-lock-in.

That isn't sad news for you?

Re:Sad

[hrimhari]

No, he is not.

Of course, if you say so. Thank you so much for helping Linux be a better OS by correcting me with such an important contribution.

Formally you are right, because you never installed Ubuntu on any laptop at all.

Formally I should sue you for spying on me, but since your crazy statement is wrong, I'd lose.

Also lol at TV out on a laptop.

Because...? In your bubble, laptops don't have TV out? Oh, I know. Linux users would never, ever want to use their laptop's TV out port. How silly of me for trying...

Alex Belits (437)

You must be one of those guys who feed the theory that dissatisfied Linux comments will be bashed to oblivion in /.

Re:Sad

[smash]

They evaluated both Linux and Windows on TCO and decided that Windows was cheaper. Given that an enterprise agreement gets you perpetual upgradable Windows+office licenses at something like (from memory) $80/pc including av software, and a heap of enterprise apps its fairly attractive.

The second you need to employe a nerd to remedy a problem you just would not have had on windows that "free" software starts going up in TCO. Same with Windows sure, but Windows support (even "have you tried turning it off and on again L1) is a lot cheaper and easier to find.

Blame the report!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's blame the report rather than being introspective about real usability problem with Linux.

Re:Blame the report!

[justforgetme]

true..

but what makes me mad about that fact is this:
the people who build Windows and the people who make it work are not the same person.

the people who build Windows are Microsoft
the people who make Windows work are H/W manufacturers who invest thousands in developer hours to write functional drivers.

if only H/W manufacturers did half of that work for linux drivers you wouldn't be able tomake this case...

Re:Blame the report!

[calmofthestorm]

What problem? Maybe if linux stops trying to be a desktop os I won't wakeup tomorrow to find gnome broke another crucial component of my system despite it not being installed. First they came for the wireless card...

Re:Blame the report!

[magloca]

Though it saddens me to say it, when it comes to hardware support, Windows just works.

Provided that you buy your laptop with Windows preinstalled, yes. If we're talking about installing either Windows or Linux on a "naked" laptop then, in my experience, it's simply a crap shoot. Modern Linux distros come with most drivers you're likely to need included, but they're sometimes crap (especially when it comes to graphics) and you may or may not be able to find better ones on the net.

Windows is almost guaranteed not to have the drivers you want included on the installation media -- but you can usually find them fairly easily (on the net or on the, usually crapware-laden, CD or DVD that came with the hardware). There are exceptions, like recently when for the life of me I just could not find Windows drivers for the crappy Intel audio card in a cheap laptop. In Ubuntu, audio just worked. But suspend didn't; probably a BIOS issue.

Re:Blame the report!

[Nursie]

Debian doesn't like my SD reader. Windows 7 won't use the camera built in to the laptop.

Neither is a show stopper, but I have probably spent equal time on each one.

Now my eee 901, that seems to use lowest-common denominator hardware that even MacOS doesn't dislike too much!

Re:Blame the report!

[Nursie]

Works both ways.

My network printer requires well over a hundred MB of downloads from HP to get going on windows, and insists on installing crapware.

On linux I just added it and everything was peachy. And people I know who have (perfectly good) older printers have had all sorts of trouble getting them working with Windows Vista or 7.

Yes, there are holes in Linux's device support. But there are just as many in everyone else's, more in my (anecdotal) experience.

Re:Blame the report!

[PoiuyTerry]

No let's not blame the report, let's blame the users.

Re:Blame the report!

[atlasburped]

true..

but what makes me mad about that fact is this: the people who build Windows and the people who make it work are not the same person.

the people who build Windows are Microsoft the people who make Windows work are H/W manufacturers who invest thousands in developer hours to write functional drivers.

if only H/W manufacturers did half of that work for linux drivers you wouldn't be able tomake this case...

if it were profitable, they would do it. if one company wrote a printer driver, it would be wasted effort as that wouldn't increase the sales of its printers by much. this is where windows, with microsoft's dictatorship, wins. they have the clout and someone has to step up to the plate and connect linux to hundreds of drivers, update the GUI, make OO easier to use, etc. this is a very, very, very big deal. thsi is also why Apple doesn't work with _everything_. they can't afford to do it. instead they make pretty computers targeted at specific audiences (simple users and graphics workers).

Re:Blame the report!

[StillAnonymous]

Agreed, printing on Linux can be a real hassle if you don't spec out and buy a printer with known compatibility first. Even when I did (Canon MP620) it was a headache to get working. I had to get the drivers (can't remember if it was for the printer or the scanner portion) from Canon's Australian website. For some reason they didn't have them on their North American page..

The main reason it's so bad for cheap desktop printers is that there's no standard printing protocol like PCL or PostScript. Almost all of them put all the processing logic into the driver (so called WinPrinters), which makes writing one extremely difficult for anyone other than the manufacturer.

Re:Blame the report!

[BasilBrush]

thsi is also why Apple doesn't work with _everything_. they can't afford to do it. instead they make pretty computers targeted at specific audiences (simple users and graphics workers).

You don't know what you're talking about. Whilst of course it's true that Macs don't work with "everything", I can't remember the last thing that didn't work when I plugged it in. Actually I can - it was an old Wacom graphics tablet with a 9 pin serial lead. It wouldn't work with modern Windows PCs either.

Try going into an electronics store, and look along shelves of peripherals. You're going to have a very hard time finding one that doesn't work with Macs.

The idea of yours that Macs are still for niches and people don't buy them because of limited hardware support is nonsense.

Re:Blame the report!

[atlasburped]

in addition, in a government department, there will usually be a few major lines of manufacturers/models of computers and printers. this is how IT departments do business. rolling out an _existing_ printer driver isn't a big deal for them, but messing around with a poorly written one is. again, manufacturers have every incentive to write a windows or mac driver and very little to write one for linux. there just isn't enough critical mass.

Re:Blame the report!

[jedidiah]

Yeah. Let's just ignore the flaws of a report that focuses on obviously bogus things like printer drivers for business class printers.

That's what lame trolls fixate on when they have nothing better to come up with.

Re:Blame the report!

[jedidiah]

This isn't about Linux "just working" for cheap crappy disposable "win-printers". This is about Linux for business printers. These are the same sorts of heavy duty workhorse printers that were working well in the early days of SunOS with little in the way of explicit printer vendor + OS vendor interaction.

This isn't about random cheap crap that was chosen entirely based on the fact that it had the lowest price tag that day.

Re:Blame the report!

[gsslay]

Oh, no, no, nooo!

Standard procedure at this point is to blame the users; "I don't like using this." "What are you, a retard?"

I love Linux, but facts are for the average user its desktop experience is not as pleasant as Windows. Now you can blame anyone you like about that; it's the users' because they can't/won't learn anything different, it's the hardware vendors for not providing appropriate drivers, it's the developers for writing impenetrable half-assed documentation, but the end result is the same. And the bottom line is never going to go away; if your software isn't liked by users then it's your problem, not theirs.

Re:Blame the report!

[Crudely_Indecent]

Instead, lets blame the idiot vendor they're relying on to deliver their solutions.

The 1 system not running Linux in my house is my wife's Macbook. My 2 daughters run Linux successfully. We all print to and scan from a multi-function scanner/printer/fax/copier. We can all network print. I have a scanner that I use for more detailed work. My wireless router is a homebrew running Linux which also functions as a print server.

My business runs on Linux. My client solutions run on Linux. I'll just say it, my world runs on Linux.

This article states there has been a change in leadership. The new boss is apparently anti-Linux, despite their own studies showing that the current systems are viable.

Re:Blame the report!

[polyp2000]

Before i say what i have to say , I would advise - doing your research before buying. There are plenty of places to find out whats good and what isnt. Its simple - you wouldnt buy new hardware for your windows PC without doing some research first .... would you ???? If you would then more fool you.

My point was - , The flip side to your comment is - actually Linux (I base this comment on Ubuntu specifically ) Linux "Just Works (TM)" too; I would argue that in fact Linux "Just Works Better (TM)" - if you buy hardware that you have researched into , you wont even need to install any drivers...

I find it archaic that stuff even comes with a windows driver disk in the first place.

I would also like to add that Linux in many cases has better support for hardware that windows - in particular with Legacy hardware - try running a recent version of Windows 7 or Vista on a machine thats more than a few years old - your results wont be too favorable. Conversely try connecting old peripherals to a new Windows PC and see how much fun you have trying to find working drivers for them. WORLD OF PAIN!
.

N...

Re:Blame the report!

[advocate_one]

Though it saddens me to say it, when it comes to hardware support, Windows just works.

try explaining that to my father... every time he's updated his computer, he's found existing expensive hardware is no longer supported by the manufacturer on the new version of windows

his A3 format scanner was no longer supported when he went from win 3.11 to win95, his audio capture card (high end for speech recognition usage) stopped working when he went from 95 to XP as there weren't any drivers for it and quite a few of his perfectly good apps refused to install on windows 7

Re:Blame the report!

[kevinmenzel]

Easy. USB wireless sticks. Those tend not to be nearly as generically supported on OSX as they are on Windows.

Why would you want one? Well, some allow for external antenna connections, etc., or maybe you just want to boost your computer that has 802.11b to 802.11n for range or speed reasons.

Re:Blame the report!

[smash]

It doesn't really matter HOW the solution works. Business doesn't care. If linux or anything else can't match that then its behind the 8 ball before the game even starts.

Re:Blame the report!

[smash]

All macs have built in wireless. Next example?

Re:Blame the report!

[metlin]

Please. As an "erstwhile techie" who downloaded Slackware on a 28.8k modem, I tried using the Linux on the desktop recently, and sorely missed the usability that I've gotten accustomed to on both Windows and my Mac.

Yes, I realize that some problems, like hardware drivers, are the fault of vendors, but it does not matter to the end user. The fact of the matter is, it is inconvenient to the end user.

I like plug and play. I like being able to get a new wireless printer/scanner and have it integrate seamlessly without having to worry about stupid things. I like being able to hook up my new DSLR and have it work, without having to futz with random settings. Hell, even getting my iPhone synced was such a pain that I gave up.

At the end of the day, if I've to spend more than 10 minutes in getting a new piece of hardware (or software, for that matter) to work, my productivity has been impacted.

Linux is great as a backend -- but as a desktop? It's for people whose time is not money.

Re:Blame the report!

[smash]

Who said the user who takes their laptop home to work from home is plugging into a business class printer?

Re:Blame the report!

[tripleevenfall]

This is an essential problem with Linux myopia among expert users - that my experience would = everyone else's experience if they weren't stupid/corrupt/baised/etc.

Re:Blame the report!

[stewbacca]

Exactly. This line pretty much sums up my entire Linux experience as a technology training developer:

Users have ... also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability.

It really is that easy, but hard for devout slashdotters to see from within this cozy little thought-sharing ecosystem.

Re:Blame the report!

[pckl300]

If you were abducted by aliens tonight, would your 2 daughters continue to run Linux successfully? Or does everything work simply because you're they have an admin that knows what he's doing?

Re:Blame the report!

[jimicus]

There's still a few classes of hardware which aren't so easy, though they're getting fewer every year.

Still a problem that I know of - in no particular order:

• Cheap inkjet printers. Becoming less of an issue, though IIRC Lexmark and Canon can still be a touch awkward. Epson are well supported, but they tend to turn over their range quite quickly which can mean the printers on the shelf today aren't supported in the Linux distribution you installed last week. They can probably be persuaded to work but the USB IDs will be different so it probably won't JFW.
• Scanners. Again, becoming less of an issue.
• Multifunction devices. Often only some of the functionality is supported.
• Wireless cards. Much less of an issue than it was two years ago but many manufacturers have an annoying habit of changing chipset but keeping the model number the same.

Re:Blame the report!

[BasilBrush]

OK, fair enough. But since all Macs ship with current standards of Wireless networking built in:
1) One can see why few manufacturers bother with OSX drivers for add-on networking.
2) It's not putting anyone off buying a Mac.

Re:Blame the report!

[nemesisrocks]

We all print to and scan from a multi-function scanner/printer/fax/copier.

I'm going to stab a guess here, but the German Foreign Office's printing requirements are likely vastly different to yours. For one, there's probably a special printer needed to print passports, that probably only one company in the world manufactures.

My business runs on Linux.

Running a small business on a platform is a very very different proposition to running a large business / government department on the same platform.

Re:Blame the report!

[Crudely_Indecent]

It's for people who's time is not money.

My customers would LOVE that.

Re:Blame the report!

[Crudely_Indecent]

Your daughters aren't specialized workers

Someday, they will be - and they'll be well-prepared for it.

Are you honestly trying to compare your home environment....bla bla bla

No, I'm not. I do, however, have experience transitioning an ISP from Windows infrastructure (several thousand nodes in several different cities) to Linux. By the time I was done, the only Windows systems left were the IIS servers, and they were virtualized (on Linux hosts). I was a freaking hero. Hardware upgrades were pushed back several years, downtime became unheard of, and I won't even mention license fees.

Average users don't debug kernels, that's an admin job. Their time is much better spent doing their jobs than staring at a blue screen. You may continue refusing to believe that I'm dense/stupid.

NO WINDOWS FOR ME - thank you very much. The Linux learning curve isn't so steep when users aren't poisoned by exposure to other systems....except Mac, they're actually pretty nice...The best thing I ever did for my wife was get that Macbook. My daughters enjoy being able to just "Press button to turn machine on" - they manage just fine. And one of my daughters has become quite the GIMP Picasso.

Re:Blame the report!

[Crudely_Indecent]

If you were abducted by aliens tonight....

You're absolutely right. That's what admins are for though, and Germany already has them. And unlike my daughters, Germany has the option of hiring new admins if theirs get abducted by aliens.

Re:Blame the report!

[Crudely_Indecent]

By replacing Linux, Germany won't be taking admins out of the equation. They'll probably have more Windows admins.

Re:Blame the report!

[Crudely_Indecent]

You're probably right, they likely have different printing requirements than I do. Fortunately, I'm not so naive as to believe that the majority of printers are Windows only. To the contrary, the vast majority of printers are compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux. Here's a passport printer that is Linux compatible. http://www.diletta.com/EN/prod_pp_440i.htm

I've converted entire businesses, thousands of nodes, to Linux. It can be done effectively, efficiently and seamlessly.

As I pointed out, the Germans own reports say that their system is effective, one guy wants it changed.......he happens to be in charge. So, the German people get to pay for an unnecessary conversion.

Re:Blame the report!

[pckl300]

The Linux learning curve isn't so steep when users aren't poisoned by exposure to other systems....except Mac, they're actually pretty nice...The best thing I ever did for my wife was get that Macbook. My daughters enjoy being able to just "Press button to turn machine on" - they manage just fine. And one of my daughters has become quite the GIMP Picasso.

Again, you're a sysadmin. You can't exactly go around shouting "Computers are so easy!" The Linux learning curve is huge (and steep), and the software is frustrating. I don't think there's any average user who would be willing to put up with it without a nerd at their disposal.

Re:Blame the report!

[Alex Belits]

Except, of course, all linux distributions use the same kernel and therefore have the same drivers.

You have no idea what you are talking about, and you have only seen Linux in your anti-Linux marketing materials.

Re:Blame the report!

[Alex Belits]

What is this with hordes of "confirmators" for obvious bullshit?

Microsoft marketing people sure are busy.

Re:Blame the report!

[Alex Belits]

Multifunction devices. Often only some of the functionality is supported.

Only on very cheap ones. Except HP -- they support everything, including plenty of things they better should've not.

Wireless cards. Much less of an issue than it was two years ago but many manufacturers have an annoying habit of changing chipset but keeping the model number the same.

In German Foreign Office? If they need those, the problem is certainly not with Linux.

Re:Blame the report!

[mwvdlee]

Except, of course, all Linux distributions use the same code repository for the kernel, but use different branches, compiled with different drivers and different versions of those drivers. That is, or course, excluding all the drivers that aren't actually compiled directly into the kernel but are loaded late ron in a variety of different ways.

I don't know much about Linux internals, but I know NVidia's drivers aren't compiled into the kernel, I know some kernels use the Brainfuck scheduler, I know Linux can use Windows network drivers using an adapter and there have been quite a few other news items over the past decade indicating that, to put it lightly, not all Linux distributions use the same kernel.

And ofcourse there's the temporal issue of Linux distributions from 10 years ago do not use the same kernel and drivers as Linux distributions from 10 years into the future. I don't quite know the frequency of patches, but chances are a new Linux kernel compile in the morning is different from one in the evening.

"On posting comments regarding Linux, or how to be less of an idiot while doing it.".

I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[mykos]

I can't see how anything could possibly go wrong.

On topic, this situation seems to be a chicken and the egg. Until a lot of people are using Linux, switching from Windows on a mass scale isn't feasible.

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[TwistedPants]

http://code.google.com/p/paint-mono/ for the common use cases. I just want the damned thing stable, packaged.

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[tsj5j]

It's not simply chicken and egg.

I've recommended linux to my friends who are using netbook, i.e. mostly sharing common configurations with no obscure hardware expected.
Whilst they don't have driver issues, the most common complaints are:

- Poor and inconsistent UI. They particularly hated that Ubuntu was swapping the buttons around often.
- Many open source software are feature-incomplete when compared to their commercial counterparts.
- Linux desktop (esp. Ubuntu) is very unstable when it comes to updates; half the time the updates would break something for them.

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[kevinmenzel]

You don't actually understand common use cases for Adobe CS suites when used for design work do you? Because not only are the products superior, including the fact that there are plug-ins developed for those products extending functionality that doesn't exist in other projects, but there is an attempt by Adobe to integrate the workflow across the suite in a way that makes sense. This is about end to end solutions, including having things like Pantone pallettes that are updated regularly so when you send your work off to get printed, it comes out the right color.

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[Galestar]

For me its:
- ATI drivers are garbage and get 1/4 the framerate running games in Wine.

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[souravzzz]

I am and always have been an avid linux supporter, but Ubuntu's decision to swap the buttons came as a big surprise to me. Whoa- why change something without any reason other than just looking different? I can remember how frustrated I became with the new layout before finding out the script to revert it back.

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[IRWolfie-]

are you using the proprietary drivers available from ATI?

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[Galestar]

yes... the FOSS ones won't even run most games I've tried, they just segfault.

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[anyaristow]

- Linux desktop (esp. Ubuntu) is very unstable when it comes to updates; half the time the updates would break something for them.

Last time I let my ubuntu installation update itself I ended up with a non-bootable Linux partition. THat was the last time I touched Linux.

Re:I have faith that this thread will remain civil

[deek]

To be fair, I've cursed Microsoft on many an occasion for changing configuration locations and behaviour. Seems like every version of Windows they release, I have to re-learn many of my standard procedures.

I'm using open source software for almost everything at my work. The only thing I lack is a good Exchange client, so have to use a remote desktop to view my work email. The software I use have all the features I need. Do we really need all the features that the commercial counterparts put in? Most people don't.

I don't use Ubuntu per se, but I've installed it on my dad's computer. Whenever I do updates to it, I don't notice anything that breaks. Then again, I've installed a LTS version of Ubuntu. Minimal need for me to update that way.

Having said all that, Linux is not ready for the corporate environment. Windows has some beautiful tools for managing networks of computers, in many different ways, and controlling updates to them all. I've seen some simple tools on the Linux side, but nothing that compares to the Microsoft offering. I do believe that Linux is wonderful for the home environment, though, or small business networks.

One of these things is not like the other.

[spqr0a1]

Switzerland and Spain are doing great with OSS in government. What makes linux a bad match for the German Foreign Office? Or what are they doing wrong?

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[kubitus]

their wrong doing? You can get a new Porsche from OSS, but from M$ you can as some people in Vienna found out!

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[jandersen]

What makes linux a bad match for the German Foreign Office? Or what are they doing wrong?

Switching from something everybody knows and some even like will always be difficult. At the very least a lot of user education has to happen before the switch to address the pitfalls. It would probably also be wise to try to influence people's attitudes before the event, otherwise you'll find that there is a large group of malcontents that will try to sabotage the whole thing.

I have seen this type of problems many times and not just when it comes to switching technology; you have to win people's hearts and mind if you want to succeed.

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[JustOK]

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2006166&cid=35276274

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[jprupp]

I live in Geneva, and here everything government does supports Linux. The government is using open source software everywhere and they haven't complained a bit about it. Just the opposite. Software for taxes is available on Windows, Linux and MacOS X. Although I don't think is FOSS (haven't seen the license yet).

I've been migrating people to open source servers and desktops in Latin America for years, and sometimes I've found the classical resistance from users. I mean, you really must give the users a great experience in order for them to like the switch. I've seen users complain vocally when forced to use old desktop environments (particularly old KDE releases). But usually if you move them to a more modern and better configured desktop system they appreciate it, especially if they're coming from Windows XP or older.

Printer support was quite ugly in the olden days, not to mention the odd (but functional) Xsane software for scanning. Things have been getting better in the last two years, but still these German users probably had to deal with some pretty ugly things. They may have been switched too early.

Linux is mostly ready for the desktop now: for an office clerk desktop is good enough, even better. For a programmer is excellent. For most people is fine. But there are some proprietary software that some people won't be able to do without. Fortunately it isn't Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer anymore, so we've gained some ground. People are happy with OpenOffice.org and Firefox/Chrome these days, they have even started dreading some bloated proprietary packages already (e.g. Internet Explorer).

We're nerds, for us a command line is enough, but for users change is stressful enough. And there's the issue of the helpdesk people, who feel really threatened by the switch, especially when they're not so smart, like is usually the case in government positions. Supporting Windows means upgrading antivirus and formatting computers. Most users have administrator access in their machines, so no problems with file permissions or the like. Windows networking is dead simple, and desktop hardware support for Windows is really easy to get. It's ugly, inelegant, but it's there, and it sort-of works, and its quirks are well-known. Habits get engrained.

The lesson to learn here would be to look at what the users need. Look at the shortcomings they might find, and anticipate them. If you know they'll need to use Xsane to scan, because they need some complex stuff, provide some documentation in a Wiki already before the migration. Provide little howtos on common tasks. Make the documents editable by them. Give them help and let them help one another. Move the users to the new system in small groups and have a technical person exclusively assigned to help the last migrated bunch of ten or so. Don't ram change down their throats, let them drive it.

If the company is large enough, hire some expert programmers, or a programming outsourcing firm to improve on some open source packages that are essential for business. That will not cost so much.

If there's technical people that dread change, that will refuse to upgrade their skills and embrace the new OS, _fire them_, Change is necessary and your team needs to be able to cope with it, especially the technology people.

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[Windwraith]

Spain? I am spanish and never heard any official entity migrating to linux. In fact all web services require IE..SIX, that damn dinosaur, to operate properly. Requires a virtual machine or a very out-of-date windows to use.
Distribute a document in ODT and you will only get stuff like "your office document was bad! send us a new one!" (or a silent denial of whatever service required the document)

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[AYeomans]

What are they doing wrong?
Switching back to and end-of-life operating system (Windows XP). But why?

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[stewbacca]

You are citing a slashdot story from the Linux section as proof of Linux success? How is that remotely valid?

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[JustOK]

it's a citation where someone is talking about Switzerland and Spain doing great with OSS in government.

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[westlake]

Switzerland and Spain are doing great with OSS in government.

I think the key word here is "government."

The geek can be a little too enarmoured of the mandate from on high, the bone tossed to your coalition partners or to some notion of political correctness. When you look at a broader spectrum of users the picture can change dramatically:

Switzerland
Spain

Re:One of these things is not like the other.

[c0lo]

What makes linux a bad match for the German Foreign Office? Or what are they doing wrong?

Can't install the antivirus-and-security suite. So, very hard to protect against Wikileaks, which is important given the FO context.

In before fanboyism

[doubleplusungodly]

n/t

Was?

[ThePromenader]

So the human race ~is~ devoluting!

Re:Was?

[HaZardman27]

Are you suggesting we evoluted to where we are rather than evolved?

Linux or Windows desktops?

[Pecisk]

Please, clarify. I understood that desktops was still Windows, but they used open source apps - Mozilla, OpenOffice.org suites, etc. Where's printer and scanner drivers comes in?

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[fishexe]

Please, clarify. I understood that desktops was still Windows, but they used open source apps - Mozilla, OpenOffice.org suites, etc. Where's printer and scanner drivers comes in?

TFA states that the desktop systems were dual-boot. Why they would do that in an office setting instead of just migrating to one or the other, is beyond me.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[js3]

Because hardware changes over time. Example: Department buys a newer better printer, but people using a linux desktop can't use it for printing because there are no drivers for it.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[Svartalf]

I call BS. Each and every one of those "Office" printers are devices that are network-centric. By definition it has to support a Jetdirect, LPR/LPD, and at least an IPP print queue- and use PCL or Postscript for the print command language.

I've not had a "problem" needing "drivers" for an "office" printer for the last decade.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[Pecisk]

Maybe then buy printer which actually works with your actual systems? It is not that it is 2000 all over again - Linux printing (and CUPS in general, thanks to Apple and OS X) support is quite high.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[deapbluesea]

I call BS on your BS. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 at work and haven't gotten the Xerox multifunction printer to work properly yet. Half the features are unavailable, and the vendor support is non-existent. They provide a Linux print package that consists of their own printing functionality, but then leave out the actual drivers. I hacked a PPD file to at least be able to do some of the work, but every print job results in an "Out of Paper" error followed by a "Job Successfully Completed" message. I never know if I'm going to get my printout or not. Consequently, it's about a 100m walk to the printer up some stairs. I don't mind the exercise, but when a PDF fails to print, I lose a lot of time walking back and forth trying to fix the problem. That's not a business environment conducive to efficiency.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[stewbacca]

Your comment provides much insight as to why Linux does not enjoy mainstream success (feel free to add a strong lisp for effect):

By definition it has to support a Jetdirect, LPR/LPD, and at least an IPP print queue- and use PCL or Postscript for the print command language.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[Carewolf]

I haven't seen a printer for 5 years that couldn't print from Linux. USB printing is standard, and if they don't connect with USB, they connect via ethernet, and Linux supports all the options there as well. The printer thing is a red herring and shows somebody hasn't updated their anti-linux trolling.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[Carewolf]

I have had needed drivers in the last decade. I need to install printer-drivers whenever I use Windows, but from Linux all printers just work right out of the box without the need to download or install drivers.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[Alex Belits]

Except, of course, he is right, and you are talking out of your ass.

Networked printers with features that he mentioned, are not only automatically supported but also automatically detected by CUPS (that is, printer support that is always installed on desktop Linux and OSX). They indeed "just work".

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[Alex Belits]

Except, HP supports all its printers on Linux now. Their utility (hplip) is much more user-friendly than their Windows monstrosity, too.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[stewbacca]

I'm talking out of my ass if the mainstream understood a single piece of his post, but they don't, so I'm not, so Linux is relegated to people who are interested in discussing the nuances of LPR/LPD, IPP, PCL etc. etc.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[Alex Belits]

You are arguing against reality.

If your point is that you and your friends at Microsoft can spread FUD among the users, this is a losing battle for you because Microsoft did that for its whole history and now it is failing. If you are trying to prove something else, you are a moron.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[stewbacca]

I don't think I'm trying to prove anything, so I guess that makes me not a moron.

If you think Linux doesn't suffer from mainstream adaptation because of its inherent (or in some cases, perceived) complexity, then you need to step outside of your wolrd-view (basement).

I'm not a Microsoft user, nor are my friends. I'm not sure what kind of logical fallacy "calling somebody a name as an insult, but the name doesn't fit" is, but you just made it.

Re:Linux or Windows desktops?

[Alex Belits]

There is no complexity, and there is no perception of complexity, except among people who listen to you and your colleagues. Linux and OSX share the same printer support infrastructure. Anyone who ever encountered a recent consumer-oriented distribution, sees this immediately, even without knowing how components and protocols are called.

The last hope you have is to post fake problem reports from 20 accounts and respond from each of them to the rest, so people might think, there is some legitimacy to the FUD you are spreading -- and as I see here, Microsoft marketdroids are already at this stage. Die in a fire.

Whatever.

[symbolset]

They'll get the update complete just in time to miss the migration to mobile. What's with Germany?

Re:Whatever.

[shutdown -p now]

Migration of what to mobile? Work office? I don't see that running on iPad anytime soon.

Re:Whatever.

[symbolset]

You'll see. I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise for you. You'll know what I meant soon enough.

Change of government

[SmilingBoy]

It is worth noting in this context that there were a number of changes of government in Germany, implying that party politics might also have played a role. Between 1998 and 2005, the German government was a coalition of social democrats and greens (with a green foreign minister); between 2005 and 2009, the government was a coalition of christian democrats (conservatives) and social democrats (with a social democrat foreign minister); and since 2009, the government has been a coalition of christian democrats and liberals (with a liberal foreign minister). The "SPD" mentioned in the article is the social democrat party.

Re:Change of government

[Dr. Hok]

It is worth noting in this context that there were a number of changes of government in Germany[...]

That's exactly what I thought. It's the political agenda, not a well-weighed decision based on usability or efficiency. In case some readers don't know the German political landscape, 'liberal' here stands for 'business-friendly' (as in 'we support the businesses of our friends'). They once even called themselves 'the party of the top earners' (until they realized it cost them a considerable amount of votes).

Re:Change of government

[Anonymous Coward]

the government has been a coalition of christian democrats and liberals (with a liberal foreign minister)

And one should probably add here that "liberal" in German political parlance means something very different; the German "liberal" party is probably closer to libertarianism than any other US-American political position, although if you're thinking Ron Paul now, you'll have the wrong idea, too. For the most part, they're about 80% laissez-faire capitalism and 20% personal liberty, and they're usually happy to form coalitions with the conservatives and sacrifice personal liberty (which the conservatives, naturally, are vehemently opposed to) for the sake of economic liberty. As such, they have a reputation for being the party of businessmen, bankers and the like.

suspicious

[LingNoi]

Henning Tillmann, a colleague of Oliver Kaczmarek, the SPD MP who raised the question, and a member of the SPD executive committee's web policy discussion group, told our associates at heise Open that the government's response was not satisfactory. "The reasons given for the return to Windows are implausible," says Tillmann, "We need the figures." The costs of licensing Windows and MS Office throughout the department would cover the costs of programming a hell of a lot of drivers, notes Tillmann. Oliver Kaczmarek has already announced his intention to take the matter further and demand a clear statement from the government.

We have scanners and printers running no problem in our office on Ubuntu. Why exactly does he mention having to program printer and scanner drivers?

They might have a legitimate problem but from the information presented it sounds like poor excuses when someone asks for the exact figures and he responds with the need to write drivers. It sounds like something Microsoft would say from their "get the facts" campaign.

Re:suspicious

[Thad Zurich]

A matter of expectations management, perhaps. In this case, maybe they actually funded some driver-writing (good planning) when they should have just replaced incompatible hardware (poor implementation choices). The overall air of the citation seems to hinge on customer expectations. It seems more likely that the drivers issue is a red herring, and that the real costs derive from the need to cross-train monoculture victims in the workforce.

Re:suspicious

[lennier1]

Driver support hugely depends on the vendor (and sometimes even on the model).

For example, at a previous company we had some of those souped-up copiers Canon sells for twelve grand a piece. The kind that is supposed to do everything short of making coffee.
Canon's management software for the Windows servers (rights management based on LDAP groups and stuff like that) must have been written by half-blind chronic drunks, but it still worked somehow. But Canon treated the Linux driver as the company's bastard child, leaving many in the tech department the odd men out. Printing usually worked, but occasionally only b/w or your printouts suddenly ended up on large A3 paper instead of regular A4-sized sheets. Creating booklets via the built-in stapler was mostly a game of chance and don't even get me started on scanning stuff straight a Linux share....

Re:suspicious

[squizzar]

What bass-ackwards printers are they using? I'd have guessed that most printers used in a corporate environment are postscript based, so support shouldn't really be an issue. Secondly I thought scanners just used SANE? Which is why the Windows drivers work right? Why not have a windows print server?

I think what's happened here is that the spokesman has had the problem 'simplified' to his level of understanding because the actual issue is either to complex or is actually BS.

Re:suspicious

[TwistedPants]

I wish I could use the hit and miss behavior of all of the printers on our network to justify a migration to ubuntu for all.

Re:suspicious

[throx]

What bass-ackwards printers are they using? I'd have guessed that most printers used in a corporate environment are postscript based, so support shouldn't really be an issue.

Not in my experience. Printers tend to be a crazy mess of different technologies supplied by the cheapest supplier/closest friend of the IT Manager/whatever someone found at Best Buy/etc. I'd estimate maybe 25% of the printers I've seen in corp environments support Postscript, about 50% support some variant of PCL (which mostly overlaps the Postscript ones) and the rest are a mix of custom drivers and just plain bizzare cruft.

If it makes you feel any better, the non-PS/PCL ones tend to not have x64 drivers for Windows so the whole thing just demonstrates the typical corporate shortsightedness in purchasing decisions.

Scanners in a corporate environment tend to be photocopiers with a network card that dumps a file somewhere so they likely won't be as much trouble as a printer. There's still the odd bizzaro scanner that just doesn't have drivers for anything but Win95 but those are slowly dying out. Assuming SANE is a very, very risky proposition.

Having a Windows Print Server doesn't really work because Windows works best by offloading the rendering to the client rather than using the server.

So, the print driver issue is likely real (though odd because it would have been cheaper to just get Linux compatible stuff for far less than driver development costs); the interop between OpenOffice and MS Office is definitely real; and there's more likely a lot of plain bad planning that just made a mess of the whole migration which put a bad name on tech that really isn't that bad.

Re:suspicious

[kevinNCSU]

We have scanners and printers running no problem in our office on Ubuntu. Why exactly does he mention having to program printer and scanner drivers?

Now I'm just throwing this out there, but it might be possible that there's more then one printer company that makes more than one type of printer so that there might exist in one of the foreign offices of the German government a printer of a make and model which isn't the exact same as yours?

Re:suspicious

[Sancho]

That does sound like a marketing droid, but let's not pretend that there aren't driver issues on Linux. A lot of printers will work fine out of the box, but if they don't, you aren't going to get any support from the manufacturer. This sounds more like an IT team that couldn't do their research or had a lot of previously bought hardware around that happened to not work.

Re:suspicious

[LaissezFaire]

Printers and scanners are a common issue in linux. (Software modems were another, though less common now, of course.) And the drivers just don't work the same as the windows drivers. I still wind up setting up separate simplex and duplex "printers" most of the time.

Re:suspicious

[jedidiah]

> Well, if you're not experiencing a driver problem, then that must mean no one else is.

The same goes for Windows.

Re:suspicious

[JAlexoi]

For 12'000 these machines should be able to connect to a System/360 and work.
Try Lexmark, they should work properly. Since Lexmark got the printing business from IBM.

Re:suspicious

[lennier1]

Nah, I'm sure it was our fault anyway for using something as exotic as Debian and Ubuntu. ;)

That was two companies ago. Live and learn ...

Re:suspicious

[VortexCortex]

We have scanners and printers running no problem in our office on Ubuntu. Why exactly does he mention having to program printer and scanner drivers?

Now I'm just throwing this out there, but it might be possible that there's more then one printer company that makes more than one type of printer so that there might exist in one of the foreign offices of the German government a printer of a make and model which isn't the exact same as yours?

I've yet to find a printer that didn't work with Linux.

In fact: I've had more problems with Win7 x64 drivers than with Linux x64.

I'd like to see the Government's list of actual non-functional printers (wouldn't you?).

Re:suspicious

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me try getting this straight; You're saying it's cheaper to migrate a whole departement back to a platform that is under constant siege by malware, virus and trojan peddlers, than throwing out crap peripherals and getting replacements that do work? Insightful, indeed...

Re:suspicious

[spasm]

What's the make & model of your scanner? I run ubuntu and despite several attempts, finding a current model cheap (under USD$100) flatbed scanner that definitively works with ubuntu is surprisingly difficult. The SANE compatibility guide is huge, but largely lists scanners which are long out of production - fine if you want to know if that ebay scanner will work; useless if you're looking at current models on offer at the local electronic retailer. Ubuntu's compatible hardware guide isn't much better. Compatibility (and documentation of such) seems to be quite good in higher end machines (over USD$300), but I don't want to spend USD$300 or more on something I need maybe once or twice a month.

Re:suspicious

[SplashMyBandit]

You do know that Mac OS X uses CUPS underneath right? The same printing software as Linux.

Re:suspicious

[LaissezFaire]

No, I didn't, but I'm not sure that matters. CUPS is just the underlying printing subsystem. I'm pretty sure that Mac users don't have to point a browser to http://localhost:631/ to add a printer, or use the Gnome/KDE GUIs. That can be the hard part of adding a printer. (They may have different drivers available than linux tends to, but I don't have any data on that.)

Re:suspicious

[Grishnakh]

That's why it's always best to buy HP office printers.

Re:suspicious

[lennier1]

Our department was pushing a comparable HP system, but the guy in the finance department who had to sign off on it "knew someone" and the result was that Canon which cost half a grand less but caused problems whose costs had produced additional expenses in excess of that within the first 14 days.

Re:suspicious

[Alex Belits]

I'd estimate maybe 25% of the printers I've seen in corp environments support Postscript, about 50% support some variant of PCL (which mostly overlaps the Postscript ones) and the rest are a mix of custom drivers and just plain bizzare cruft.

Hello, people of 1994! Dotcom bubble will burst in March 2000. Don't tell me I have not warned you.

Re:suspicious

[Alex Belits]

I'm pretty sure that Mac users don't have to point a browser to http://localhost:631/ [localhost] to add a printer,

Actually they do. This is the easiest way to configure printers, and the interface is exactly the same as on Linux.

or use the Gnome/KDE GUIs.

OSX printer configuration utility looks like a twin of KDE one.

Re:suspicious

[Alex Belits]

HP provides a tool with bells and whistles, however everything else has drivers/networking support that works just fine.

Re:suspicious

[Grishnakh]

One thing we need we need to differentiate here is consumer printers vs. business printers. Linux drivers for many consumer printers are indeed lacking, and that's frequently because these printers are software printers (or "host-based" printers): they do all their processing on the host PC, to save money. Business printers are a different matter; any real business printer is going to have PostScript support, and frequently even PDF support these days. All the PC has to do is send it a PS or PDF file. And any real business printer is going to be networked, not directly connected. However, many high-end business printers do have drivers which can tell the user all kinds of information about the printer, such as various tray options, ink remaining, etc. This usually isn't absolutely necessary though, and it's usually possible to print to the printer with a pretty simple PS driver.

If a business is using a $30 consumer printer, then they're obviously idiots. There's never a good reason to use one of these, not only because they're not reliable and have no driver support for other OSes, but also because the ink costs are ridiculous. If your business can't afford a laser (or color laser), then you should just give up. A decent small-business color laser these days costs $500-1000.

Driver Costs Not Realistic, Says Article

[Daengbo]

A comment from someone in the government shows that this isn't going down without a fight. The FO's answers to inquiries claimed driver costs were high. Officials say that something's wrong if writing drivers costs more than refitting the entire bureau with new Win/Office licenses.

Re:Driver Costs Not Realistic, Says Article

[Bert64]

They have been using this system for several years already...
So lets assume that when they started, they may have had to write drivers for some hardware they already had. But surely this has now been done and won't be a recurring cost.
Unless ofcourse they are actively procuring new hardware which doesn't have linux drivers, but why would they do that? That's just unbelievably stupid, there is plenty of hardware out there which already has very good linux drivers available.

Re:Driver Costs Not Realistic, Says Article

[squizzar]

Except that a large number of API changes in the kernel are accompanied by the relevant changes to affected drivers. Either get the driver in the kernel, or accept the cost of patching drivers as part of the (I'd assume significantly greater) cost of moving to a new kernel version. In a corporate/government environment I'd guess this doesn't happen every couple of months.

Buying new devices: You could do the research and buy ones that are supported. Factor it in as part of the support cost of the device. If the hardware is so esoteric that you can only buy it from one source it behoves the manufacturer of said hardware to provide the drivers for you if they want to sell their incredibly unusual kit.

Re:Driver Costs Not Realistic, Says Article

[polyp2000]

Indeed ... What hardware are they using? - Writing drivers couldnt have been that high - otherwise it would have been cheaper just to by hardware that is known to work well with linux.

Re:Driver Costs Not Realistic, Says Article

[jgtg32a]

Those licenses aren't as expensive as you think, when you take loss of productivity into consideration.

Re:Driver Costs Not Realistic, Says Article

[IICV]

Officials say that something's wrong if writing drivers costs more than refitting the entire bureau with new Win/Office licenses.

Not really - Microsoft will offer Win/Office licenses for free if that's what it takes to move you away from an OSS deployment, as well as technical assistance in making the move.

After all, it's totally profitable for them to spend money locking you in now, in order to make money later when you pay to upgrade everything to Windows Cloud Edition (Free with a $20/month subscription per license!)

Re:Driver Costs Not Realistic, Says Article

[buchanmilne]

Show me an in-kernel printer driver. If your printer vendor isn't doing *their* job (upstreaming printer drivers, or maintaining them if they want to retain all their IP in-house), change printer vendors (see below).

3. You have to buy need devices which need new drivers.

As for why people would buy new hardware?

If you're a big shop like this, you specify Linux support as a requirement, and do a PoC or open tender when you want to introduce new printers, and select models that pass your requirements. This should not be your problem , it is your vendors' problem.

Re:Driver Costs Not Realistic, Says Article

[Bert64]

Contract rules requiring the cheapest hardware still require that the hardware be fit for purpose... Otherwise the cheapest "printer" is actually a disposable pen. Hardware that does not work with your existing systems is not fit for purpose.
If you are (or planning to) run linux, then linux compatibility should be a requirement, and any manufacturer unable to fulfil your requirements should be excluded from bidding.

Also if the hardware does not have drivers for the platform you are using, then the cost of writing those drivers is part of the cost of hardware, is it still cheaper?

Yes ... Open Source can present some IT challanges

[Anonymous Coward]

and some issues for certain functions and users. The bigger question for me is how many security / virus issues occurred during the use of Linux for both servers and desktop ?

it is difficult

[roman_mir]

It's hard not only for governments. A retail operation was trying to switch to Ubuntu boxes and one of the problems became Zebra LP 2824 thermal printer drivers, which are all for windows and none are for unix/linux. Of-course CUPS support these printers to an extent, but not completely and the worst part is printing in Cyrillic - it doesn't work. Barcodes do print and English prints though. Is this a show stopper for Linux on desktop? It well could be in this case.

Re:it is difficult

[TheDarkMaster]

I managed to make one of these run on Linux, but it had to write my own "driver" (in quotes because it's actually part of the application that became able to communicate at low level with the printer via parallel port)

Re:it is difficult

[roman_mir]

well, yes, I wrote 'raw' into it as well as ZPL and it works, but as I said the problem is writing out characters that are not in normal ASCII, in this case Cyrillic. The characters are not printed.

Re:it is difficult

[GNious]

I would not use Zebra's print-drivers for Windows as example of Windows being better - the drivers are severely buggy, leaking more memory than a KDE workstation running firefox!
We have gone so far as to writing our own drivers, and overall recommending customers to stay as far away from Zebra's drivers as humanly/serverly possible.

Re:it is difficult

[vegiVamp]

While the lack of proper drivers (or postscript emulation, for that matter) is the printer manufacturers' fault, I have to say that as their neighbour I wasn't aware that german officials did their administration in Cyrillic. The rest of the country seems to do just fine using the Roman alphabet.

Re:it is difficult

[TheDarkMaster]

Ahhhhhh... Yep, you are limited to the character map from the printer in "raw" mode. I tryed, but to draw something using fonts like Verdana you need the Windows driver :(

Re:it is difficult

[lvangool]

It's the Foreign Department. Think about it.

Re:it is difficult

[vegiVamp]

Yes, well, given that I'm a neighbour, the germans all seem a bit foreign to me :-p

Re:it is difficult

[ducomputergeek]

Solution: Dymo. Company I worked at was dealing with retail POS software written in Java. We were able to get our standard offering up and running on OpenSuSE and SLED without any problems for use with HP rp7000 and NCR POS systems. For label printing we used the Dymo LabelWriter series which are A: cheaper than Zebra and B: has CUPS drivers and many builds have them included by default.

Re:it is difficult

[moco]

I can't talk about the specific model you mention, but the zebras I worked with were far from a "generic" printer. In the sense that you either used their windows label printing software (labelview) or, if your requirements are not met, you write specific code for them even in windows. Admittedly this was 10 years ago, maybe labelview has improved or there may be other options out there.

Anyway, in 2001 I had to write code to print (a very specific type of) labels at an adjustable rate for a production line. Plus we needed to update a database associating each label with the specific article, so labelview was not enough. It ended up running on linux, but it could run on either unix or windows. I still have the ZPL manual sitting on a bookshelf at my house.

Re:it is difficult

[bubulubugoth]

Zebra implements it`s own language called ZPL, the full specification can be obtained from the web... I used to write directly to a zebra printer coding my own command controls and writing it directly to /dev/ttyS0, that was like... 6-7 years ago for a movie ticket application.... isn't that difficult in the end. .. Zebra printers are no excuse for me...

Re:it is difficult

[roman_mir]

Did I say anything about Windows being BETTER?

I said that this printer is not working under Linux for printing out Cyrillic in this case, for a store chain it just maybe a show stopper.

Re:it is difficult

[roman_mir]

I did mention they need Cyrillic and other character types to print on those printers, didn't I?

Yes, we used RAW, we used ZPL - only standard ASCII characters can be printed that way, not Unicode character sets or other types of fonts except for the default.

Re:it is difficult

[roman_mir]

and I wasn't aware that a 'retail operation' had anything to do with German officials.

Why are half the people in this thread unable to understand the very first sentence in the comment?

It's hard not only for governments. A retail operation was trying to switch to Ubuntu boxes

Re:it is difficult

[roman_mir]

It's a retail chain. They already have everything working on Windows, they were thinking about moving to Linux. You don't buy a bunch of new everything only to switch to a different OS.

Re:it is difficult

[roman_mir]

Printing Cyrillic?

Re:it is difficult

[roman_mir]

And does it print Cyrillic in Linux?

But saying that this is a solution... when it's an existing retail chain that already owns its hardware?

Re:it is difficult

[inglorion_on_the_net]

Bar code printers that cost about $250 retail being a show stopper? I would imagine you could just replace them with some model that does work. Sure, it would cost you, but I don't think anybody expected the migration would be completely free. It's all a matter of costs vs. benefits, and I wouldn't imagine some $250 machines being a deal breaker.

Re:it is difficult

[roman_mir]

That's just one of the problems.

But 250 dollars? Multiply that by the number of stores. Also it's not USA where $250 is just a microsecond for the Fed to print and to give out in bailouts. People actually have to make profit to survive.

Re:it is difficult

[Alex Belits]

Grasp[ing at every straw, aren't we?

Zebra printers don't work with regular printing applications -- to use them, a custom application has to send command in one of supported formats.

Oh, lookie, a full documentation! http://www.google.com/search?q=zebra+zpl+programming+guide And it includes, among other things, loading fonts!

Re:it is difficult

[Alex Belits]

No.

http://www.google.com/search?q=zebra+zpl+programming+guide

ZPL supports loadable fonts. They just aren't in any way related to Unicode (and that is the same regardless of the OS used) -- you have access to 256 characters at a time, so if you have multilingual text, you may have to use multiple fonts and 8-bit charset. German is supported with ISO8859-1 or ISO8859-15, cyrillic+ASCII with KOI-8, etc. If you need a label with cyrillic and German, or cyrillic and Japanese you may have to switch fonts.

This is how those printers work (and how most matrix printers worked in 70's-90's), it has nothing to do with operating systems.

Thunderbird would make anyone crazy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use evolution and consider Thunderbird to be worthless. Aside from that as someone who uses Linux as a primary desktop for years (CENTOS/FEDORA) there's more general wierdness for me compared to Windows 7. Stuff is more likely to just work with Win 7.

I think the real benefit of open-source has nothing to do with the license cost which is quite overrated. The benefit is that I can just download the latest stuff anytime without having to worry about licenses or other hassles. Because the cost of MS software is quite insignificant for anybody living/earning in a western country (and people in other places mostly pirate it) when you consider it stays current for years. I mean would anyone seriously have considered themselves to save $200 on an XP license for example that they could've used for 6 years if they preferred XP? Maybe a few insane slashmonkeys would try to argue that.

Re:Thunderbird would make anyone crazy.

[Alex Belits]

Thunderbird is far superior to Evolution when configured to use IMAP.

And there is no legitimate reason for using any other mail reading protocol but IMAP.

Microsoft invests Billions in... Germany?

[fibrewire]

Someone at the top of the ladder @ Microsoft must have seen where this was going.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-10-06/microsoft-s-ballmer-to-invest-billions-in-cloud-data-centers.html

Which printers?

[high_rolla]

I wonder what printers and scanners they are using that would require them to write their own drivers? I have been using Linux for a few years now as my desktop and have had no problems connecting various printers using existing drivers.

Re:Which Printers?

[PixetaledPikachu]

I'm wondering which printers they are using that require them to write drivers? I thought most common printers had Linux drivers nowadays?

Canon provides a linux driver for my Pixma MP145, but the quality is very underwhelming. I can't switch between printing in color, B/W or greyscale from the GUI

Re:Which Printers?

[Zappy]

My printer advise boils down to, if it doesn't support either pcl or ps don't buy it.

This rules out most of the crappy inkjets and some multifunctionals.

Writing printer and scanner drivers??

[wvmarle]

It makes me wonder what arcane version of Linux they were using - or what kind of obscure brand of printers and scanners they insist on using. Any serious manufacturer these days supports Linux.

Now I know not all printers have Linux drivers available; yet this migration has been going on for five years and has been planned probably for years before that.Easy enough to replace equipment that comes to the end of its life span with equipment that's known to work with Linux. At least that is assuming they have a serious and competent IT department.

Re:Writing printer and scanner drivers??

[fishexe]

It makes me wonder what arcane version of Linux they were using - or what kind of obscure brand of printers and scanners they insist on using. Any serious manufacturer these days supports Linux.

I have a strong hunch--a very, very strong hunch--that they never actually wrote any printer or scanner drivers, rather the person in charge of explaining the decision reached into the excuse bin and pulled that one out. The real reason probably has more to do with the sort of institutional bribery that Microsoft is famous for.

Re:Writing printer and scanner drivers??

[amiga500]

Governments and corporations often use printers which you would never find at your local Staples. For example check writing printers are one niche. Other specialty printers include wide format printers or high capacity printers. These printers also tend to have a longer life-span than your typical desktop printer. If the printers have a 10 year lifespan, the government may not have the chance to negotiate with the manufacture on getting Linux drivers.

Re:Writing printer and scanner drivers??

[Svartalf]

Heh... You're deluding yourself... Want to know what typical devices they'd be using? Here's an example thereof:

The Oce cm2510

Here's another example...

The Ricoh C4500

In both cases, these machines, like pretty much ALL the other "business" printers (and that's what they get used for) run network centric print servers that support LPR/LPD, JetDirect, IPP, and possibly SMB direct spools. They take PCL5 or more typically Postscript as a command language. The stuff you'll find in most of these contexts is not some desktop printer that they've nabbed and slapped somewhere. And if it was done for some lightweight application, they're using a standard network print spool box, coupled with something that's...supported by PCL5 or Postscript, mainly because they don't want to dink with drivers. In the case of the scanners on those multi-function devices, they scan not to a desktop but to your EMAIL.

Sorry...not buying the line they're running up the flagpole. For the expense of what they claimed for those "drivers" they could have eliminated it if they didn't have devices like the two above. Seriously.

Economically sound?

[zebslash]

I am sure that with the money they spend in Windows licenses, they could have bought new compatible printers and scanners. Come on, most high grade, networked all-in-one printers and scanners are compatible with Linux.

Re:Economically sound?

[PiSkyHi]

Bah... Its an excuse - this has nothing to do with the reason they gave and everything to do with politics. Meanwhile, most of have seen the Linux Desktop become solid, stable, feature rich and most of the developers are now moving on to making netbooks and tablets fly as most of the major work is done.

It reminds me of when I finally bought a VHS machine just as they were being phased out for digital, the cheapest VHS machine came with 6 heads and Hi-Fi sound - it was finally technically complete so I got one cheap.

These guys have done the exact opposite - spent years with Linux as it continued to become a desktop master, now that it technically is, they drop it. Idiots!

Re:Economically sound?

[PsychoSlashDot]

I am sure that with the money they spend in Windows licenses, they could have bought new compatible printers and scanners. Come on, most high grade, networked all-in-one printers and scanners are compatible with Linux.

You're assuming that's the sort of gear that's at issue. My bank in Canada uses small receipt printers at each teller's desk. They've also had cheque scanners that read the codes at the bottom, often printed in MICR toner.

While I don't know that the decision isn't ridiculous, I'm not going to assume it is. They may not be having problems with large-scale group printers that we all know can be made to work (well). It may be smaller, industry-specific gear that has lead to this problem. We don't know. So I refuse to play couch-rocket-scientist and tell them how they're doing it wrong and don't know their jobs.

Re:Economically sound?

[tsj5j]

It's hard to put a hard figure on lost productivity as employees are encumbered by inexperience or poor UI.
Training helps (and that costs quite a nice amount too), but I'm pretty certain employees work far faster on a UI they're familiar with.

Re:Economically sound?

[AdrianKemp]

I work at a university campus library, we're a tiny little outfit (a mere 140 staff). However we deal with public service as well as maintaining fairly sophisticated servers for the collections and providing cafe-style computer access to students.

140 staff, another 100 student accessible machines. All are running windows, and those licenses run us $0. This is partly because the people in charge won't allow buying anything but IBM (lenovo) which means that all computers come with windows. The other part of it is Microsoft giving us the software we need free because they want people hooked.

We have $64,000 in printers, $34,000 of which need to be replaced if we switch to linux, another $10,000 that should be replaced as support is existent but spotty. (I went through all of this when I tried to get a switch happening).

Without going into staff training or anything else, that means a cost of at least $34,000 (around $250 per staff) in printers to switch to linux. I assure you that printers are a big part of linux's problem in the workplace.

Is it unfair to linux that the extra cost of buying lenovo desktops can't be factored in (I could by locally for about half the price)? Yes.

Is it unfair to linux that Microsoft gives away software (and developers to manufacturers) where needed to make the switch to linux harder to sell? A little, but that's business.

Does it matter? No.

The simple fact is that as much as I do like linux, Microsoft isn't lying when they say it's more expensive in the workplace. They're being slightly underhanded, but not lying.

Re:Economically sound?

[Troy]

So I refuse to play couch-rocket-scientist

I burned a good 5 minutes parsing that phrase as some variant of "rock-paper-scissors," and thinking "what could beat a rocket?"

Which Printers?

[high_rolla]

I'm wondering which printers they are using that require them to write drivers? I thought most common printers had Linux drivers nowadays?

Why are they writing their own drivers?

[perpenso]

... the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers ...

Why are they writing their own drivers? As a sizable buyer of equipment (the government, not the single department) they could simply tell HP and other vendors that the government will only be considering equipment that has Linux drivers.

Re:Why are they writing their own drivers?

[squizzar]

Yes they do. Printing is usually handled by CUPS (which was bought by and is now maintained by Apple). The desktop environments provide their own front end tools, but the underlying system is the same.

Re:Why are they writing their own drivers?

[xclr8r]

My guess is legacy applications, probably run secretly in Wine.

Re:Why are they writing their own drivers?

[Just Some Guy]

Why are they writing their own drivers?

I've known people who described themselves as programmers. They'd programmed Quicken. They'd programmed Paint Shop Pro. In fact, they were confident that if they could download an app, then they could program it onto their computer.

I suspect those people program Quicken in much the same way the Foreign Office "writes" printer and scanner drivers.

Re:Why are they writing their own drivers?

[snookiex]

Probably, but I guess they have a lot of legacy equipment which is no longer manufactured and the vendors find pointless to make drivers for them. On the other hand, I think that it was naive to think that they could make the drivers by themselves. I don't know the scenario, but I'll take my chances when I say that they should have kept Windows boxes to handle the equipment and focused in figuring out a way to share those resources with the rest of the users.

Re:Why are they writing their own drivers?

[denzacar]

They are not buyers. At least not any more. Or "in volume".
Printers and scanners mentioned were probably bought separately by each department and each office (it's FOREIGN office... as in... has offices around the world) "as needed" and "as available locally" over some time IN THE PAST.

It's not like it would have been wise or advisable if they had thrown their hardware out along with the OS.

Re:Why are they writing their own drivers?

[DerekLyons]

the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers ...

Why are they writing their own drivers? As a sizable buyer of equipment (the government, not the single department) they could simply tell HP and other vendors that the government will only be considering equipment that has Linux drivers.

And HP and the other vendors will look at the relatively tiny size of the buyer insisting on new drivers compared to the enormous market market of people not so insisting... and will let the bid due by date slide past without lifting a finger.
 
This is driven (pardon the pun) by several effects:

• Despite it's huge absolute size, the German government isn't buying 100,000 printers at a pop - it's buying 10 here and 100 there, and 20 elsewhere spread out over years.
• Despite maybe buying 100,000 printers over a decade the German government almost certainly isn't buying a single model - they're buying 1,000 of this, 500 of that, 2,000 of the other.
• Nor is writing drivers a one-time cost. They have be maintained and updated as firmware and hardware changes - and new drivers have to be written as new models come onto the market in the hopes that German government may buy that model.

Re:Why are they writing their own drivers?

[Alex Belits]

Equipment doesn't last that long. They used Linux for years, I will be surprised that any single printer (other than HP LaserJet 4 or 5 -- those things last ridiculously long) was not replaced over that whole time.

ACHTUNG!

[Anonymous Coward]

ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS!
DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN.
IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.

Re:ACHTUNG!

[pulse2600]

Best. Post. Ever.

Re:ACHTUNG!

[Killjoy_NL]

It is an old one, but a good one :)

Calling bullshit

[Alex Belits]

While it's very likely that Microsoft-addicted users complained, I am absolutely certain that no resources were spent on "writing printer and scanner drivers", thus making the whole claim untrustworthy.

Someone has to be investigated for corruption -- IIRC, in Germany it actually something that matters.

Re:Calling bullshit

[dadelbunts]

Maybe thats the point. Not spending resources on writing printen and scanner drives that most likely wouldnt work as well as they would on a windows machine.

Re:Calling bullshit

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Transparency International's annual Corruption Perceptions Index

Highlighted the important part for you.

Re:Calling bullshit

[Alex Belits]

They never wrote any drivers. This part is certain. I don't think, they ever encountered any problems with printers, either, but the part about writing driver is easier to prove.

Re:Calling bullshit

[Alex Belits]

That foreign office has to interchange with the tax office and others for example. All of them use Windows, and rely on bureaucratic process; likely invoking custom forms and standardized (Win-only) hardware.

If government uses scripting in Microsoft Word and Excel to handle its forms, the problem is not with software.

Also they've been dual-booting

No one sane dual-boots an office computer. If anyone did, the whole thing would be nothing but sabotage.

still due to requiring Win-only legacy software (tax office again), so that's were the user inertia still was.

Tax law most likely changed multiple times over the years, requiring full rewrite of tax-related software pieces. If someone kept rewriting them in Visual Basic in the midst of migration to Linux, he was either a complete idiot or intentionally sabotaging the system. Much more likely no such thing existed because tax handling is server-side in custom-made accounting systems.

poor interoperability

[sxpert]

right... it's much easier to be interoperable when everyone is running the same (MS) crap... morons, that's not interoperability....
as for writing printer drivers, well, their fault for not selecting a manufacturer that makes sure it's hardware is compatible, such as HP

Re:Poor interoperability

[calmofthestorm]

I'm with you in spirit, but I've never had someone mail me out an OpenOffice Writer file. I still get docs from time to time from the occasional computer-clueless user.

Re:Poor interoperability

[polyp2000]

That most likely because most OpenOffice users are savvy enough to know that the person on the other end might not be running OpenOffice. I Use OO all the time - but ill always convert to an M$ friendly format before sending them off to anyone. I will often also attach a PDF exported directly from OO - just in case.

Maybe that's the reason no-one has sent you an OpenOffice file

N.

Re:Poor interoperability

[linuxpyro]

If I'm going to send someone I don't know a document, I usually send it as a PDF. I use OpenOffice, and a PDF is really the best way I have of being sure that it will look to them as it does on my own machine. Now, I don't do this if the other person has to make many changes, but otherwise PDF is the way to go. I do it even if I've been working on Windows and using Word.

Re:Poor interoperability

[Risen888]

Me too, actually. My workhorse music player application (and when you've got 20k+ audio tracks, yes, workhorse is the word) is gmusicbrowser, doesn't run on Windows (well, it apparently does load, but it doesn't play music because of the lack of some perl bindings). Also, running emacs on Windows is all kinds of fucked up.

Printer drivers?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Really?

I mean, I suppose I don't really know much about this, but did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers? Seriously, what doesn't CUPS support these days?

Re:Printer drivers?

[johnsie]

Many specialised themal label printers and legacy scanners.

Re:Printer drivers?

[fishexe]

...did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers?

Depends how steep a discount MS used to bribe them into switching back. My guess is "100% until you're out of office" was the offer.

Re:Printer drivers?

[guruevi]

Actually, truly legacy scanners and printers do work in Linux and might not work so well with the latest Windows (latest being XP -> 7). SCSI scanners for example are a big one, old PS printers are another one (Windows prints to them but usually messes it up somehow, others get detected as some HP LaserJet version, accept the job and pipe it to the printer version of /dev/null - nothing comes out).

It's the in-between stage of crappy stuff they bought between 1995 and 2001 that's so bad. Those cheap parallel port scanners and early USB scanners that could be bought for $100 in 1998. All types of printers from old typewriter manufacturers that went into the printer business as a last resort to save their business and don't even exist anymore. Some of them only have Windows 95 and 98 drivers and will work up until Windows XP but no further. Those things should've died a long time ago but somehow people still want to use them.

Whatever the cost is to replace those systems is absolutely minimal compared to the yearly cost of Windows licensing. We currently pay $95/license/year as a large institution - in just 3 years you have saved the money to buy some really, really nice group printer, label printer, scanner or even an individual printer.

Re:Printer drivers?

[tsj5j]

Printer drivers were just one of the examples.
I suspect this guy doesn't know much about the specifics, and his comptroller just told him it's more financially viable to switch back to Windows.

Frankly, I believe that Linux is causing a great deal of inconvenience to both them and businesses that work with them.
Just Microsoft Office alone and the poor job OpenOffice does of transparently replacing it is sufficient to piss off a whole lot of employees.

Re:Printer drivers?

[tiqui]

What follows will look like flamebait from a troll to anybody who wants to ignore the truth, but if the situation is ever going to improve, all of us who use Linux and want it to succeed need to stop ignoring reality. Linux users need to learn to take criticism properly. The simple fact is that for most non-geeks, Linux sucks (I have been using it for years and my business runs almost entirely on Linux, but even I find it almost more trouble than it's worth). If the end user has a problem with Linux, the proper response is to say "wow, we need to better understand the users and we need to fix these problems" rather than posting hostile messages on the web (not saying your particular post was hostile, but it often happens when people complain about Linux) that accuse users of being stupid, or posting responses to cries for help that amount to "RTFM!" or "use the force, read the source!"

You ask "what doesn't CUPS support these days?", and I say: all but one of the printers my business uses, and support for that one is flaky..... and why should I need one of the worst applications ever written (CUPS) anyway? I dare you to setup a PC with Linux and CUPS and then ask your parents to do something important with it. Odds are, they'll get frustrated and give up without ever getting a single page out of the printer. If they ever have to add a new printer, they'll never succeed. It's a clumbsy, non-obvious pile of junk that has a non-intuitive user interface. Printing in Linux simply stinks; half the time you get blank pages, or pages of garbage ASCII characters instead of the nice output that any idiot can get from Windows or a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. No average PC user thinks of firing up a web browser and entering a raw IP address into the URL line to get at the printer controls. In Windows, it's very easy to setup, control, and use printers. In Linux, printing appears to be an after-thought that was quickly hacked-in under extreme schedule pressure with the user interface being setup through the web browser because it was quick and easy for the programmers.

Linux audio similarly sucks (can we please have a single standard programming interface that supports both open- and closed-source applications equally well?!?!?!, scanners suck too (Sane was a good first try.... ten years ago). Have an all-in-one scanner-printer unit? Odds are you'll have troubles. The nearly religious fanaticism for "open" code is only making things worse.... I have nvidia cards in most of my systems and use the nvidia binary drivers (they work and make the Linux boxes every bit as good as any windows box for our custom in-house cad software) but now new Linux distros insist on including crappy open-source nvidia drivers and making it hard to use the good binary drivers from nvidia! Why? Was it because there was no way to make both options easy? Nah, apparently just because some jerks appear to have decided that "open" did not just mean free and open code shipped with Linux, but that actual hostility to non-open code was to be encouraged. When we upgraded some systems and ran into this issue, we had to waste a bunch of time spelunking on the internet trying to find the solution (why did we even have to look? adding support for the new drivers, even as the default, should not have made the newer Linux release even harder to use than a previous release for people who need the closed drivers) That just does not fly for end users, no matter how happy (in an obnoxious "my way or the highway" sense) it might make some coders with an open source purity test complex.

Maybe the Germans needed to add an app to some desktops. In Windows land, you stick an installer for the app on the machine, wait a few moments and you are ready to roll. In Linux land, you might get a tarball or RPM, stick it on the machine, find that there are 5942 dependency issues, you need 3 hours with a high-speed net connection to download and patch everything, need to change compiler versions, need to update glibc, need to update the Kernel, nee

Re:Printer drivers?

[TheQuantumShift]

I agree, what works for some won't work for others.

I was lucky that canon decided to make .debs to install my printer/scanner drivers. The hard part was that the driver is x86 only, and to even get the driver I had to lie to canons site and say I was from Europe. Then I had to install lib32 stuff (along with a sketchy cups2 package to resolve outdated dependencies) and "force" apt to install the deb (wrong arch and all of that). After that it worked great. Note: I bought the cheapest all in one they had when I got that, assuming Linux would just work the way my last canon did. If I had done my research, I would have probably spent a few bucks more and got something with better support.

In contrast, to install the printer in Windows 7, I had to turn the printer on. That's it. Device auto-detected, driver auto downloaded and installed. Done. Of course, if there were drivers in cups for my model, the process would have been the same in Ubuntu. Plug in, turn on, start printing. I will point out that scanning worked without installing anything via gimp and xsane.

So that's my story, but the point is: Yes hardware is not supported as well as in windows, but it keeps getting better, just like the rest of OSS. That's the point after all, make the software the best it can be. Market share can go hang, this isn't a "fight to displace MS". If you want vendors behind Linux, stop buying hardware that isn't supported from companies that aren't interested in OSS based customers. Make sure to leave (polite) feedback on customer support sites stating that due to lack of Linux support, you're buying brand x.

Above all, use the right tool, and don't force an agenda.

Re:Printer drivers?

[SanityInAnarchy]

all but one of the printers my business uses, and support for that one is flaky.....

Since that was the only part of your rant which answers my question, let me answer that with another question: Which ones? I'm not a contributer of the CUPS project, but, you know, model numbers would be nice. You also didn't answer this question:

did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers?

Because from what I understand, printers are far, far cheaper than Windows, and writing printer drivers is the most expensive way of all. I mean, maybe you had a legitimately bad experience, but this just sounds to me like they are Doing It Wrong in every way possible.

To address the rest of your rant:

Linux users need to learn to take criticism properly. The simple fact is that for most non-geeks, Linux sucks...

Constructive criticism, I'll take. That's just pointless bashing. Tell me why it sucks, what needs to be changed.

why should I need one of the worst applications ever written (CUPS) anyway?

Hey, guess what? More pointless bashing. Again, tell me why it sucks.

I dare you to setup a PC with Linux and CUPS and then ask your parents to do something important with it.

Well, first of all, if this is your sole argument for how much CUPS sucks, I'm sorry, but for running a printserver (or any kind of server), I'll take a scriptable commandline over a parent-proof GUI any day. It's nice when they aren't mutually exclusive, though, as seems to be the case with CUPS.

To address your complaint more directly, not only have I done this with Linux, with a fair amount of success -- printing documents is important, and it works just as well with CUPS as with anything else -- but I dare you to tell me my parents would get frustrated and give up on a shiny new Mac. That's right, CUPS is used as the Mac printing stack.

If they ever have to add a new printer, they'll never succeed.

The last time I did this in Kubuntu, I clicked "System Settings", then "Printers", then "New Printer". In a few clicks, it even automatically portscanned my local network looking for printers. It's been even longer since I tried this for USB than for network printers, but each time, I was surprised at how much was done for me.

Printing in Linux simply stinks; half the time you get blank pages, or pages of garbage ASCII characters instead of the nice output that any idiot can get from Windows or a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. No average PC user thinks of firing up a web browser and entering a raw IP address into the URL line to get at the printer controls.

And with that, I'm convinced you know almost nothing about CUPS and almost nothing about modern desktop Linux. Did you even try the GUI way of doing this? I didn't have to fire up a web browser and enter a raw IP address. When I print a document, it shows up in the system tray just like it's supposed to. But it is kind of cool that I can control my printserver from that web interface if I need to, say, add a new printer to a printserver, not to be confused with adding a new printserver to my local machine.

But hey, you mentioned any idiot can get nice output from a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. I'll say it again: Mac uses CUPS. I thought CUPS was "one of the worst applications ever written"?

Linux audio similarly sucks (can we please have a single standard programming interface that supports both open- and closed-source applications equally well?!?!?!,

...erm...which standard programming interface that Linux currently supports doesn't support both open and closed source apps? I must be confused -- I have sever

Re:Printer drivers?

[Alex Belits]

HP2663 colour inkjet, to the left of my laptop, great quality, speed and economy under Windows (pity about the 150MB+ Windows driver package), but under Linux the job goes off to the printer and never emerges; and

Congratulations, you have found an old, and likely invalid, Ubuntu bug report and misspelled the name of printer in it:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/599956

Epson CX4300 3-in-1, to the right of my laptop.

Another success for googling:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1659498

You don't even have those printers. You just google for "ubuntu printer problem".

One has to wonder ...

[HW_Hack]

what the number of security / virus issues was (or wasn't ) during the period of using Linux in the office ? I do tech support for a medium sized school district and we are constantly getting pretty sophisticated phishing emails to some of our staff. And some staff still fall for them or send out emails or try to reply ... Fortunately we are 70% Mac based so most of that just blows by.

The issue with teachers is that they regularly email parents and students who may have infected PCs and their email addresses are then harvested.

In other news

[antifoidulus]

Wikileaks is already preparing for the deluge of sensitive German diplomatic information that is bound to come in when someone hacks the new Windows machines. I give it a month, tops.

What a waste

[Palmsie]

You spend all that money training people and changing the culture of your office to become more open minded and active learners with regard to technology only to switch back after you spent all the resources. Of course people are going to complain, change isn't always easy but if you facilitate the transition through training or knowledge management it eventually pays itself off.

In other words

[Billly Gates]

I am sure some nice rebates and a few government lobbyists paid for special information sessions on learning the joys of Microsoft products of course. Maybe these including some nice resorts, dinners, and tickets for sporting events for these lovely educational lessons.

If they are anything like our staff at my office.

[Rivalz]

We still have some staff members using typewriters. I shit you not.
Never underestimate just how reluctant people are to change.
Especially when there is no incentive to do so.
And you want them to work harder to learn something that does the exact same thing except its cheaper for you.
And you expect them to get the same amount of work done different system.
And you cut their pay.
And their money isn't worth as much anymore.
And they could probably earn more as a bar tender.

Ways to make a change feasible.
Rule #1: If it doesn't make sense to the person doing the work to switch ie. no discernible benefit your screwed before you even started.
Rule #2: Build solitaire directly into clones of word and excel.
Rule #3: Build facebook games directly into all office apps.

You could say....

[ALeader71]

Buy cross platform compatible hardware, but they do have a point.

I do wonder about the "lack of functionality, usability, and interoperability" claims. If you phase in the back end items: databases, web servers, file sharing, and LDAP then implement standards compliant replacement information stores and better looking front end client applications most users will scarcely notice the change. You could even keep Windows on the desktop. Microsoft Office is still king, and Open Office lacks the click-for-click interface cloning that stymies the average user.

Just in time

[symbolset]

To miss the migration to mobile.

missing out on group savings

[advocate_one]

as the other departments were using windows and so the cost of writing the drivers wasn't being shared out amongst all of them, but kept in the single department... anyway, they should have been insisting on hardware only coming from manufacturers who provided Linux support... buying winprinters and expecting them to work on Linux is just stupid...

Implausible

[Delgul]

As the article states, the reasons given are implausible. More likely, the move is politically motivated.

Re:implausible

[mad_minstrel]

Perhaps they have specialized printers for handling things like ID cards, where falsifiability is an issue. Perhaps he meant retina scanners. Who knows! A "scanner" and a "printer" can mean a lot of different things.

Re:Implausible

[soccerisgod]

The foreign office is in the hands of a party (FDP) that from its political standpoint would clearly favor proprietary software over open source. The open source initiative was started by the previous office holder, who came from the other end of the political spectrum (the German Green party) Whatever real problems there may or may not be, they almost certainly are not the reason for this switch.

Re:implausible

[1u3hr]

If by "printers and scanners" they meant something else entirely than the words usually mean, maybe they should have said so. And you'd expect high security applications to have customised hardware and software. This is about the bulk of office drones typing out memos in their cubicles

Re:implausible

[BlackCreek]

> Perhaps they have specialized printers for handling things like ID cards, where falsifiability is an issue. Perhaps he meant retina scanners. Who knows! A "scanner" and a "printer" can mean a lot of different things.

Specialized printers are normally connected to specialized hardware. Said 'specialized hardware' then acts as a printer / image servers. Desktops (whichever OS) are just clients. At least that is how the cartographers, I had as colleagues while working with research, managed their (specialized) printers.

Re:implausible

[nashv]

Just buy printers and scanners that are supported and the cost is zero.

It needs to work with printers and scanners that are already there - which by the way easily have a 10-yr life span. This is timing issue -different stuff gets upgraded at different times. Printers, Desktop OS, and the general office workflow is not upgraded at once.

Re:implausible

[1u3hr]

It needs to work with printers and scanners that are already there

The Linux system has supposedly been in place since 2005. So they've had these machines in a corner for six years and want to dust them off and buy new Windows licences so they can use them?

Strikes me as pretty damn unlikely. Anyway, any expensive printer will have a Postscript driver. I guarantee it. Or you could just dedicate an old Windows machine to be the print server, in the worst case.

Standardised? - Proprietary

[udippel]

"standardised proprietary client solutions" is what the article says they want to return to.
By all means, they didn't get it: It is not about the software; but about standards. If I were a German taxpayer, I'd be up in arms: From now onwards, again, taxpayers' monies are used to produce documents that are inaccessible in future. Ask your parents, how nicely old MS-Office documents can opened in newer software versions: zero and nada.

Something smells corrupt here.

Oh, no, I suddenly - struck by enlightenment - understand: the crybabies ("missing functionality, interoperability") can't play Crysis on their workstations.

Year of the linux desktop?

[Laser Dan]

Maybe next year will be the year of the linux desktop...

Why write printer and scanner drivers?

[youn]

I know it's good for the community as a whole, but if it is too expensive for them and cost is an issue... most of the mainstream stuff is supported out of the box these days... and definitely cheaper to buy a new printer than write a driver

Re:Why write printer and scanner drivers?

[tiqui]

And what if you are an organization that owns hundreds (or thousands) of a printer that Linux does not support? What if you listened to all the pro-Linux hype on the glorious inter-tubes-webby-thing and switched to that Linux thingy only to be told by your mid-level people that you have hundreds of scanners that are not supported, and hundreds of each of four different printers, three types of which are totally unsupported, while the fourth type prints some documents properly but screws-up others? And what if your mid-level people tried to install a new office app to help integrate an important activity on all your low-level employee desktops across your entire enterprise, but they came to you and told you that setting up the app up on one system takes two hours and the process needs to be duplicated across 10,000 machines?

The entire attitude of the Linux community on matters like this is wrong. If something is a problem for the end-user, then it is a problem with Linux that needs to be fixed. All too frequently, the response of the Linux community to an end-user issue is to suggest some work-around...... it comes-off like a used car salesman who, having conned a person into buying a clunker, and being confronted with the fact that the car's air conditioning does not work, cheerfully suggests that there's a wrench in the glove box that the user can use to grasp the shaft that would normally host a knob and turn it many times to roll-down the window.

Virus Functionality

[mathex]

They missed the viruses

Did anybody factor security in the cost ?

[what about]

Nobody knows what is in the windows updates.... (beside maybe some Microsoft employee)
I would think that a gov. body should consider security as a top priority !
(Is anybody concerned that one day all WIndoze machines just stop and the whole department is stuck ?)

Also, even assuming the TCO is the same Win-Linux (I do not believe this) but instead of shipping money to Redmond you keep them in Germany, something a government should think about, or not ?

There can be a simpler explanation, as usual, a Microsoft representative visited a key person and explained the advantages to switch back to Microsoft.
(Any of you may just guess who will gain the most for the switch back)

Lack of focus

[Yuioup]

It all comes down to the lack of focus and consistency with a few Open Source projects. Unfortunately making a desktop environment does not lend itself to a every-developer-is-equal type environment. In order to succeed a desktop environment project needs to be ruled with an iron fist from top to bottom.

See (albeit non-Open Source) examples: Windows, iOS.

This does not sit well with at all Open Source developers in general. The concept of a dictatorship flies in the face of whatever they hold dear.

So for this to succeed, somebody has to step up and create a desktop environment built from top-to-bottom with a no-questions-asked policy.

Y

Re:Lack of focus

[marcosdumay]

One of your examples fails to be an iron first dictatorship. The other one fails to be a desktop environment.

Re:Lack of focus

[Risen888]

Nothing in the article (I know, I know, you didn't read it) or the summary (you did at least read the summary, didn't you?) even mention anything about any desktop environment(s) whatsoever.

In short, what the fuck are you on about?

Poor interoperability

[G3ckoG33k]

One of many reasons I don't run Windows is, in fact, the poor interoperability with some of my favorite Linux only programs. That extends very few programs however.

It would be relevant to see which programs lack the stated poor interoperability.

missing out on group savings

[advocate_one]

as they were the only ones involved in the experiment, then their costs of writing drivers weren't being shared out... also, they should have absolutely insisted on hardware having to have Linux support out of the box from the suppliers. Expecting winprinters to work is rather stupid as winprinters aren't really printers at all as the manufacturer has shed a lot of cost by using the computer itself to do the hard work.

The rest of the article says it best

[erroneus]

Almost no need for comments here in Slashdot as the second half of the article "balances" the initial assertions.

Essentially, one group in a political party is against the use of F/OSS in favor of Microsoft and other BSA groups' products. They give arguments that do not contain any figures to support their claims. The article indicates this much but also asserts that the costs of creating various forms of support for hardware are CERTAINLY less than the costs of Windows and other software licenses. (You can almost certainly expect Microsoft to step in to offer discounted license costs to the German government to prove that's not true as they have in the past)

With all that said, it certainly does show there is still an uphill war going on where hardware support is concerned. Without question, the battles have mostly been won though the determination of developers, hackers and crackers where the results are an extensive pool of hardware supported under Linux. Trouble is, hardware development hasn't stopped and new ways to shut out access to Linux users have been added as it goes on. One that gets under my skin most recently is NVidia's Optimus technology that has made the use of the nvidia gpu impossible on my little alienware.

Until hardware makers are legally inhibited from doing so, this will go on for as long forever or until Windows becomes the next IBM or Novell. (Nobody believed IBM on the desktop could be killed off... nobody believed Novell on the server could be marginalzed either and they both happened. Why anyone thinks Microsoft Windows will still dominate in 5 years amazes me. They might, but they might not -- things are changing rapidly and there is still lots of government support and development of Linux around the world.)

Re:The rest of the article says it best

[Nominei]

You are probably 100% correct on the politics of this situation. But you talk like hardware developer's are actively trying to shut out access to Linux users. Why would they bother? If it works for Linux, great - more customers! If not, who cares? The majority of people aren't technically savvy enough, or care about computer enough to give a damn. Windows still being dominant in five years is pretty much locked, I think. Sheer momentum from the masses will keep them in the front, even if some killer new device comes out tomorrow that can completely replace computers as we know them! As useful and handy as F/OSS software is, most people don't understand that free can mean great value. They expect free actually means limited, second-rate, and hard to use. Sadly, It doesn't matter what you say, do, or demonstrate - it will stay that way.

Re:The rest of the article says it best

[erroneus]

In many cases, Linux support for hardware at least "strongly appears" to be removed from previously supported hardware under pressure from Microsoft. That is actually just a strong suspicion at this point, but we already know that Microsoft has, in the past, put its pressure on both hardware and software vendors to make those products "Windows only" so this would not at all be unusual or "a stretch" at all. I simply have no direct evidence of it... we need a "leak" if the proof is out there. But we also see that Microsoft is constantly doing things to cut out anyone who does F/OSS development such as the more recent story about Microsoft's app store terms and conditions which were discussed here on Slashdot.

So while it seems "plausible" to suggest that hardware makers simply see no profit in supporting F/OSS operating systems and software, the fact that quite a few other businesses see and prove it otherwise. Of course each market has its various aspects, but to suggest out of hand that the most likely reason is "there is no profit in it" is ridiculous. There are all sorts of factors that would indicate why it would be good for ALL vendors such as Google's primary reason -- huge amounts of good will and "fan base following." Every business knows that when you have fans, you need to worry less about where your customers will come from.

Re:The rest of the article says it best

[erroneus]

While I would have typically made that assumption as you have, I have to disagree with that assessment based on the anti-Linux's argument's supporting data is unavailable or being kept away from scrutiny.

And if this was in the U.S. or almost any other country, I would have let that slide. But this is Germany we are talking about here. They are notorious for being accurate and complete in nearly everything they do professionally. It is very "unGerman" of them to hold back this information if it supports their argument in truth.

Re:The rest of the article says it best

[Alex Belits]

This is what Microsoft is trying to accomplish -- send open source developers on a wild goose chase to "fix problems" that do not exist, so those developers will not have time and resources to produce superior software.

Fuck you, Microsoft! We know what is not broken and we are not going to fix it.

The price of business as usual

[muckracer]

Monopoly Vendor - meet locked-in Users. Locked-in Users - meet Monopoly Vendor.

Poor interoperability

[G3ckoG33k]

The article or the linked pdf:s don't specify which programs cause the poor interoperability.

In view of that, it may just be some (illegal?) lobbying from other OS owners.

That's a shame

[lakeland]

Sounds like too many staff were experienced with Windows and didn't like learning something new... training, missing functionality, lack of usability and poor interoperability all sound like the complaints I've heard from users when asked to use a different system.

Incidentally, what on earth were they writing printer or scanner drivers for? Could they not specify 'compatible with our environment' on the RFP?

Re:That's a shame

[tiqui]

missing functionality, lack of usability and poor interoperability all sound like the complaints I've heard from users when asked to use a different system

They are also complaints you hear from people who are being told to use a product that has missing functionality, lack of usability and poor interoperability

Rule #1: The customer is always right.

Rule #2: when Linux supporters say the customer/user is wrong, see rule #1

My guess is OpenOffice.org was the biggest hurdle

[webagogue]

I love what the OpenOffice.org (and varriants) have done, but MS Office is SO INGRAINED in the soul of office work that anything else is unbearable for the majority. I'm sure that will change as younger generations utilize google docs, iWork, etc, but that's not the case today. At least not in German government.

Oh?

[Ventriloquate]

Highly vague and seemingly riddled with underhanded intentions but maybe their games didn't run on Linux.

Management....

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it is the "management" that are deciding it is too costly to continue with free open source. The IT department can't get a real reason why. The IT could do tons with the cost of licensing Office/Outlook/Windows and they can do many training seminars on how to use the Linux desktop (gnome is not that hard).

In other words

[geek]

The idiot users were to stubborn to learn how to use it so they gave up and dropped millions on windows

I'll agree with the opposition...

[moco]

FTA:

Henning Tillmann, a colleague of Oliver Kaczmarek, the SPD MP who raised the question, and a member of the SPD executive committee's web policy discussion group, told our associates at heise Open that the government's response was not satisfactory. "The reasons given for the return to Windows are implausible," says Tillmann, "We need the figures."

It sounds more like a change in IT leadership to me.

It worked!

[Arador Aristata]

I see the Microsoft marketing team finally got to them.

Re:It worked!

[tiqui]

Or maybe they just got tired of a bunch of unexplained problems, no documentation, no support, etc. and decided they were better-off in Widows land. If you have not had a bunch of problems with Linux, you are either a geek or you are not using Linux as a tool in some other, primary, activity. Dreaming of conspiracies may make you feel better, but it does not fix any problems and it will not get Linux onto one additional desktop.

Utopia is literally nowhere

[Celarent Darii]

Free software costs more than expected.

Amazingly, work is not free.

Not exactly news, but a good reminder of reality.

Writing Drivers?

[Dogers]

for example in writing printer and scanner drivers

So they either didn't check what they had or just carried on buying any old random scanner or printer. That's not the best route for success..

Re:Writing Drivers?

[johnsie]

it's always everyone elses fault isn't it?? Linux fanboys just wont accept that their precious little OS in incompatible with many, many hardware devices.

Re:Writing Drivers?

[jedidiah]

No. We won't.

We've "been there and done that".

Some of us were using Unix with business class printers 20 years ago. We also understand the underlying technical details.

So no. We aren't going to just take things as they are presented at face value.

Printers aren't the thing that keep even small businesses trapped by Windows.

Details

[inglorion_on_the_net]

It's a pity it didn't work out. I would like to hear more details about exactly what didn't work out (with actual figures, please), so that something may be done about it. The information I have so far doesn't really add up:

They say:

Back in 2007, the Foreign Office's IT department regarded the use of open source software on servers and desktop systems as a success story. IT costs per workspace were reported to be lower than in any other government department

open source has demonstrated its worth, particularly on servers

but then they go on to say

the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated

Ok, so some costs were higher than anticipated, but open source had still demonstrated its worth and overall IT costs were still lower, right?

Also, why would they be writing their own printer and scanner drivers? That could certainly be done if it were the most effective option, but it's also quite possible to buy printers and scanners that are supported out of the box.

So I'm looking forward to getting more answers, particularly as to why certain choices were made the way they were made, and how much money they each cost.

Virtualization

[unlocked]

Why switch run Virtualized Windows on Linux for those that need it.

Re:Virtualization

[johnsie]

Virtualized operating systems cannot always communicate with hardware properly and run very slowly.

Re:Virtualization

[tiqui]

Or better yet, avoid running a double-decked stacked mess of problems....just drop the Linux part, and the virtual machine part, and run a clean copy of windows!

[begin sad sigh] The best solution would be to fix all the usability and compatibility issues with Linux so that Bill Gates would be saying "well, they could still run My Windows thingy in a VM on top of Linux...." [end sad sigh]

Windows Dumbed Users Down

[bedouin]

I wrote an article about this in 2005. Basically, the MS hegemony meant people learned where to click things, rather than what they do and the concepts behind them.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=47652

In the 80s you didn't need to be a geek to use a computer, but at the same time you learned basic ideas that would let you feel at home on any system or OS. Now people just think, "Go to the start menu. No start menu? What the fuck what do I do???"

Re:Windows Dumbed Users Down

[FaxeTheCat]

Actually, only geeks felt at home on any OS in the 1980s. I know. I was there.

Re:Windows Dumbed Users Down

[salesgeek]

Nah. I knew lots of non-geeks that were right at home with a C:> prompt and were creating non-trivial applications in Dbase and Lotus 1-2-3 (using macros). 1-2-3 in particular did more to wrestle applications out of the MIS department than anything.

Just to get something like WordPerfect running you had to have some rudimentary understanding of how the computer worked and had to have working knowledge of at least 5 DOS commands (Format, Copy, Move, Delete and Cd).

Re:Windows Dumbed Users Down

[bedouin]

I was too, and I was using Apple IIs, my c64, PCs, and VMS simultaneously while still in grade school. When I sat in front of say -- an 8-bit Atari or a Mac it wasn't a foreign experience because certain fundamental things always remained true.

I remember moms and dads calling my BBS on probably what was their first computer. Every BBS system had its own idiosyncrasies but people figured it out. Even things like IRC in the early 90s had tons of non-geeks on it. When the only way became the MS way though? That's when individuals became dumbfounded at even a minor environmental change.

Re:Windows Dumbed Users Down

[FaxeTheCat]

>I was too, and I was using Apple IIs, my c64, PCs, and VMS simultaneously while still in grade school. When I sat in front of say -- an 8-bit Atari or a Mac it wasn't a foreign experience because certain fundamental things always remained true.

So you were a geek. Precisely my point.

So there were non geeks on IRC? Big deal. Now all the non-geeks are on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, MSN, twitter and they now upload pictures to one of the gazillion picture sharing sites and do music and movie sharing and edit and upload movie clips to Youtube... and even my 11 year old can use Google. And your point was again?

Re:Windows Dumbed Users Down

[tiqui]

I wrote an article about this in 2005. Basically, the MS hegemony meant people learned where to click things, rather than what they do and the concepts behind them.

um, Hello, Mc Fly! average people who are just using computers as a tool to achieve some other primary task should only need to learn where to click things to quickly and easily achieve their desired ends. If you expect them to learn "what [those things] do and the concepts behind them" then you have confused end-users with geeks, hackers, programmers etc. and you will never understand why Micro$oft dominates the desktop.....sadly, this attitude will only help Micro$oft keep their death-grip on the average user.

Propaganda! (and German original)

[Anonymous Coward]

The decision is political, not technical.

The German original is at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Linux-im-Auswaertigen-Amt-Rueckmigration-auf-Windows-nicht-zwingend-1192284.html and based on http://www.netzpolitik.org/2011/interne-dokumente-des-auswartigen-amtes-zur-anderung-der-open-source-strategie/#more-20730.

Netzpolitik cites a McKinsey study that sees significant costs from a switch back to MS Windows. The main remaining problem is user resistance, which can be mitigated by keeping some dual-boot installations for a while longer.

Erste Post

[twakar]

Warum?

Re:Erste Post

[maxwell demon]

Weil Westerwelle Windows will.

The Positive Side

[johan_from_cape_town]

I am pretty sure that the German Foreign Office will get flamed like crazy now - but I think it is important to see the positive side of it all. It was a big experiment, with a non-zero cost (for the German Government) to it. Instead of ripping the German Foreign Office the open source community should take this and try to learn as much as possible from what happened. To quote Thomas Edison:"I have not failed. I've just found 10000 ways that won't work." Information Technology is not just about the technology, or the ideals behind the technology. It is also about people, about organizational change and social systems and structures. The German Foreign Office is an ideal lesson in all of this.

Some thread predictions

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see the following recipe used for the comments, please.

1) Ad hominem attacks on Germany
2) Comments about installing Linux for your grandmother and her never having to ask for help for the last 5 years
3) Comments that hardware creators are not open enough
4) Random attacks on Microsoft's OS from the perspective of Windows 95.
5) Random attacks on Mac owners.
6) A "BSD is dying" post
7) A "this is news?! Where's the Slashdot I used to know" post
8) A comment about the inconsistency of the periods I used to end each of my points

Re:Some thread predictions

[muckracer]

> 1) Ad hominem attacks on Germany
> 2) Comments about installing Linux for your grandmother and her never having to ask for help for the last 5 years
> 3) Comments that hardware creators are not open enough
> 4) Random attacks on Microsoft's OS from the perspective of Windows 95.
> 5) Random attacks on Mac owners.
> 6) A "BSD is dying" post
> 7) A "this is news?! Where's the Slashdot I used to know" post
> 8) A comment about the inconsistency of the periods I used to end each of my points

Well, whatta'ya expect from a bunch of german Nazis, who ain't anywhere near as cool as my Linux-loving grandma, in fact, Nazis quite similar in personality as hardware-creators with a superiority-complex, who cynically cry OpenTears, while randomly shooting volksverhetzende Mac-owners to meet a gruesome death...not unlike the death the underground BSD group has been meeting...all the while the world sits back barely batting their eyes, which some say would never have happened in their younger days when facts and news were delivered almost instantaneously, then debated vigorously, but now hardly a comment from anyone upon these tragic events unfolding, thus diminishing the global outrage this situation should surely justify into an almost unnoticed an occurrence as the inconsistency of periods at the end of online postings.. ...

Re:Some thread predictions

[maxwell demon]

1) Germany is no human, therefore an ad hominem attack on it isn't possible. All you could do is an ad rem publicam attack.
2) Yeah, she never used the computer anyway.
3) They aren't. Most hardware comes in closed boxes!
4) But Windows 95 is bad. There's not even a 64 bit version!
5) Won't do it. I'm not a terrorist, you know?
6) Netcraft confirms it.
7) Yeah, they don't even have a Cowboy Neal option these days!
8) Your periods are inconsistent!

three points

[Tom]

Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality,

True. I have long discounted Free/Open Source software for productivity tools. My servers run Debian, but I would never again use that on my desktop. Though I moved upwards to OS X, not downwards to windows, I can relate to those users.

a lack of usability

Also true, most Free/Open Source software is still made and designed by geeks for geeks, and hasn't had a desperately needed visit to a usability expert. Usability is not something you can do as an afterthought. Either you have it designed in from the start, or it won't be there.

and poor interoperability."

By which they most likely mean it doesn't read .xslx files and doesn't sync properly with Exchange. Welcome to the world of MS lock-in. It is real, and it's the main profit source for MS. Now we know that even a government can't free itself from that burden.

Re:three points

[elijahu]

...

I have long discounted Free/Open Source software for productivity tools.

...

I don't completely discount them, as there are some (Firefox and Chrome, for example) that surpass their non-FOSS counterparts. Of course I'm being generous in considering browsers "productivity" tools, but they can be in a work environment where the applications are heavily web-based. Sadly, none of the FOSS attempts at spreadsheets has been able to truly match Excel, and even non-FOSS competitors (Numbers, which I have made honest attempts to switch to) fall short. In many office environments, spreadsheets are too much of a core component to overlook, and seemingly minor issues of missing functionality, when encountered regularly in a "why won't this do what I know the other program will" kind of way adds up quickly to equal major user dissatisfaction.

...Usability is not something you can do as an afterthought. Either you have it designed in from the start, or it won't be there.

I very much agree. While I've been impressed with the strides made by Ubuntu, it still lacks a lot of the intuitive usability you get from OS X or even Windows. Its hard for many /.'ers to set aside their experienced view, put themselves in the mindset of a person with limited computer experience, and really understand how baffling a new OS can be if not built for an intuitive user experience.

and poor interoperability."

While many in this thread have scoffed at the idea of drivers remaining an issue, and perhaps they are for printing, I have had several generations of great scanners now that never did and never will work with Linux. It is very frustrating in an office environment to have the need to do something trivial, like scan a document, and be told that it isn't possible because the correct drivers don't exist. Could you please wait a few months for someone in your IT department to try their hand at coding a driver and then try to scan again? Maybe they could have simply gone out and purchased the right scanner hardware. I'm guessing there are some pieces of software out there for Linux that make document capturing easy to use, but I've never seen them because I've never managed to get that far before the need to get the job done overcame my stubbornness for doing it in Linux.

The .xslx point was a good one. There are many times where a document in a Microsoft format "can" be opened in a FOSS tool, but in which the formatting is off by enough to make it a big mess. Calls for going back to MS only takes an one upper management type getting badly embarrassed in an important meeting when the fancy PowerPoint presentation he made at home in Microsoft chokes and dies in the FOSS software that his IT shop told him was compatible.

Virtualization

[unlocked]

Why switch. Run Virtualized Windows on Linux for those who need it.

FP???

[justforgetme]

Fisrt opst? :P

Writing drivers!?!

[bjourne]

I can understand that they would not want to use Linux if they have to write printer drivers for it! But in my experience, network printers work out of the box with Linux both for duplex and four-color printing. What kind of special printing requirements would the German Foreign Office have where the regular printing setup isn't good enough? Does Windows come with specialized printing drivers?

Not really surprising

[uberjack]

While Linux and the open desktop have certainly come a ways since - even 5 years ago, it saddens me to say that neither are ready for the proverbial "prime time". While I can't imagine using anything but GNOME these days, I have a much larger threshold of putting up with things like unavailable codecs, incompatible drivers, and just plain software unavailability - possibly because in most such cases, I'm willing to make the effort to figure out how to make things work. We're getting there though, and the state of Everyman Linux is certainly leaps and bounds above of where it was as little as 5 years ago.

Not surprised

[Kjella]

I never bothered to post here because all I had was Norwegian sources, but here in Norway there's been two major blows to OpenOffice adaption. Both the county and region that used to push it the hardest has announced plans to migrate back to MS Office, taking with it 4000 and 20000 users back to Microsoft. When the total public sector is some 800000 people and already 90%+ Microsoft, it's creeping back up towards 100% not down. And if you can't do without MS Office, you can't do without Windows. Linux on the public desktop seems just further and further away at this point.

Par For the Course

[oakwine]

On commercial tech transfer park of major university campus, experience was similar. Many startup businesses started off with full Linux, servers and desktops. But as they expanded, the desktops moved to Windows and Mac. They kept the Linux servers. The Linux desktops provided too many issues. Exception was scientific and technical companies where the users preferred Linux for their special applications.

First

[HuckleCom]

"though it declines to give any actual figures. Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability." riiight. Move along?

Erste Gepostungmittelstoff

[Hognoxious]

I'm sure there'll be one of those subtitled Hitler spoofs along real soon now.

Efficient Germans

[peetm]

Well, as they’re known for their efficiency, planning and methodical approach to engineering solutions, this doesn’t do much bode too well for Linux, does it?

Virtualization

[unlocked]

Enough said.

Really..?

[darinfp]

Sounds like they had a little help writing the report...

missing functionality?

[atarione]

when oh when can we get a fully reversed engineered minesweeper for linux?

Re:missing functionality?

[Dr_Barnowl]

I know you're going for a funny ; but it's already part of the default installation of Ubuntu (Mines), along with Solitaire (Aisleriot), Tetris (Quadrapassel) and Sudoku.

Re:missing functionality?

[Cili]

Mines is not 100% compatible.

Who would have guessed

[maweki]

When you elect a conservative party which makes a coallition-government with the lobbyist party (the FDP - "free democrats" are actually just that), you get exactly that.
A goernment which is susceptible to this kind of corporate influence.
And they don't even have to justify their actions. They don't have to give the actual numbers. Transparency in government my a**. I didn't vote for them.

Similar Experience

[millsey]

I wonder if they are using Brother Printers. My experience with printing with Ubuntu at home is it printing 1 page every 10 minutes, compared rebooting into windows at several pages per second. The same multifunction device works really well at scanning however on Ubuntu.

Costs?

[Zemran]

for example in writing printer and scanner drivers,

Why not buy printers and scanners that already have drivers available then? Big saving and there is plenty of choice. They already employ someone to do the selection in the purchasing dept., that person should also keep a list of which ones are compatible.

Just tools

[giuseppemag]

I suppose any moment now the hordes will arrive argumenting everything, from conspiracy theories to "this software is better".

Here is the incredible truth:
Software is just a tool used to accomplish something else. The Real People Out There use what works for them, not what they believe in.

Computer people should stop with the religion wars already, it's frankly ridiculous...

Re:Just tools

[MeesterCat]

If I had the points this would be modded up.

Re:Just tools

[giuseppemag]

Virtual points, cool! :D

Re:Just tools

[not-my-real-name]

Computer people should stop with the religion wars already, it's frankly ridiculous...

Many computer people are atheists so they need to have something else to argue about.

Re:Just tools

[giuseppemag]

Lol. The price is the sum of all factors involved. If your workers refuse to do their job properly because they feel linux is not adequate for them then the price goes way up. Once again, use what works considered all factors...

Re:Just tools

[randallman]

On the face, your comment sounds pragmatic, but it is truly apathetic.

For instance, consider the MS Office format. Plenty of people use and exchange .doc(x) formatted files and friends because "it works for them". I work with public records, many of which go back to 1950. Most of the old paper records were scanned using the standard group 4 compressed tiff format. I guarantee you those will have the same readability 50 years from now as they do today. 10 years ago WordPerfect was the standard in the office and today many of those files can't be read reliably or at all with the current MS Office software. The same will be true for .doc and .doc(x) files. There would be some inconvenience in using a standard like ODF, but in 50 years those files would be readable. Doing what is good for the long term isn't always the easiest or cheapest option for the short term. But like you, most people don't care; they're just apathetic.

In a government office (I've worked in one) most computer operations can be handled by commodity programs like browsers and text editors. There are very few people that require specialized software or devices, so I'll bet these complaints are cherry picked and even if valid don't warrant a full scale switch away from the current system. That's absurd, and as pointed out by others most likely a political move motivated by the BSA. Windows + Office licenses on these people is wasted, and in Germany's case, the money is leaving the city and country. What's happens is that the government decision maker gets convinced he needs to purchase a Windows and MS Office license for every government employee. I see a problem here and I'm a "Real Person".

Re:Just tools

[Fri13]

When you can proof that software is not affected by politics and used as business strategies, then you can say that technical people should shut the fuck up!

It is all about money. Who gets most of it, spending less than other competitors. And it is all tied up with politics and marketing.

What is ethically correct, it is wrong/incorrect by the business and politics strategies and wise versa.

If everyone would follow good ethics, there would not be any job layoffs, hunger, wars, unemployment, crime and so on.
But as there is small group of people who are greed and dont care anything about others, and big group of people (30-40%) who does not care about others, everyone are suffering.

If you really believe what you just said, then you must think that there is nothing wrong that Microsoft would have got the monopoly on the whole personal computer markets, and not just on PC markets.

Windows to every every desk and home... (said by Bill Gates and stealing that slogan from IBM's PC marketing materials "PC on every desktop and home")

Re:Just tools

[giuseppemag]

To me it sounds just like paranoia. None of those documents are really as important as you make it sound. Unless we are talking about the format in which we store important scientific and literary works for posterity, then I could not care less about the format used to preserve a bunch of quite irrelevant data.

Curious...

[Device666]

I use open source in my own company for everything, for me it paid out handsomly. But what I do question is how much Microsoft was willing to cut of its price to Germany just to get this PR. MS is known for giving huge price cuts when a government wants to move way from Windows. I guess moving back was worth a lot more. But how much more?

I bet it was more...

[TheBilgeRat]

the lack of netflix support...

Drivers?

[mvar]

for example in writing printer and scanner drivers

Cost of training plus the constant whining of users who were used to Windows for most their lifetime is understandable as a downside of the linux desktop. But "writing printer and scanner drivers" ? Really? So one can guess that they change their printers & scanners in a yearly or even 6-month basis and the linux community can't keep up with the drivers, so the German Foreign Office employees have to sit down and write their own..!

Can't be helped.

[Zelgadiss]

Windows was not declared a monopoly for no reason.

Worth to note which party is responsible

[fadir]

The foreign office is run by Guido Westerwelle, leader of the FDP (so called "liberals") who are pretty known for having close ties to companies and the industry in general. To be more blunt: pay them enough money and they do what you want them to do. Just recently they halved the taxes on hotel bills - after receiving a noticeable amount of money from a company running lots of hotels (Mövenpick) for their election campaign a few months prior.

So it's safe to assume that some coffers with money changed owners in return for this step. They are corrupt (pretty much everyone knows this) and they use it where ever they can. So far they (mostly) managed to stay within the legal limits (which is not too hard considering that there are very few restrictions for politicians in Germany, so basically once elected you can do pretty much anything you like without too much fear of of any serious consequences).

Re:Worth to note which party is responsible

[MrL0G1C]

They are corrupt (pretty much everyone knows this)

So why did they vote for them then?

Re:Worth to note which party is responsible

[aardwolf64]

Voters are stupid. I live in the Memphis metropolitan area... We have city council members that keep getting elected that have committed fraud, shoplifting, and are alcoholics (one recently got caught illegally obtaining a license in a neighboring state because her Tennessee license was revoked for repetitive drunk driving arrests.) And yet, the people keep voting for them...

It's the same reason Rahm Emmanuel will become the next mayor of Chicago, and everyone knows there's tons of corruption going on. He didn't even live in the state for the prerequesite amount of time, but he found a court that would let that slide.

Writing printer drivers?

[norpy]

Seriously? Why did they need to write printer drivers.

If they had just had the forethought to BUY printers that had working linux drivers, it wouldn't have been an issue.
Most enterprise level printers have a decent postscript driver that operates in a unix environment just fine.

Over the last 5 years I have not been in an office that didn't have a scanner that had the ability to email scans to me directly from the machine - no driver needed for that.

smells funny

[polar red]

though it declines to give any actual figures

This smells funny. a generous windows-salesman ? a receptive IT-manager ?

Apparently they haven't heard of Macs

[presidenteloco]

or they just enjoy the challenge of restoring /wiping and re-installing virus-ridden computers on a monthly basis.

Re:Apparently they haven't heard of Macs

[jedidiah]

Macs won't solve their "printer driver" problems. In fact, Macs will be using the exact same printing mechanism as they were just using as an excuse to dump Linux.

Someone clearly got a payoff from Microsoft. End of story.

The surprising thing...

[h4rm0ny]

is not that they're moving back to Windows, but that they're moving back to Windows XP. I could understand it better if it were WIndows 7. Although they'll inevitably upgrade at some point, it seems a lot of hassle to go back to an inferior operating system for a transitional period.

The reason I think Windows 7 would make more sense than XP (aside from all the support and security issues), is that Windows 7 really does offer something that neither KDE nor Gnome do which is a very simple and easy to manage environment. I like both Windows 7 and my KDE desktop running on Gentoo. I like Windows 7 because it is really slick. I like my Linux box because it's powerful, has all the tools I need to do advance things I like to do. The trouble is that someone like me is an edge case. I wouldn't want to see KDE or Gnome attempt to emulate Windows so much that they lost the powerfulness that I like about them (KDE more than Gnome is my preference mind you). But similarly, I think you couldn't fully incorporate the power of Linux into Windows 7 without losing some of that slickness and simplicity. There seems to be a natural divide between the two where either attempting to bring in the qualities of the other is likely to spoil some of the good stuff. And unfortunately the German FO users are going to be the sort of users who want slick simplicity, rather than crunching power. I say unfortunately, because Windows will cost them more.

Re:The surprising thing...

[drinkypoo]

The reason I think Windows 7 would make more sense than XP (aside from all the support and security issues), is that Windows 7 really does offer something that neither KDE nor Gnome do which is a very simple and easy to manage environment.

Does Windows 7 really offer much in the way of management that you can't get with XP? Can you give some examples?

Re:The surprising thing...

[papasui]

They probably already owned XP licenses, which is what allowed the transition to occur. Sure they'll have to upgrade eventually but XP could feasibly be ran on older machines for several years still.

Re:The surprising thing...

[Kjella]

You seem to think a WinXP to Win7 transition is close at hand. In fact last year Microsoft extended the XP downgrade rights to be at least as long as Win7 is for sale in the OEM channel, which will be two years after the release of Win8, whenever that is going to be. Many large corporations are happy on XP and have no intention of rolling out anything else until they absolutely have to. 55% still run XP, and that's including all the home users that typically switch earlier. I would guess 70-90% of businesses still run XP. Microsoft may kill support but corporations will use firewalls, anti-virus and e-mail scanners to block threats and continue using it.

Microsoft blew it a bit on the XP - Vista gap, with Vista not being very compelling either. It may be 2001 tech but corporations have now beaten all the kinks out of the system, instead of keeping them on an upgrade threadmill everyone standardized on XP. Users know it, there's a huge pool of cheap and experienced admins that know it, the whole ecosystem is cheap.

Re:The surprising thing...

[h4rm0ny]

Does Windows 7 really offer much in the way of management that you can't get with XP? Can you give some examples?

Well, apart from the general smoothness of the experience, uninstalling software is easier. Configuring network connections is easier. I love the way that the built in Networking in Windows 7 presents me with a list of my configured VPNs and just lets me click to activate one. The grouping of like windows and mini-previews is surprisingly useful. The quick search in the Start menu and the incorporation of recent files under their program headings in the Start menu is also far tidier than XP's old recent documents. I like the Libraries in Windows 7 very much. It lets me get closer to the way I can use Soft Links to directories in Linux, but in a really convenient way handled by the GUI. I also approve of the distinguishing between actions at Administrator level and normal user level. I guess that the last one falls under the heading of managing the environment. There are undoubtedly other things I've forgotten about, but this is what I can immediately think of off the top of my head that is actually functionally different to XP as opposed to simply look and feel.

Of course one of the big things is MS Office 2010. It's a joy to use. If it weren't for that, I'd likely use my Windows 7 installation much less than I actually do as I'm perfectly happy bouncing around in my KDE environment. I suspect MS Office was one of the factors in the change over for the Germans. Open Office isn't anywhere near as nice to use.

Re:The surprising thing...

[foniksonik]

Yeah but for this to be as profitable as possible first they have to move to XP then they have to pay someone to transition them to Win7. See if they just jumped over to 7 that whole consulting gig for the transition goes away and someone's cousin doesn't make millions.

Re:The surprising thing...

[drinkypoo]

Basically none of that stuff is a big deal in terms of having the typical user get work done, and they probably already have licensing for XP. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Re:The surprising thing...

[Swarley]

It's not really an issue of management, but Vista/7's memory management is so superior, I don't remember how I tolerated laptops before it. XP doesn't prefetch commonly used programs into RAM (or at least doesn't do it well as I believe it is technically possible to enable the feature, albeit poorly). As such, XP tends to crawl on laptops with slower HDDs because it had to hit the drive every time you open a program. And this is not some nitpicky benchmark thing. It's very noticeable in everyday use. I've been using 7 for about a year now and I can't see why any person or business would chose XP instead.

Re:The surprising thing...

[tiqui]

Many organiations prefer to have all systems running the same OS....... and even MS admits that many businesses see XP as the best and most stable version of Windows (it runs everything they need to run, runs on their hardware, and they are familiar with it) Many organizations avoided Vista and are taking a cautious approach to Win7. No conspiracy required to understand this

Re:The surprising thing...

[drinkypoo]

XP has prefetch but it will cache an application you load once and as such you want to periodically remove old files. This is probably one of the big reasons XP gets slower over time. A simple scheduled task could fix it.

Windows 7 is agonizingly slower than Windows XP on machines with slow disk. I have a laptop that boots Windows 7 in literally twice the time it booted XP. It never worked right on XP which is the only reason I'm running 7. It came with Vista, which is the only OS on which suspend/resume works correctly. I get video corruption under Linux with my AMD R690M chipset, which really ought to work correctly with the open source driver because of its vintage; I presume that AMD has not released sufficient information to support it properly because I've had the same problems for a very long time now and through many revisions of the driver.

Re:The surprising thing...

[SMOKEING]

No, I don't believe a gentoo user will ever run Windows.

Re:The surprising thing...

[h4rm0ny]

Well migrations are usually a hassle. They might have some XP licences knocking around - I obviously can't comment as to what definitely is the most cost effective approach without knowing what they have, when licences expire, etc. But faced with two options, one of which is preferable for a number of reasons, and knowing that you're going to end up there anyway, I wouldn't want to do two extra migrations beyond what I had to do without a very good reason. But hey, it's not me going to be doing it... ;)

Re:The surprising thing...

[drinkypoo]

I perceive it as total bullshit. Migrating costs money, new printers cost money, why not just spend the money on new printers? Further, windows print servers are a viable option for many devices. It's really not that hard to, say, get a workflow going to deliver PDFs to a Windows machine and tell it to send them to various printers. I had to install drivers for a fairly modern HP color laserjet (5550 I think? it's been a bit) to print directly to the network queue on a machine instead of going through the server as IT desired because it would just throw away my print options and print with whatever the defaults were on the server. You can work around this sort of thing with multiple queues until the printer-replacing budget comes up.

The biggest reason I think the printer thing is a total bullshit excuse is that expensive printers do speak standardized languages. Most of the really amazingly expensive printers make a big deal out of support for standards and professional output devices (such as what you'd find at a print house) are overwhelmingly likely to run on PostScript. Graphic artists and printers were almost exclusively on macs until recently and that meant they were familiar with PostScript, so having the same technology in a multi-thousand dollar linotronic output machine was a no-brainer.

Most of the small printers that don't have Linux support are pieces of shit that nobody should ever be purchasing in any bureaucratic context. And even most printers which fit that description work fine.

I call shenanigans, or whatever the hell that is in German.

Re:The surprising thing...

[h4rm0ny]

I call shenanigans, or whatever the hell that is in German.

Shenaniganzensneakenbluff or something, probably. Yes - I can see a number of reasons why they might go back to MS, with MS Office being one of the biggest to re-training being another. But printer support seems pretty dubious to me. I'm guessing it was just a snarky comment or bit of humour that someone ran with .I've certainly had trouble getting printers to work in Linux, even modern ones where I've ended up hunting down some PPD file (or whatever they're called) online, but in a large environment where you have professional IT support and consistent machines, I would expect them to be able to roll out some solution en masse. Perhaps they had a lot of problems and this was just a sample of them. But still, they ought to be able to use Linux if they want to. Even Open Office, for all my praise of MS Office 2010, is still a usable piece of software. I expect we'll learn a bit more about the reasons in time.

Office and Outlook?

[aronzak]

"[clients] to be upgraded at some point to Windows 7, Office 2010 and Outlook."

Returning to Windows for clients sounds reasonable, especially if there are problems with drivers. But going back to Office and outlook?

"According to the government, this will not give rise to any immediate costs, indeed, they expect introduction of these "standardised software products" to produce "efficiency gains".

Standard Mircosoft BS; Office is not "industry standard", many groups are seeking alternatives.

until they are hacked like the Swiss, the Austrian

[kubitus]

and many other Foreign Offices around the world.

Not to speak of that sovereign countries should use sovereign software

where is the risk analysis for a backdoor/firmware trojan in IT products coming from certain countries? ( US, PRC, Taiwan etc.. )

The question of cost

[bi$hop]

FTA: "The costs of licensing Windows and MS Office throughout the department would cover the costs of programming a hell of a lot of drivers..."

I'm a software engineer, and I'm all for job demand, but this seems pretty shortsighted. The issue revolves around total cost of ownership, not just the monetary cost of proprietary software. They're a government office. They shouldn't have driver-programming developers on their tax-dollar-funded payroll.

Nothing to see here

[Mathinker]

From TFA:

The Foreign Office launched a modernisation process in 2010, one component of which was the pursuit of a new IT strategy moving away from open source software and towards "standardised proprietary client solutions" as used in other ministries. Specifically, this means a return to Windows XP, to be upgraded at some point to Windows 7, Office 2010 and Outlook.

In other words, a new IT boss decided he had to make his impression. Since there are no quantitative details given, this post is just here to fan a flamewar. Oh, and users also complain when moving from one version of Microsoft Office to the next one, so that throwaway comment is also empty of any real information.

Claims?

[mccalli]

"Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."

'Claims'? I find all of those complaints to be possible and valid. I also find them valid on a Windows desktop, and also on my Mac desktop.

I don't think we need to load the article, how about the word 'states' instead? Some of these complaints could well be valid, and instead of dismissing them the Linux desktop distros should be reading and seeing how many are valid, how many just need education, how many could be imediately addressed etc..

It's a chance to learn, not to draw into a shell and defend.

Cheers,
Ian

First ?

[thanosk]

This is scary. The story has been up for quite some time and no flame wars have started yet ? Either Linux fans have resigned to their fate (not likely) or I am the only living being on the planet left that is able to access Slashdot

true.

[chichilalescu]

at some point, I changed the background image for my mom's desktop. upon discovering this, she exclaimed "where's my windows?"

until they are hacked like the Swiss, the Austrian

[kubitus]

and many more Foreign Offices around the World!

-

Shouldn't sovereign countries use sovereign software? To protect their very own assests?

Where is a risk analysis for firmware trojans in IT equipment from abround ( US, PRC, Taiwan, SKorea... )?

Well, duh

[Khyber]

When the majority of your staff is too brain-dead to think of alternative means to accomplish what they wish to do, because they've been too used to Windows doing most of the thinking (or having an application for that) for them, this is ultimately going to be the end result.

In the meantime, without having to write anything, I've found the drivers for every one of my devices, in Linux, relatively easily. All it takes is a drive to RTFM, an desire to attempt to understand it, and lack of the fear of failure.

I figured out DOS as a child without a manual, my dad just told me "type /? or /help" (I don't remember which in DOS 5.0) and I'd get a command list. He told me to read it, play with it, do whatever, don't worry about breaking it because it was simple to fix (and in those days, they truly were, compared with the garbage of today.)

From there, Win 3.1 and on was simple. I just had to learn the GUI way of doing command line things.

I can still do as I please either in Windows CLI or GUI. I'm almost proficient enough to do it in Linux, and more than proficient enough for MenuetOS.

It's just the end result of being used to something and not forced to use your brain all the time.

They had to write drivers?

[nukem996]

There is almost no reason that they should of been writing drivers. This just means they didn't do any research before buying equipment. Printer drivers are especially surprising since support on Linux is better then on Windows or Mac.

Strange

[Lord Lode]

Most printers and scanners work under Linux. Use compatible hardware when you switch to Linux?

Open source is beside the point

[poppycock]

For most organizations, especially non-technical organizations, the availability of source code is really irrelevant. One might argue that they *could* change things if they needed to, but as a practical matter they really can't. Organizations whose mission includes software development are certainly capable of taking advantage of free and open licenses.

But it sounds like the bottom line is that, in the end, they found Windows better for them than Linux. You certainly have to admire their willingness to try something outside the norm, however. IT wouldn't have made much difference, I suspect, if Windows were open source and Linux were proprietary.

Unless you're a software development organization, source availability per se is really not a useful criterion upon which to make an IT decision.

But this is Slashdot, so, you know, it must be a conspiracy.

Drivers?

[Gaardenzwerch]

Maybe the Foreign office should consider buying hardware from manufacturers that provides drivers?

Drivers

[Dr_Barnowl]

Someone commented (on TFA) that the cost of Windows + Office licenses would cover a large amount of driver authoring ; never mind that, it would probably cover the costs of buying printers and scanners that had compatible Linux drivers - and then some.

2011

[dintech]

Uh oh. Looks like 2011 is the year of the Windows Desktop.

Re:2011

[SmilingBoy]

finally!

Sounds familiar

[Zingledot]

It sounds a lot like my experience with Linux.

I hate feeling like I have to turn in my geek card to use Windows, but Linux has always felt like the place for hobbyists-turned-career, while you go with the MS solution if you have other things to spend your time on than coming up with clever ways to make things actually work.

IMHO, of course.

costs?

[thephydes]

Well, I'm cynical enough to believe that MS offered a nice package that they couldn't refuse.

Money speaks louder than ethics

[TheMidget]

Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability.

Especially those users who have a relative or friend who works in the Microsoft PC sales business ...

Could it be?

[Amtiskaw]

2011: Year of the Windows desktop?

Linux costs went up or MS costs when down?

[ahodgkinson]

As the article states, until we see numbers it is difficult to see what is going on.

The is a lot at stake here for Microsoft. If the project were successful, then it would open the floodgates for lots of similar efforts, and could even break Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop. Thus, Microsoft is obviously hoping that this project fails. Conspiracies aside, one way to help the transition back to Windows is to lower prices, offer special deals, free services, etc. I wouldn't surprise if this happened.

It could also be that the required device compatibility imposed a big programming cost, and it really did cost more than expected. I'm curious to learn if that cost could be amortized over larger/more government departments.

Let's get the full facts first before we judge.

Not-a-troll

[dgr73]

I think this proves what my personal experience is.. that there's a lot of good in Linux for the end-user, especially in Ubuntu. But there are SERIOUS gaps in drivers & usability sometimes. It's a better effort from a community than I thought possible some years ago, but amount of work to keep all drivers up-to-date is just too much. Windows wins by virtue of all companies automatically developing drivers for it.. so whenever some driver doesnt work, it's the vendor, not M$ that gets the blame. But with linux driver handling is so integrated into the system most users (like my wife) just go "linux sucks" when something doesnt work. This is just my opinion and doesnt need to be followed by posts asking "So what exactly doesnt work?" and "You're wrong, all you need to do is configure doohickey1 by using nageesh3.8, which you can get with the command...."

heise.de article

[mlock]

The article on heise.de has a link to internal documents of the Foreign Office, which shed a little bit different light on the whole thing.

Looks like...

[dhruvx]

all those studies microsoft did about higher TCO for OpenSource turned out to be true. *ducks* In retrospect, they are telling us things that we already know for years - OpenSource / Linux on desktop is NOT ready. Linux / OpenSource is great on the server side. Definitely 2011 is not the year of the Linux desktop :) Nothing to see, move along... Disclaimer: For the utterly daft, my statement about the TCO study was sarcasm incase you missed it.

Reasons?

[uffe_nordholm]

I find the article very light on details, other than very general things. Could it be because most of the "issues" the users have with the Linux systems and programs is that they look different than what they were used to? If this is the case, I wonder what they do when they buy a new car, do they retake their driving licence?

Frankly, I'm not surprised....

[hotrodent]

Having made the switch to Linux myself a few years ago, I often face problems with getting peripherals to work well - easily.
Anyone tried getting the G15 keyboard macro keys working easily? This is not what I call easy. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LogitechG15
I persisted because I want to support FOSS, but I can easily understand that if government departments and companies are faced with similar issues, they probably don't care about FOSS - they focus on budgets and the costs involved in support.

Until the desktop industry embraces Linux in the same way the hobbyists do, this issue is a major roadblock.

Re:Frankly, I'm not surprised....

[1u3hr]

Having made the switch to Linux myself a few years ago, I often face problems with getting peripherals to work well - easily.

We're not talking about you (or me), alone in our basements. A government ministry will have an IT department whose job it is to deal with crap like that.BEFORE they buy, let alone deploy said hardware, thay should make make sure that it works.

And we're talking about bureaucrats, paper-shufflers by trade.What "peripherals" could they use? A printer, a scanner? Plenty of choice of supported hardware.

Nobody ever got fired...

[muckracer]

> Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."

We had Vista forced down our throats. Users also complain of "missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability" and that with good reasons. Yet the very company responsible for those poor products will make even more money, because unlike Linux and FOSS, it will never be put into question. Besides, as we've all known for the last 20 years or so...the NEXT version will be REALLY GOOD(TM) anyway!

Why is the free market failing so badly in this area??

The Horror! The Horror!

[theNAM666]

When in doubt, do not go back to Windoze.

Strange

[marcello_dl]

One of the pluses for getting linux desktops instead of windows in my place is that they work with most printers out of the box. Professional printers/copiers are usually easier to interface, they can act as smb or ftp hosts to send scanned docs.
Of course I think they have sound reasons to switch back, I think that their tech staff will not be happy to think again in terms of AV licenses and driver hunt on websites.... wish them better luck next time.

Not pleasant

[nashv]

The German public has been an ardent supporter of FOSS...to see this kind of news does not bode well for the future of FOSS. I suppose the optimal point is corporate managed FOSS - the kind Google and Sun(used to) maintain.

implausible

[1u3hr]

"Cost of printer and scanner drivers" -- Bullshit.

Just buy printers and scanners that are supported and the cost is zero.

Basically any business class networked printer supports Postscript and/or PCL, which have standard drivers anyway.

The real reason is no doubt some bureaucrat who just wants his Outlook and Excel. Or one who has links with some large software vendor. Impossible to prove though, they'll produce whatever reports they need to to justify what they want to do.

And another one bites the dust

[cronius]

[...] the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated.

Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability.

So basically they've painted themselves into a Microsoft corner and can't get out. (Although "writing drivers" sounds like complete bullshit.)

I do recommend they switch back to Windows, and then move to Apple products. It's a sure way of wasting even more money, if the current flip-flopping isn't doing it for them.

Lets face it

[bartron]

Until you can get one single unified model for a linux desktop, linux ON the desktop isn't going to happen. Fine for servers and fine for users that know what they are getting in to. Not fine for regular people. With freedom comes choice and with choice comes indecision. Sometimes less choice is more and why Windows, with all its faults, has succeeded. One OS which operates the same (in theory) regardless of hardware. Linux, from a users perspective, does not operate the same regardless of hardware. The interface is a fragmented mishmash of every 'good' idea its contributors came up with. Linux is a server OS. Some of us run server OS's on our desktops and that's fine, but it's not for regular users and never will be.

Frist psot

[samboneym]

First post

Yeah right.

[jack2000]

Let me translate that for you: Our brain dead paper pushers couldn't be arsed to learn the very basic things they need to know in order to use an office suite slightly different than Microsoft's. What do these people need, really, word and an e-mail client? Pfffft.
Also I call bullshit on his driver claim.

Diplomats don't do GUI very well , much less CLI

[ryzvonusef]

Telling them (more accurately, their secretaries) to type in to a CLI is suicidal.

Linux needs a distro that can be operated 100% with GUI. Even 99% will not cut the meat. Sorry, but In GUI, atleast you can fumble around and click some relevant button [2], CLI doesn't tell you that, for example, to stop something, press Ctrl+Z, or some such. People want to be able to click an X.

OTOH, the German govt could have used out pressure on the manufacturers to provide drivers.

Anecdote time:

Familiarity is also important. My dad retired as a stenographer for the Forign Office of my country, and he wanted to use my PC to type an application or something. I was running Ubuntu, and I offered him Open Office. 15 minutes later, he was pulling his hair, since he couldn't format it to the peculiar formatting rules in his office (A bizarre format not compatible with any of the standardized Business Letter styles[1]), and requires you to fumble around with the bulleting, tabbing and rulers. And those things didn't behave like they did in his Office 97 or whatever.

My dad was retired, what if he was working in office and had to handle OO for all the time? He would have gone nuts. Training wouldn't have told him how to make sure the first para start with a "larger" indent but no number, but the subsequent para start with and a "smaller" indent and number 2, 3, 4 etc.

These are the kind of weird stuff you learn not from a training course, but from your seniors 15 minutes into the job, only there will be no seniors to tell you how to do that in OO. I eventually managed to do the formating for him, but the "largeness" and "smallness" of those indentation was not upto standard, and he was not pleased with OO.

Now on, whenever he wants to do stuff, I have to dualboot into Xp and offer him Office.

OO is not Ubuntu's fault, but over all, alot of niggles have popped up to make sure that I have my computer boot into XP by default, in case he ever need to use the system without me.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_letter
[2]: http://xkcd.com/627/

something's wrong...

[mr_walrus]

i notice this post like 15 minutes ago, and STILL no frist post?
aliens abducted everyone?

But it was already considered a success

[oneil.paul]

Strange indeed especially since the migration from Windows to open source was already regarded as a success... "The Foreign Office is now six years since into its successful IT Infrastructure increasingly on open source and had largely been unnoticed by the public" http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/download/jb2007/osjb2007-03-06-werner.pdf

Re:But it was already considered a success

[FaxeTheCat]

So what would you expect? "We are now six year into moving our infrastructure to open source, but we are not really certain about the end result"? Yeah... that would go down really well...

Until you have audited numbers for the change to OSS and the return to Windows (which will never happen), all this article provide is some entertainment and another trigger for a flamewar between the incompetent and the uninformed (both categories will be represented on both sides, and being in one category does not prevent being in the other).

Bring the popcorn.

Death Knoll (and First)

[Procasinator]

Not good for Linux.

I wonder if there is a feedback loop back to the distributor/maintainers in these ventures? It will

missing brain

[mardicas]

"...also complained of missing brains, a lack of intelligence and poor eyes."

Suuuure.

[jack2000]

Let me translate that for you: Our brain dead paper pushers couldn't be arsed to learn the very basic things they need to know in order to use an office suite slightly different than Microsoft's. What do these people need, really, word and an e-mail client? Pffft.
Also I call bullshit on his driver claim.

Sucks

[BlackCreek]

One way or another this sucks. Any public service migrating from Windows to an Open Source solution and then back to Windows is a big missed opportunity by the FOSS community.

WTF?

[Bert64]

Why are they writing printer and scanner drivers? If they've been running this since 2001 (ie 10 years ago) then chances are any printers or scanners they bought prior to that have already been retired, so why the hell are they buying new printers and scanners which are not already compatible with what they use?

Re:WTF?

[dave87656]

Usually the argument for Windows is missing drivers for your devices, so it sounds plausible if they tout that party line. I personally think there may have been secret dealings going on and someone is driving a new Mercedes and retiring early who is in the decision making process.

Pah, users..

[Martz]

Users will complain about anything.

One thing I've found out after a few years of rolling out software to companies with inefficient workflow, is that users absolutely hate change.

They are not really interested in the profits, or how something could perhaps work more efficiently ... they want to come into work, do the same job they did yesterday (easy) and go home to their families. They don't want to learn new systems or get their head around new implementations. That requires engaging the brain and interacting with the software rather than just clicking the same old buttons over and over.

There is also the fear of embracing a new software product which may make them redundant, so they resist and complain and wish things were the way they were before so they can go back to sleep for the rest of their 8 hour shift.

I think the days of people in business playing the dumb card ("I don't know anything about computers, I stay away from them!") are slowly dying. At some point it won't be acceptable to be dumb computer user or "IT illiterate" anymore than not being able to read about write is acceptable in most business environments today.

Governments will be even worse, everyone will have an opinion about what should be happening and the entire thing will drown in red tape. Can you imagine?!

Ultimately it's about giving the German public the very best value for their taxes they pay, who cares what the OS is? Linux or Windows, it'll always be poorly received by the users.

writing printer and scanner drivers?

[sugarmotor]

"Writing printer and scanner drivers" would be a one-time effort, no ?

Re:writing printer and scanner drivers?

[FaxeTheCat]

If that were to be, it would be the first bug free printer driver on the planet.

The user in question being called Guido.

[Colin Smith]

New guy at the top. Probably doesn't know where the save option is in Open Office.

Vague reasons

[Undead Waffle]

I understand not giving details for things like "lack of usability" but "missing functionality" and "poor interoperability" would be easy to give examples for. To make a switch back like this they should at least give something less vague. The important bit is at the end where Tillmann says their reasons are "not satisfactory" and "We need the figures".

The article makes this switch sound more political:

The Foreign Office launched a modernisation process in 2010, one component of which was the pursuit of a new IT strategy moving away from open source software and towards "standardised proprietary client solutions" as used in other ministries.

Not surprising

[hairyfeet]

Not every OS is suitable for every job. IMHO Linux excels at server roles, kicks ass in embedded, but in desktops, where so much is still dependent on proprietary hardware? Not so much. And before anyone pipes in with "it works for you" well fine and dandy, but getting it to work for a single guy with infinite time to fiddle and look at forums is a hell of a lot different than getting it to fulfill all the roles a large org like this has.

So in the end I wouldn't say this means Linux fails, just that it didn't fit the role required and the cost to fit the square peg in the round hole simply wsn't cost effective. Happens all the time.

Politicians making political decision

[pieterh]

Someone needed their campaign finances bolstered. There is no way the cost of a few printer drivers could exceed the licenses for all the proprietary software they now need. And in ten years of using Linux on all my company's desktops and notebooks (except those Macs), I've never seen a printer that Linux did not support out of the box.

I remember the original project and the guy who led it, and it was clear that it was a success of technocratic merit over political bluster. A cheap, robust and *secure* computing infrastructure was what they got.

This is far from over, anyhow, someone is going to get caught with their fingers in the cookie jar.

Not impressed by users' responses?

[bothemeson]

No, I can't believe it either.

Writing printer drivers?

[dbIII]

What's this crap about having to write printer drivers when even devices less than $100 understand raw postscript and will work with anything from an Atari ST to the present?

It's official then

[eugene2k]

Linux sucks.

Mein Gott!

[Mushdot]

Surely the money they are now going to invest in switching back could be used to finish off writing whatever missing drivers and interoperability are left to do? I guess this demonstrates Microsoft's 'long game' of making it extremely difficult to move from their system.

until hackeb like the Swiss, the Austrian

[kubitus]

and many more other Foreign Offices!

-

Sovereign countries should use sovereign software! And protect this way their very own assets !

Is there any risk calculation availabe- for the existence of firmware trojans/bootloaders in IT equipment from abroad? (US, PRC, Taiwan, S-Korea ...)

Mein Gott!

[Mushdot]

I guess this demonstrates Microsoft's skill in making it extremely difficult to move from their systems, even a few years down the line.

Surely the money they will spend moving back to Windows could be used to pay people to finish off the missing interoperability they are complaining about?

Lack of numbers

[alexandre_ganso]

Come on, printer drivers? You got to be kidding. Today, the worst operating system regarding printers is, by far, windows. Especially on the hp side..

Not buying it

[Crayon Kid]

Taken at face value, the excuses presented are silly. Simple math will show you that the cost of outfitting the entire place with Windows 7 and Office licenses alone would cover quite a bit of training and driver development. Not to mention how they seem to be focused on just desktops while leaving servers alone? What unsurmountable obstacle suddenly appeared, after they seemed to have been using OO, Firefox and Thunderbird for so long?

Not saying it's completely implausible, but I'd like to see some cold hard figures and facts for both scenarios.

Governments should not run Windows

[Chaonici]

Leaving aside the technical comparisons between Windows and Linux, I do not believe that governments should be running closed-source software on their machines. Why:

One, security. No one knows what proprietary software is capable of. Can you trust it to run on a government machine and to (presumably) handle important and sensitive information for the feds? No one knows, because it's closed source. Use of open source software ensures that there are no backdoors and such that could be used by, say, a foreign government.

Two, practicality. Use of open source software allows governments to tweak their systems exactly as needed.

Three, ideology. Any government that claims to serve its citizens should be running open source software in the interests of transparency.

Further reading on the subject: Why the government of Peru ditched Windows. http://web.archive.org/web/20070829215908/http://www.gnu.org.pe/resmseng.html

Re:Governments should not run Windows

[FaxeTheCat]

One: Governments get access to the source code of proprietary software if they ask for it and sign the proper NDAs.

Two: Governments are big buyers. Software vendors listen to big buyers.

Three : Ideology: Government transparency has nothing to do with software architecture. It has to do with the way they execute their politics.

Four: The above does not say they should NOT use open source.

Most of us prefer the government to govern, rather than wasting time and resources on software design.

Awww

[aunt edna]

... tumbled.

Poor interoperability...

[migla]

Of course, it's actually the proprietary systems, programs and formats that are at fault for poor interoperability, but the reality is it doesn't matter if the evil lock-inners that have cornered the market are to blame, the foreign office has to get it's job done.

Free software has a better chance in many other places, while working towards the goal of good interoperability, when everyone can finally shed their shackles.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Chaonici]

That's funny, I'm typing this on a Linux system because it gives me what I want. See, I can use anecdotes as evidence too!

That is the cost of not requiring open standards

[nethenson]

The cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated.


That is the cost of not requiring open standards: German government ability to upgrade their systems now depends on manufacturer cooperation, because that is the only reasonable way to get drivers for their devices.

They are having problems with Linux, and they might have problems with Windows 8, or whatever future migration they want; PostScript is a standard that will always be supported, their current SecretProtocol.dll won't.

Re:winner take all

[Mathinker]

> of course windows is interoperable with itself. pfft.

If only you were actually right! Ooops, nix that, that would mean that a lot of Slashdotters would lose their jobs...

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[juasko]

Yes, these companies migrating from Windows to Linux are making a misstake, they should choose MacOSX instead.

Reason is simple, third party support is comparable with Windows and what is not available to the mac is usually not worthy to have most often low quality stuff.

Second there is little training needed. You have most of the same software around, and they work in quite similar way. Though the system is way different. Studies have shown that in the long run, OSX becomes cheapest to maintain. The initial cost is however quite much higher as Apple doesn't sell their hardware with much reduced price at all even if you order large quantities.

But been following a few reports of different migration models, within 5 years the mac investment has paid of. The advantage Mac has over Linux is support, maintenance and training costs. Linux has advantage when it comes to investment costs.

But all of them are cheaper than MS licenses.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[node 3]

Evidence of what? I don't see any non-personal claims in SocietyoftheFist's post other than "desktop Linux was never going to happen" (which so far is quite correct).

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. Modern desktop Linux like say Ubuntu do just about everything an average Joe is gonna want from a Windows or Mac machine. The real issue is people become overly fond of their apps/interfaces/polish/brand names/conveniences of their familiar (windows/Mac) machines, and refuse to subject themselves even to the tiny mental effort needed to try out a new system/way of doing things.

And as the poster below comments how people in some other ("developing") parts of the world people are not so stubborn in refusing to adapt, the reason being that they probably don't get so attached to their known systems.

Re:But wait...

[muckracer]

> I thought this is the year of Linux on the desktop!

It is!! *

* except in Germany

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[DataDiddler]

Linux does have Red Hat though. If you want it, you can get much, much more support than you'd ever want. I think Ubuntu is starting to get into support as well which, based on its wide install base, should have pretty decent driver support. Or you could check a printer is supported before ordering a couple dozen of them...

Provided you have semi-literate employees who can figure how to work GNOME/KDE (which, to me at least, seem only slightly more complex than MacOS), the only real problem a company might have would be getting competent sys admins, for which they'll have to pay a bit more than Windows admins. However, I'm guessing, this being a government operation, costs and efficiency aren't their number one concern.

Re:cue the ac fanbois

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think they can afford a login or thousand? They are not that pricey around here.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[justforgetme]

I don't want to come around all bitter and miserable but I think this is proof that some people just can't handle abundance... :-P

The Performance Envelope Stops Here

[gafisher]

"Users have, it claims, ... missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability.""

Sounds familiar.

Re:Lack of training

[muckracer]

> "Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."

"Help! I am trying to QUIT and I can't find the START button! This Linux crap is SO not intuitive!!"

the problem with linux on the corporate desktop

[brezel]

is maintainability. we have around 150 desktops here where i work (all servers except one run linux) and we were thinking about migrating the desktops to linux. i have used linux exclusively as a desktop OS for the last 8 years (also at work, i am a programmer), but i have to agree that it's just not possible to run and maintain a mid- to large scale client network of linux desktop computers. here's why:

1.) linux aims at providing the most possible freedom to its users
this is what you don't want when you administer hundreds of computers. you want the possibility to restrict the user as much as possible, so that they don't break everything all the time and require your assistance.

2.) AD, logonscripts, group policies, authentication
again the same story. linux is built from ground up to fulfill the user's wishes, not the admin's. just take for example some very basic thing like browser-settings. you cannot force firefox, konqueror, opera or whatever to use a proxy server while inhibiting the users to change it themselves. (yes transparent proxying but that sucks). it looks like chrome is trying to make something like that possible with the policies.d directory, but this is not widely available. the whole configuration-concept of unix-based programs is to load system-wide settings first, and let the user override them. windows' concept is exactly the other way around, which is why it is so successful in companies.

what is also done very well on windows is the logon process. no matter if the PDC is there you can still use your computer. did you ever try that on linux with /home mounted via NFS? impossible. kerberos and ldap auth are a step in the right direction on the server side, but client support for these things is poor at best.

3.) MS office
this point can be illustrated ad infinitum, so i won't go into details, but eveyone who actually works with office documents that contains at least macros, pivots or charts will agree that openoffice/libreoffice is not usable there, as soon as you need to be compatible with clients. MS access is another story of its own.

4.) printing
cups has improved a lot over the years, but there are still lots of specific printer features that you cannot use if you use cups. this is why we have exactly 1 windows server. especially larger printers (in the 3-10k euro area) work only half-assed via cups. either you cannot do accounting or page stats, or you cannot privilege jobs or whatever.

5.) ACL
there is no possibility to set ACLs via a gui on linux. also posix acls suck. i am very happy to see that nfs4 acls are more and more adopted, but there is still a long way to go until they will be widely available. you can just not explain some sales guy or client service lady how to use setfacl to share a document with a different group via commandline, when all they have to do in windows is check a checkbox.

it breaks my heart to say this as a long time linux user and open source developer, but linux on the corporate desktop is an illusion. not because linux is bad, but because the concept is fundamentally incompatible with what administrators of hundreds if clients need.

Re:Returning to XP?

[Pentium100]

So what? It's not like Windows XP will wear out or rust and have problems. Old hardware can have these problems, but not old software. I have a copy of MS DOS 5, it still works and can do the same things as it could when it was new.

Re:list plz

[u.hertlein]

1. what missing functionality? the article doesn't say.

Apparently this had something to do with OOo compatibility that could be fixed with a OOo update.

2. define 'usability.' is this another "it's not windows" whine fest? osx isn't windows either but you don't see many complaining about that. that's right, end users can't install that latest trojaned screensaver or other useless...

To be honnest I suspect it's something like that. "It's not Windows, I can't install my usual crap". Never mind that user's should NEVER EVER be allowed to do that on a sensitive, internal network (think US State Department computers)

3. interoperability with what exactly?

See 1.), it apparently was an office file format interop/compatibiltiy issue (from heise.de).

Ohwell I'm only paying for this SHIT with my tax Euro - wait, NOT, I'm currently paying for the SAME SHIT with my tax AU$... :-(

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[BestNicksRTaken]

I have Windows7/XP boxes that now only ever boot to Linux and a MacOSX box that has been replaced (and outperformed) by a cheaper Linux box

I only ever use Linux on my desktops, laptops, phones, routers, servers etc; anything else is like going back to 1992.

For Windows/Mac to ever be usable on the desktop, they at least need package management and less vendor-lock-in.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[rgbatduke]

We can do an instant poll of /. readers right here inline! Then it wouldn't be anecdotal. Errrr, well, maybe it would but it would be less anecdotal. Except for the self-selection and lack of double blind and randomly selected poll targets and...

Personally, I'm typing this on a linux system and have been using linux desktops more or less exclusively for oh, fifteen years, sixteen years, who can remember. Since the days that Slowaris replaced SunOS. I do run XP Pro safely in a nice little VM on the rare occasions I need a specific piece of Win-only software, where it can do no harm. Obviously Linux cannot possibly provide a functional desktop, and the fact that my Luddite wife is typing away on the other side of the room is some sort of atavistic exception or the result of spacetime distortion from another dimension.

One does wonder just what the German Foreign Office was doing that required them to "write printer and scanner drivers" or train people. I envision a training session just like this:

Hello, today I'll be your personal trainer, and we'll see if we can wean you away from Windows. Let's see -- login, check. Type your userid into this itty bitty box, then your password. That's p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d. Now, to write a word-processed document you have to click this icon and select this second icon. No, I know, there's no fourcolor box at the lower left. Yes, I mean the foot. I know, a foot isn't as pretty as the fourcolor square thingie, but click it anyway, there. Now that one, yes. Good job!

What? You don't know what to do? Look, see the funny little blinky thing? That's called a cursor. Now, press a key. Look! A letter appears on the screen! It is the same letter. If you want to write a document, say a strongly worded note urging Mubarak to step down, you press these keys in sequence to type a letter. I know, I know, you miss your Microsoft Word (tm). It came with Strongly Worded Letter templates and Open Office doesn't, but try to bear with me. Now, let's see if you can s-a-v-e and p-r-i-n-t. Yes, yes, yes, no, not that one, down one, oh, sorry did we forget to change the character set and language settings to German well here, oh look now you can read all of the commands except of course all of the icons are little pictures and you don't really need to. Goodness, it isn't printing!

Hans? Hans! Could you write a print driver for this printer? She wants to print. What's that? Did we actually plug the printer in to the system and select it from a menu? No, we tried inserting this CD that came with the printer and it wouldn't run, said something about needing Windows. Cups? No thank you, it is too early for a cups of beer, but cups of coffee would be nice. Systems administrators? Why certainly. All of our systems were set up by MCSEs, who (as everybody knows) have the best possible education in systems management and training that money can buy and earn fabulous salaries as a consequence. Hans? Well, he's our only linux trained admin -- we didn't want to have to fire all of our former staff -- and because none of these CDs work, he has to spend all of his time writing drivers for these cheap-ass Taiwanese printers we bought.

Now let's work on the Internet. We are going to s-u-r-f the w-e-b using a b-r-o-w-s-e-r. I know, I know, there is no little "e" on the menu bar, click on that reddish orange thing. It's supposed to be a "firefox". What? Yes, I know there is no such thing as a firefox. Y'know, it does look a bit more like a pearl dripping orange sherbet or a plucked out eyeball, now that you mention it. Look, try squinting a bit. See it? A firefox. Anyway, try clicking it. I know, you're used to clicking the "e" for "explorer" and this is quite different, but go ahead, give it a shot. There! See? Where are all of the ads? What happened to the viruses you used to get that would send Mubarak offers to

Re:If they are anything like our staff at my offic

[B2382F29]

Rule #2: Build solitaire directly into clones of word and excel.

You mean like this?

Re:fingers in my ears *lalalalala*

[nglbrkr]

You're not reading between the lines. The reasons given are extremely vague and obviously bogus. How many years have they been using FOSS - do you seriously believe they can remember the old system after all that time of using FOSS all day every working day? The reason is much more likely to be, as others have pointed out, that new politicians have been lobbied/ had their campaign funded/ etc. After all its embarassing for MS to not have a monopoly in government ministries, isn't it?
There have been big deployments of FOSS in schools in Germany recently. MS needs to stop the rot.
There is surely no major difference between a linux desktop and windows xp, other than that the linux desktop has a sensibly organised menu and other improved usability. There is no criticism to take to heart here. There is only vague nonsense that doesn't ring true.

Re:Stunned silence?

[lazybeam]

Slashdot runs on Linux, doesn't it? Obviously Linux isn't user friendly enough to post comments onto it!

Re:TCO

[Dr_Barnowl]

The TCO of Windows for me includes sufficient corporate anti-viral and snoopware to raise the clean-boot memory consumption of my workstation from about 250MB to around 800MB, a period each day where my computer thrashes the disk auditing the filesystem making anything IO bound grind to a halt for an hour, followed by a half hour where the same process compresses it's report to send to IT services, making anything CPU bound grind to a halt. The virus scanner consumes basically a whole CPU core on it's own when working on files, which makes processes that take under 1:30 on Linux take over 8 minutes on Windows, and the same occurs for my users (who are the main users of these processes). I can't use all 6GB of RAM in the workstation on Windows, because our IT dept. hasn't got an "approved" 64-bit build of Windows. Yes, it is an issue for me, and my users, because they will be using the incredibly memory-hungry (by necessity) apps that we are developing.

No, I'm not a normal user, but the cost of all that extra weight to my productivity cannot be understated. On Linux, my frustrations are mostly about finding the way to do some thing that I've not done before - and that really could just be considered part of the job. Once solved, these problems are no longer an issue. On Windows, my frustrations are all with how slowly or badly it does stuff that is totally routine, and I can't do anything about it.

I now only use Windows for the one thing it is better at - running Outlook and Office. And the only reason Outlook is useful to me is because it's the only viable client for Exchange. And the only reason Office is useful is because OpenOffice sucks for Office documents - hopefully something that will be resolved by the LibreOffice project. I do test on Windows, because Java GUI toolkits have some quirks on different platforms. But I find it a deeply frustrating experience, like driving your wifes underpowered minivan because your Lotus is in the shop....

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Spad]

To be fair, that applies to most people in most areas of life; people like the things that they're used to, that they know how to use and don't have to spend ages thinking about.

Or are you saying that if I took your Linux machine away and gave you a Mac instead, you wouldn't find it annoying that not all the apps were the same and that things didn't quite work the way you wanted them to? I know I find it annoying when I switch between OS's and something I'm used to isn't there anymore.

Linux as a desktop doesn't do everything I want it to, so I still run Windows; as a server, on the other hand, it does everything I want it to for some tasks, so I use it and where it doesn't, I use something else that does.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[cibus]

Fantastic :-) Hans? HAAAANS? I want to print zis document! Write me ein verdamt printerdriver!!

Translation

[master_p]

lack of usability = not 100% like Windows

poor interoperability = does not open .docx files

missing functionality = cannot run Windows applications

writing printer and scanner drivers = win printers don't run in Linux

the cost of adapting and extending it have proved greater than anticipated = there is no commission in open source software for the politicians

Re:Germans Going Back To W...

[maxwell demon]

But Westerwelle already is the minister of foreign affairs.
And that's the true problem ...

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[snemarch]

Wow, a perfectly reasonable & pragmatic comment on /.?

I'm in awe.

Probably it was Open Office

[Swarley]

Personally, I seriously doubt that it was the Linux that caused the problem. My guess is open office. While I generally prefer windows to Linux, I'm a big fan of open source software. Open Office is the very worst the open source ecosystem has to offer though. It's buggy, poor compatibility, slow, limited features, features not working like they should. Most people treat it like software that gets the basics done admirably but struggles with advanced features. I totally disagree with that. Open Office gets almost nothing done admirably. I think if they had tried to switch to Linux/Google Docs they might have found more purchase. I have seen OO torpedo lots more people's opinions of the quality of open source software than I have seen any other package elevate them.

Re:Probably it was Open Office

[h4rm0ny]

I think it's very likely you are right. I actually quite like Windows 7 and it's my secondary desktop O/S. But all other things being equal it doesn't offer me much more than KDE and in some regards quite a bit less. But MS Office. Now that is lovely and when I just want to write documentation or whatever, I'll reboot into Windows 7 just so I can use it. Sure I have OO on my Linux install and I store all my documents on a server so I can access them just as conveniently from either. But I would far, far prefer to spend a couple of hours tapping away in Office 2010, then in OO. The new KOffice looks better than OO, imo. But I haven't used it in anger yet and it's certainly not as feature complete.

Re:Probably it was Open Office

[Vancorps]

I hear that, try sorting by ip address in Calc. Excel does it automagically. These days it's looking more and more like Linux Desktop is just a good portal to a virtual desktop for Windows. The owner of the company I work for will go from his iPad with his virtual machine where he can print to any printer on the network to his imac in his office to his living room Ubuntu box to a Windows box in his bedroom all in one day and without having to close or lose any work.

He's my beta tester for technologies so we purposefully have a bunch of different platforms running at his house. It works out nicely as he'll provide a lot of feedback and isn't afraid to tell me a technology is half baked. So far, his virtual desktop has made him a happy camper. He gets to work with the same tools everywhere he goes so he never has to be without the apps he's familiar with and doesn't have to endure the weirdness that is OO.

That said I still use OO for most everyday activities dropping to Excel on my virtual machine when needed. When OO is working well enough that I'm comfortable pushing it out to the rest of the network I'll stop paying for Excel but until then I have XenApp and XenDesktop and it's getting mighty easy.

OpenOffice, Libre Office Split is Being Exploited

[salesgeek]

One has to wonder if this is simply MS going after OpenOffice installs now that the OOo community is distracted and caught up in the LibreOffice fork. MS now can point the finger to Oracle as being just as rotten, if not worse than MS is, and can point out that you are going to have to migrate to LibreOffice anyway, so you can pick your migration poison.

Re:B.S. I say

[fishexe]

Without figures, this whole deal smells like MSFT getting a sweetheart deal with the German gov. I still don't get the driver issue. I bought a brand new Canon all-in-one printer and found Linux drivers for the scanner and printer in a few minutes of googling.

Yeah, my first thought was, "what the hell kind of printers and scanners are they using, that they don't have perfectly fine Linux drivers in this day and age?" I mean, seriously...back in '04 or '00 this may have been the case but the time of having to write one's own drivers for these types of devices is long gone, and that sounds a lot more like a pretext made up on the spot.

Re:B.S. I say

[True Vox]

While I am a fan of Linux, and am sad that they are going backwards, I think I know what's going on with "printer issue". The simple desktop models likely work fine. I would guess they're having problems with the giant office printers (Maybe not as big as this one but something large enough to power a whole office). Of course, I haven't read the fine article, nor am I a German, so I could be way off. But I suspect that's where I would run into trouble.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[marsu_k]

- Doesn't connect to my ISP most of the time

I don't know about your setup, but at least on my end it's either ethernet or WLAN from the ADSL router - and that is very much OS-agnostic as long as said OS supports DHCP, works fine with Linux (or Windows, or OSX, or what have you).

- If it does manage to connect, it doesn't run the compression software

"Compression software"?

- Refuses to install Flash

Blame your distribution then, personally it's just a matter of "sudo pacman -S flashplugin", adjust to your distribution as needed. Plus as a pleasant surprise, when I recently got a new laptop, I can get stutter/tearing-free full screen video! (although this has an i5 and a decent NVidia card - it would be surprising if it didn't work - but historically Flash has been a bitch under Linux, blame Adobe)

- Refuses to accept the Cole.2K codec packs

Why on earth would you need to install it, as FFmpeg (and by extension, MPlayer, VLC and so on) plays virtually anything under the sun? Seriously, I'd like to see you provide an example that plays with Cole.2K and not with FFmpeg.

- Doesn't run Word docs properly

This is true, up to a point - although I've run into situations where OO.org (and derivates) actually open files written by older versions of Word better that recent incarnations of Office.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[h4rm0ny]

Evidence of what? I don't see any non-personal claims in SocietyoftheFist's post other than "desktop Linux was never going to happen" (which so far is quite correct).

Firstly, the OP made the comment that something was "never going to happen". That's only a valid statement if everything is done and dusted and desktop Linux has died a death. So the GP's response showing that people do use Linux on the desktop is a valid counter to that. I do too. I don't have figures for how many people out there use KDE or Gnome but there has to be quite a lot. Estimating adoption is hard, but conservative estimates say 1% of desktop users are using Linux. That is millions of Linux users on the desktop. As a proportion, it is small. But as a community of people necessary to keep Linux on the desktop alive and healthy, it is huge.

Secondly, the GP's point was not that his experience was proof for something, which you have set it up as, but merely showing that he has an equal but opposite anecdote showing that the OP's evidence of personal experience isn't statistically useful.

Re:Stunned silence?

[fishexe]

Why no comments yet? Is everyone in denial?

Apparently you are...about all the other comments...

No doubt

[ThatsNotPudding]

at the heart of this are kickbacks and bribes by Microsoft, but I bet the printers they're talking about are very specialized ones either for large formats for GIS work or documents that require a lot of features for authenticity and security (read: licenses and passports). I assume the manufacturers of these specialized machines have ardently refused to provide Linux drivers to the German government, either via direct orders from Redmond or in fear of being Chaired (folding or otherwise) by Steve Ballmer.

Re:If they are anything like our staff at my offic

[fishexe]

Rule #2: Build solitaire directly into clones of word and excel. Rule #3: Build facebook games directly into all office apps.

Rules #2 and #3 are really, really stupid. Unfortunately for the world, they're probably also correct.

All it takes is a change of leadership

[Colin Smith]

Like for example a new foreign minister who is only able to use windows.

Incumbent Guido Westerwelle since 28 October 2009

Coincidence of course.

 

Re:All it takes is a change of leadership

[lwriemen]

Another example in the USA is the Microsoft antitrust trial. The appeal crossed the boundary of a Democratic controlled White House to a Republican controlled White House, along with the requisite DOJ appointment changes. Many of the Republicans don't believe that monopolies are a bad thing, because they believe that they arise fairly out of a free market. The fact that Microsoft even ended up with a slap on the wrist, in the appeals environment, shows how strong a case was made against them.

All of Judge Jackson's findings still remain relevant with respect to Microsoft's entrenchment in the market. The market still needs some external adjustment to allow other operating systems to compete on the desktop.

linux is a terrible desktop

[atlasburped]

i've always maintained that linux is a poor desktop OS for non-gearheads. if the most gearheaded nation in the world, germany, gave it up, this is the reason. linux gets in the way of getting actual work done. remember those PC vs Mac commercials? they're equivalent to Linux vs. PC. i've seen friends futz around with Linux in the time that it takes me to finish the work at hand. lack of printer drivers was named as one problem. is there a reason that windows printer drivers (of which there are very many) can't be co-opted by writing a bridge to them?

Re:linux is a terrible desktop

[jedidiah]

> is there a reason that windows printer drivers (of which there
> are very many) can't be co-opted by writing a bridge to them?

No, there isn't. It's called a print server.

OTOH, my Brother network printer works much better in XP when it's going through a Linux print server.

Re:cue the ac fanbois

[h4rm0ny]

Microsoft staff + vendors posting as AC in 3...2...1...

Just as people who work on Open Office or Ubuntu or Django or anything else that isn't produced by Microsoft will also post on Slashdot, sometimes logged in, sometimes as AC. What's the problem? You're implying that anyone saying something positive about MS or their software must be doing so because they have a financial interest. That isn't so. For example, if I had a choice between using MS Excel 2010 or Open Office, I would certainly choose Excel. If I have a choice between running Apache or IIS, I will certainly choose Apache (unless I need some particular integration with IIS by other software). Many of us here discuss things as they are, not because we have some absurd allegiance.

Re:B.S. I say

[StillAnonymous]

Bad example, perhaps. I checked that link you provided and they do indeed have a linux ppd file for that monster!

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[postbigbang]

Thank you.

The entire post is a memorial to how to rationalize a bad installation. If the German Foreign office had to make or fund their own printer and scanner drivers, then there's an IT functionary that deluded them, and needs to be sacked.

Managing expectations is truly important, and it appears that their IT department failed them, and miserably.

But let's blame Linux, 'k?

Re:until they are hacked like the Swiss, the Austr

[h4rm0ny]

and many other Foreign Offices around the world.

Not to speak of that sovereign countries should use sovereign software

where is the risk analysis for a backdoor/firmware trojan in IT products coming from certain countries? ( US, PRC, Taiwan etc.. )

Actually, MS will allow governments to inspect the source code. It's not much good for spotting bugs, as with Open Source's "thousand eyes", but it is useful in allowing governments to check for deliberate sabotage.

Send programmer reinforcements

[h00manist]

More software makes a better OS. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and every OS, project or language depends on the programmers. Linux has few programmers, some of who work only on a part-time basis. Efforts to get more coders, like Google's Summer of Code, are some of the most efficient efforts to promote open source. I favor efforts that reward or incentivate open-source coders, such as awards, competitions, the threshold pledge system, or RSPP-Rational Street Performer Protocol, stuff like that. So people can freely code open-source stuff at leisure, and have reasonable expectations of achieving more than publishing the code and peer recognition, in case the project comes out good.

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[drinkypoo]

More software makes a better OS.

Which is why Linux beats the pants off Windows or MacOS in the market every time, since it comes with more software. Er, wait...

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[TheDarkMaster]

Exactly. The Average Joe does not want to have to learn dozens of obscure CLI commands to have your favorite media player running, and hopes that all the programs that do a particular task have the corresponding command more or less in the same place and do the same thing. Most obvious example? ctrl + c and ctrl + v.

Off course, we NEED programmers. But, programmers who understand that the Average Joe does not know or are required to know all the mysteries of one CLI.

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[jasenj1]

Oh. And documentation. Real, full blown, accurate documentation. Yes, some (many?) commercial products have sucky documentation, but open source software is terrible in my experience.

Get a horde of tech writers to contribute to OSS.

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[h00manist]

Oh. And documentation. Real, full blown, accurate documentation. Yes, some (many?) commercial products have sucky documentation, but open source software is terrible in my experience.

Get a horde of tech writers to contribute to OSS.

How are we going to get it.

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[theshowmecanuck]

That's like saying practice makes perfect, so people go out and practice repeatedly and often. But of course practice DOES NOT make perfect. CORRECT practice makes perfect. Practicing the wrong thing over and over just makes you good at being bad. So adding programmers to add to the status quo will do nothing to help the situation.

What MS, Apple, Google, et al have done to be successful has been to practice correctly. They have coherent and well defined User Interfaces that are predictable and do what they are supposed to do without an average user needing to know how to do extensive configuration. Almost all GUI programs have common commands, and pretty much all have help systems that provide complete and useful information (not all, but certainly better than Linux apps). Many here will howl in outrage, but Windows 7 is a very good desktop providing a very good user experience for the average user (and by definition this means the vast, vast majority of computer users). Same goes of course for Apple products. However much I dislike their business practices, their products are good, and work as advertised... they do what they say they will do... 99.99% of the time, with little need for user configuration.

Like other here say, the Linux desktop falls down because while Gnome and KDE provide a fairly consistent user experience, not all apps do, and there is still too much user intervention required in order to configure the system to do what the average Joe wants right out of the box (yes including multimedia and drivers). As the Linux desktop gets better, so does the competition. This means a more concerted effort to make a consistent and reliable desktop is needed. If this means limiting what applications are accepted by distributions, this should be done. What this will do is force developers to create applications that provide the users with a consistent and predictable look and feel, and ultimately a more productive experience. Applications ARE NOT BUILT FOR THE PROGRAMMER, they are built for the user (unless the user IS a developer... the minority of users and/or apps). If the developer is only building an application for their own predilections, then the application doesn't really belong in a common desktop. This understanding will help the Linux desktop.

Disclaimer: I run Windows 7 Pro and Kubuntu 10.10 on separate machines. I find Windows 7 to be far easier to use, but maintain Kubuntu for professional reasons; systems I do BSA work on are usually on Linux/Unix, and I find it hard to fathom how anyone can do systems work without knowing and keeping current on the systems they impact (including development and scripting/administration).

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[shutdown -p now]

It's a matter of usability also. When more than half of that software are obscure command line utilities - which may well be helpful when combined properly as per "Unix way" etc - it doesn't really help your casual user.

The big problem with Linux application development, until fairly recently, was the lack of quality tools. Sure, the compiler toolchain was there, and backend (source control, bug tracking etc) was as well, but IDEs and documentation were lacking. When the easiest way to write a UI application for your platform is to use Java, you're doing something wrong...

Qt is actually the best hope Linux has in that department - it's solid, well-documented, and now has a decent and easy-to-use IDE in form of Qt Creator. I often wonder why Qt isn't used more - perhaps it is because of KDE/Gnome (and the consequent Qt/Gtk) split.

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[drinkypoo]

It's a matter of usability also. When more than half of that software are obscure command line utilities - which may well be helpful when combined properly as per "Unix way" etc - it doesn't really help your casual user.

Well shucks, if that means the OS only comes with an order of magnitude more software, so be it.

I often wonder why Qt isn't used more - perhaps it is because of KDE/Gnome (and the consequent Qt/Gtk) split.

Perhaps I will attempt a Qt-based desktop but I happen to like something with a more Unix feel and KDE has always felt very much like Windows to me down to file requesters. And I prefer to stick to one widget set as much as possible, and certainly one desktop environment running at a time...

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[Alex Belits]

Average Joe does not seem to have a problem spending hours entering line noise into Windows Registry to make media players work on Windows.

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[TheDarkMaster]

Bad bad example, no donut for you... :) Who comes to research and changing settings in the Windows registry is not an Average Joe.

Re:Send programmer reinforcements

[Tharsman]

The impossible thing is to get people to write open source for a living. Apple and Microsoft have a lot of developers writting software for the platform in closed form because they can make a living out of it. If you cant make a living out of it, the best anyone can expect is for you to make this development as a hobby, forcing Open Source users to actually hire developers to implement features they need and were not able to find in the market.

And, ironically, that is the original goal of Open Source, not to make software free but to make it so that I am not tied by the original vendor should I want to expand it's functionality or address bug fixes. As some one that buys a product, I should expect to be able to hire any coder to improve or fix it, just as I can hire any mechanic to improve or fix my Toyota car.

Open source, unfortunately, has been redefined into FOSS, to the point where anyone charging or keeping the rights of their commercially available open source programs gets heavily criticized for not being "true" open source. This slowly is making it harder and harder for developers to make any money in that field, and in turn forces consumers to hire another contractor for the improvements and bug fixes, due to the nature of the developer working for free, you cant expect him to address bugs or add features you need, after all. Problem is that coders tend to be very expensive to hire. It comes the point where it's cheaper to just stick to closed source platforms like Windows and OSX.

Blinded by Linux

[ah81]

Hiring people to write drives for the printers you have? Are you for real? You people are so blinded by Linux, that you don't see the reality of the situation. Listen, you have an organization that has 10,000 people, with thousands of mobile phones/printers/webcams/peripherals etc. What do you think you pay Microsoft a year to license Windows 7, Exchange and Office? I can tell you one thing, you're not paying retail price. In fact, from my experience, they'd be paying less than 10 euros per employee. So let's take 10 euros a head for 10,000 people - you're looking at 100 grand a year. How many people do you think 100 grand can hire that are able to program printer drivers for Linux. I would guess one. Then you need a load more people that support this entire system. Going the Microsoft route, you just get some low paid guy that has a Microsoft Certification to admin the whole system. These things are made to work out of the box with each other, and generally it works like that. Then everyone has the software they are used to, they all have their mail/contacts/calendar synced to their phones just as they like it, you can purchase any devices because they are all going to be compatible with Windows and you get support and professional software from Microsoft (yes, professional, please don't try to compare Open Office with MS Office, or even Linux on the Desktop with Windows 7). It makes sense to run Linux on servers where you have to have professionals running them anyway. But for an office environment, you're never, ever going to achieve the cost and productivity under Linux that you do under Windows all things considered.

Re:Blinded by Linux

[Dcnjoe60]

Why would they not use printers that are supported by Linux in the first place? Printers are pretty inexpensive now a days. Surely an new printers they would have purchased since they went to Linux would have functioned under Linux. Therefore, why are they trying to write their own drivers for printers that by definition at least four years old (conversion started in 2007)?

As for the rest of your rant, studies have shown that support personnel for Linux cost more per person hired, but you need fewer of them to maintain the systems, so at worst it is a wash. Also, from the article, they are keeping Linux on the servers, and that is where most of the support costs lie. There could be some genuine issues with OpenOffice and MS Office, if they need to use complex docx files, but that is not an insurmountable obstacle. Also, figure in the cost under Windows for virus detection and more importantly removal.

Re:Blinded by Linux

[ah81]

Why should a large organization have to discount the majority of new printers on the market today because their system can't support them. That's ridiculous. We have a huge Xerox printer/copier/fax/scanner here in the office, and I can tell you that there is no way that any linux driver is going to support this thing fully with all the features it has. It's just not worth the hassle running up against such problems all the time when you consider that the total cost of running such a system certainly isn't going to be much cheaper (and in my mind, almost certainly more expensive). And Windows 7 has viruses pretty under control if you have a competent admin running your network. In any case, if you really follow the Microsoft philosophy, even a virus that managed to make it onto your computer wouldn't cause you problems, because your mail would be stored on Exchange and your documents in Sharepoint. So you'd simply reimage your system and start working again. As much as many Linux nerds here don't want to admit it (or realise it's actually the case), Microsoft has an incredibly slick suite of software for businesses, and Linux simply doesn't come close to it.

Re:Blinded by Linux

[Dcnjoe60]

You ask "Why should a large organization have to discount the majority of new printers on the market today because their system can't support them" I agree, however, most business class printers actually are very well supported by Linux, today. It is the low end consumer devices that have a problem. We, too, have Xerox pritner/copier/fax/scanners at work, and they are very well supported in Linux. The bigger and more expensive the printer, the more likely it will have support. Again, it is the low-end consumer grade devices that are problematic. If your device supports PL5/6 or postscript then it will work.

Windows 7 does not have anything with virus's under control. However, third party developers do. That said, having to have that competent admin running your network means you are not getting the dime a dozen support person you refer to. Having mail stored on exchange does not prevent viri, it makes it easier to scan for them there, but if it misses it and you open it locally, then you are infected. That is why organizations that use exchange check both the exchange server and the local desktops. Plus, exchange does nothing to prevent viri transmitted through gmail, im, fb and a slew of other avenues.

Besides, in Germany, they are keeping linux as the server OS, just not the desktop (per the actual article).

Microsoft does have a good suite of software for business, nobody doubts that. However, to argue that it is fault free, is naive. Even Microsoft admits the money is on the server side now, particularly as things go to the cloud. Microsoft does not control the server side, like they do the desktop, because there is not a single killer app, like Office for it and they, Microsoft, were actually late coming to the game.

Personally, or professionally, I have no problem if people want to run Microsoft products on the desktop. That is their choice. However, there are other choices, too, and to ignore those is a disservice to clients. With regards to Germany, if they want to switch from Linux to Windows, that is their choice, too. I only question the reasons behind it, because the ones mentioned in the article, don't seem to be consistent with reality.

Re:Blinded by Linux

[ah81]

Does secure print work with your Linux drivers? I doubt it (I couldn't get it working with our printer anyway). Also, Microsoft supplies Security Essentials now with Windows 7, which includes a virus scanner (a good one too). That coupled with the fact that you can enforce the firewall settings on all PC's in your network if you're an admin, I'd say they do indeed have the virus situation under control (as best as is reasonably possible anyway). I guess we are just going to have to agree to disagree, but in my opinion, only a small amount of IT investment is in software - most of it is in man hours and hardware. A piece of software that costs money but saves man hours and increases productivity provides 100 times more value that free software that adds man hours and decreases productivity (as seems to be the case with Linux on the desktop for the Germans anyway, and something I have also experienced in the real world).

Re:Blinded by Linux

[Dcnjoe60]

All the functions on our Xerox multifunction devices work the same on our Windows and Linux (and Mac) clients. The fact that you have to go and enable the firewall and then close off ports is not a selling point as to how well Microsoft protects the desktop. It shows that the desktop can be protected but not that it is protected. If someone makes a mistake in setting up the computer, there is a security hole.

However, that risk is minimal, because most large organizations do not set up individual machines. They set up one machine (hopefully correctly) and then clone the drives. We support 12,000 users. I can have one individual "setup" about 100 computers in a day, this way. Those 13,000 computers are on a three year replacement cycle, or 4,000 computers a year. We have one regular employee that does this work and pull other staff as needed. At the price of a replacement computer, it is cheaper to replace a faulty one than it is to troubleshoot it for very long. Almost all of our support staff's time is spent on software support (including OS issues). It is by far the most expensive part of the process.

Surprisingly, most of that time is spent on Windows support. Granted, the ratio of Windows machines to Linux/Mac is about 60/40, but support calls are 80/20. Part of the problem is that people think they know Windows and try and do things and mess things up. Our Linux boxes, running Gnome, only allow minimal configuration by the user and if they somehow screw up their user configuration, it is easy to restore, versus re-cloning an entire drive. As for software, most of the Windows users run Microsoft Office, a growing number are running OpenOffice. All of the Linux users are running OpenOffice. We have standardized on the Word and Excel .doc and .xls formats, so interchanging files is not an issue. To tell you the truth, most of the support calls with Office applications have to deal with Office 2010's interface and where to find things. Besides general software support, we therefore have to also do a lot of software training.

By the time you figure all of that in, we spend significantly more supporting software than we ever do on hardware. PCs are a commodity, nobody ever increased productivity with a PC. Increased productivity has always come from the software running on that PC and that is where most of the support cost goes.

Our company also has productivity measures as part of one's performance appraisels. While the Linux users are not more productive, they are definetely not less productive, either. We have not experienced productivity gains with one platform over the other. As such, the ROI is based on support costs and our support costs are significantly lower for the Linux desktop users than they are for the Windows desktop users.

My best bets for Linux

[h00manist]

I think the best bets for Linux/open source these days are the myriad small systems that are coming out, and home users. The small systems are as far away from Wintel as can be. Home users on the other hand are relatively easy to please, they use fewer apps, and they choose freely. I think they also make great research for usability, they are more accessible, etc. It's easier to get a Linux desktop that will please millions of teenagers to switch voluntarily that convince corporate sleuths that all their functionality will be available.

ok...

[hitmark]

training i can understand, but scanner and printer drivers?

unless we are talking something very old and/or very obscure, and then it is just as much a issue with a recent version of windows unless the company "making" (who do that any more?) the hardware is onboard to continue updates (and then they could just as well do it for linux unless the update involves basically a recompile for a more recent version of visual-c++), it should be supported by cups and sane.

Re:ok...

[Locke2005]

Actually, since companies like HP discontinue printer and scanner support within about 2 years of selling the hardware, I would think Linux drivers would be much easier to find than, say, Vista drivers for equipment that reached end of life before Vista was released.

Re:ok...

[hitmark]

Not sure if that policy apply for large corporate or government clients tho, as even microsoft will maintain OSs it has stopped maintaining publicly as long as the client is willing to pay for the service.

Still, when it comes to HP specifically, they maintain their own linux drivers so i am unsure how long those last.

MacOS X vs Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

My Windows printer doesn't work with MacOS X!
It's a printer fault! Buy a Mac printer!

My Windows printer doesn't work well with Linux!
Linux sucks!

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[commodore6502]

>>>"Compression software"?

Smashes text to 5% and images downto 20% to speed-up loading. If you're not familiar with the concept, try Opera Browser and turn on the "turbo" mode - does the same thing as my ISP does but not as fast.

>>>you're the sort of user that needs educating

(1) I typed my post before I had breakfast, so it's understandable why I made the "run" typo (and didn't take time to check for errors as I rushed off to work).

(2) 99% of users are as you described (need educating) and why they won't abandon the Windows system they are used to. And in some cases, won't even move from Win XP to Win 7.

From the actual article

[Dcnjoe60]

Specifically, this means a return to Windows XP, to be upgraded at some point to Windows 7, Office 2010 and Outlook. According to the government, this will not give rise to any immediate costs, indeed, they expect introduction of these "standardised software products" to produce "efficiency gains".

If they are going to install XP, to be upgraded to Windows 7 and use Office 2010 and Outlook, how will that be accomplished without a rise to any immediate costs? Maybe they have the XP licenses from the original desktops that were purchased, but what about the Win7 and Office? This smells like one of those times where Microsoft is giving the software away for free. Of course, I guess all of that software will magically install itself, too, so there won't be any increased cost there, either.

As for the efficiency gains, I can see if they receive a lot of complex docx files that OpenOffice might not be ideal. However, unless Microsoft Office is going to make them type faster, think clearer and faster, what efficiency gains are to be had? If there problem is printer drivers, well, maybe instead of converting back it would be less expensive and gain more efficiencies to purchase printers that are known to work, like mainstream HP, Canon, etc.

The claim that the ROI has not been what they had hoped. Well, I'm pretty sure ripping it all out and starting over again wrecks havoc with any ROI. That is of course unless Microsoft is footing the bill.

Re:B.S. I say

[jedidiah]

The idea that some monster printer is not supported under Linux or even an ancient copy of SunOS is rather absurd.

It's the printers that are designed to be cheaper to replace than the print cartridges that are typically problem. Business printers are just much better built and not intended to be disposable. They aren't built with such consumer cheapness in mind. This includes things like standard printer language support and network printing daemons.

Re:B.S. I say

[lwriemen]

Really?!? Are you saying large office printers wouldn't have *nix support?!? Most office printers still have OS/2 support! Besides which, the link you posted had Linux drivers...or are you just advertising?

Re:If they are anything like our staff at my offic

[colfer]

Typewriters are fine for printing envelopes. Better actually. Wish I had one. But I saw a funny scene on TV recently: mad dude brings in a typewriter and the young people are all covering their ears.

About games, I put together computers with some middle school students recently. Had Ubuntu preloaded on the drives for them. Once the power was on, they had found and were running the Ubuntu games before I could turn around! Not the teacher's intention. We soon switched to Perl scripting.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[polyp2000]

And also none of those issues are actually anything to do with Linux per se except possibly the ISP issue - But that must be one heck of a strange use case networking is generally one of Linux strong points .

To claim that "Linux is a nice experiment but it runs about as poorly as Amiga OS (i.e. hard to find proper software)." is basically a load of crap

The way an operating system "runs" has nothing to to with being able to find proper software -- define "proper software" . Linux has a vast library of software - and with the use of Wine or VM software (such as VirtualBox) you can run any windows software that doesnt exist or are unable to find a replacement for.

Also - If you are comparing a recent Linux operating system to Amiga OS - and to suggest that Amiga OS runs poorly - Sure , its an old OS , but at the time it was vastly superior to what Apple or Microsoft had going at the time. I recently started refurbishing my old amiga 1200 with a few tweaks it boots as fast as , if not faster than my SSD based - core 2 duo laptop. I would not describe that as running poorly.

Your comments lead me to suspect that you might have tried an ancient version of Linux like 10yrs ago - had a bad experience , and since have not looked at it again.

For the record i use linux for all my needs at home and at work - as a desktop operating system and "It Just Works (TM)" - but then i use an up to date version of Ubuntu and did my research before buying the hardware (as a rule of thumb i stick with intel chipsets and avoid ATI graphics cards)

N.

Re:This happened before

[jedidiah]

"manage and customize" has squat to do with "use for the layperson". It's about what has already been developed for any given use case.

Some weenie mentioned Photoshop and Ad Agencies. Well, you can apply that idea to many specialties and come up with software that NO ONE here has EVER heard of but is seen as critical for a particular niche. THAT is the stuff that really matters. "Printer drivers" is just a smokescreen put up by someone that doesn't have any real reason for what they're doing.

The problem of Windows generally isn't the stuff that any random Lemming Troll can rattle off the top of his head but all of the stuff they are completely unaware of.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[e70838]

One more anecdote evidence:
The main family computer has switched to Ubuntu 1 year ago because my printer and my scanner were not supported by Vista 64 (no driver). 90% of the computer use is average Joe (chrome, oo, mail, ...), my wife is the main user and do not know much about command line (cd ls). Flash and video work like a charm aven for full screen catchup TV. I spend less time fiddling with the systems to get things working than I did before with windows. The updates are automatic and do not break anything. The system does not degrade with time.

I miss a bit the polish of word or windows explorer, but honnestly, this does not compare to the time I have spared not using windows. So many things becomes trivial in Linux and takes more time in windows, for example:
wget -O - http://www.rtl.fr/podcast/les-grosses-tetes.xml | perl -nle 's/(http\S+.mp3)/`wget $1` unless -e $1/eg' It tooks me 5 minutes to write and my wife can use it.

When my wife has a problem, I can easily connect with ssh and see the problem. When I have to give someone a file too big for its mailbox, I can put it on my apache server.

I can understand that migrating to Linux has some costs for training and integration, but this is a one time cost. Once an office has migrated, it is obviously stupid to switch back: the usage costs of Linux are a lot lower than windows and you can change your hardware less frequently.

Re:Scanner problems?

[tkprit]

It's a government: I can imagine them getting thousands of cheap knockoff printers/scanners, and Microsoft dangling a driver for Windows as a free d/l. (Though I can't imagine Germany not pressuring the knockoff company to write some linux drivers for a large purchase).

I think their problem is the statement that they used linux servers and dual-boot linux/win desktops. I've done that, too, but only until I could find a way to port everything over, which with some s/w can be a challenge (esp if said s/w is ancient and isn't supported anymore). After this many years, Germany should've cut the cord (no dual-boot) well before now; what they've probably got is everyone booting into whatever OS they like, using whatever s/w they prefer, so nothing's going to be consistent.

It's not an OS problem; it's poor IT.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[BVis]

99% of users are as you described (need educating) and why they won't abandon the Windows system they are used to. And in some cases, won't even move from Win XP to Win 7.

And 99% of everyone are complete shitheads, what's your point? The fact that we're catering to the stupid instead of educating them will be the downfall of our civilization. If they're that stupid, fire them and hire someone who's willing to be trained. A motivated person can learn how to write a document, send an email, and view a web page in an hour on a Linux system.

standardised software products = MICROS~1

[doperative]

"The Foreign Office launched a modernisation process in 2010, one component of which was the pursuit of a new IT strategy moving away from open source software and towards "standardised proprietary client solutions" as used in other ministries. Specifically, this means a return to Windows XP, to be upgraded at some point to Windows 7, Office 2010 and Outlook. According to the government, this will not give rise to any immediate costs, indeed, they expect introduction of these "standardised software products" to produce "efficiency gains". Open source software will continue to be used on servers"

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[juasko]

Nope, the studies I look at are from companies who actually did migrate, and did studies in advance. There are plenty of independent studies to take part of.

All platforms have their con and pros. Being biased is of no use.

My experience

[Pigeon451]

I'm sure no one will read this but anyways, my 2 cents in using Ubuntu.

I made the switch for a year and it was generally fine. However there was always something not working right. A printer or scanner driver didn't work, or the wireless driver didn't work, or I had a boot error (abrupt power off) and it took a long time to fix... etc. These were minor issues that all eventually got resolved and I learned how to use the shell and how Linux worked. I was happy.

Then I started graduate school. There was compatibility issues with Word and Excel (the Openoffice version of Excel was terrible). Writer was fine, however it had issues with converting equations. So basically using Openoffice for collaborations was a no-go. Then there was software issues, where some was available only for Windows. Then licensing, where our school had site licenses for Windows but not Linux. While I suppose I could have fiddled with Wine, it eventually because cumbersome and I switched back to Windows.

So I can imagine how an office would have issues. The support to fix users' Linux issues would be much higher than Windows (both due to higher user inexperience and diversity of problems), and there would likely be extensive driver issues.

I loved the stability and ease of use of the Linux backend/shell, and I hate the dumbed-down Windows look (particular 7). But I have to use what is compatible with everyone else.

UserCurve Reality....

[OldHawk777]

German Government: "Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."

The rule is always; "User-Curve actually is generational." Microsoft and Win* has dogmatic converts, most of them know little to nothing about change and technology, and explicit-policy career-managers (includes CIO/CTO) are career-safety conscious never innovative.

Until, small-Biz (implicit governance) becomes big-Biz competitor, most institutional (explicit governance) organization, processes, and policy will remain adverse to (risk) technology and change. Initial big-Biz reaction to innovative small-Biz competition is reactionary with anti-compete buy-laws, buy-out small-Biz, or feeble copy, crash, repeat attempts until marginal success or failure is achieved by reaction (not reason).

Governments (like big-Biz) are institutional (explicit governance) organization, processes, and policy. Their planned purpose, with potential for good or bad, is stability (economic, market, institution, culture), control, and survival.

IMO: L/FOSS-Linux adoption for users and managers has a higher probability of implementation-transition in small-Biz, child education, and academic classrooms. Big-Biz is highly successful at planning strategic reality, but frequently fails at achieving actuality.

IOW: Reality is pie in the sky (high hopes), until there is actual transformational experience, change, innovation. The actual (Generational User-Curve) transformational experience, change, innovation for the German government is unlikely, unless the educational system is capable of producing (as flexible as many of /. users) the future managers and users. So, yes, big-Biz/governments could eventually evolve a more apt, agile, flexible functionality, but actually, though not explicitly, they are always against the unknown.

To evolve a more apt, agile, flexible functionality in the workforce/workplace there should be a mix of MS, OSS/Linux, Apple... users/platforms. Let the users pick their platforms for productivity. WebSOA, standards, and applications can assure appropriate and adequate interoperability (planned reality requires actual vendor compliance).

I started using Apple with a Motorola MC68000 running CP/M in 1984. Then in 1991 Microsoft and Win* started infesting the office workspace. At home I am a Linux user (1995...Present), today at work only Microsoft and Win* compliant products are ever used.

I remember the behavior of the managers and office workers to changes in technology and staff (from 1984...Present). Managers and workers constantly tag change and technology (the great unknowns) as waste that causes problems, failures... evil. Blame-Storming (in Biz today) always starts with the evils of change and technology, until the innovators are identified, and career-penalized as the cause of change and technology plagues.

Functionality, Usability and Interoperability???

[flappinbooger]

Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."

Gee, flame me if you want, but it sounds to me like they were using linux in a windows world, not a linux world. You'll have those problems.

For day to day office things - documents, emails, internet, that kind of stuff, why couldn't they have been perfectly productive if everyone was using the same platform. Interoperability? With what? Windows? That's the problem. If everyone you interact with is using linux, you won't have windows interoperability problems.

From reading TFA it seems like not everything was switched. Some things were dual boot. They mentioned having to write their own drivers for things like scanners. Why not get scanners that work with linux?

I'm getting ready to switch back to linux for my work desktop. I have been using windows 7 since it came out, but now I think I can get along better with a win7 VM and a good linux desktop. When I was last using linux I recall it working just fine with printers and scanners. In fact I was most impressed when linux dutifully went out on it's own and found ALL the printers on the network and started grabbing drivers. I was able to do everything I needed to do being the only linux station amongst a world of windows boxes. I hooked up an old hp scan/print device (with a dead print, but working scan) and it got the driver on it's own. I needed to scan something and I opened gimp and hit "acquire" and boom, there's my scan. No hassles or config required.

Sounds to me like more is going on than TFA is letting on. I think the microsoft marketing team has been hard at work.

BROWSER BASED APPS!!!

[Danathar]

It's SO much easier to migrate to Linux when all the apps operate primarily within the browser. My organization has been pushing to get every app we can running out of the browser using standards based (non IE specific) approaches.

Its not easy though. The fact of the matter is (and Apple is a good example) that developers still have much more flexibility and options to create desktop applications that are more feature rich and have that "bling" polish about them then your standard web app. People will continue to want to use word, excel and powerpoint until they can be convinced that using a web based alternative is better.

It's hard enough to get my mom to stop using Word and use google docs instead (even though she bitches every time she forgets where she saved that damn word file). People are loath to dump their broken way of doing things if it gets the job done...even if that means in a hobbled inefficient way.

Linux needs Windows binary compatibility

[cpghost]

From a practical point of view, we need indeed more interoperability in the form of binary compatibility to Windows -- both to Windows apps via Wine, and to Windows drivers with some shim. Something like this has already been done in the past: think of FreeBSD's Linux ABI (Linuxulator) or NDIS shims. And, of course, most of the coding (PE-COFF loader, win32s libs) is already there as in Wine. All it needs is some coding and packaging efforts to make Windows Binary Compatibility as seamless and as transparent as possible on a Linux/BSD/Solaris/Unix/... box. I don't say: drop the current Linux/Unix ABI, I say, add Windows ABIs to the mix.

Re:If they are anything like our staff at my offic

[Bill_the_Engineer]

In other words: They are able to do their jobs now with what they have and you want to "help" them continue doing their jobs by making them learn something new.

I made money modernizing offices, and the attitude you have shown is counter-productive.

The number one error that office managers seem to make is buying a PC with a word processor and a spreadsheet program and installing it on each employee's desk. After which they instruct the employee to learn how to use it, and quickly go to their superior and brag about how they modernized the office. The mistake being that no effort was made to understand why the employee was so productive, and giving the employee a general purpose tool to replace what they were accustomed to using. This results in the employee having to learn something new "to make someone else's job easier" and the employee "knowing" that the office manager is trying to make himself indispensable by introducing something into the workplace that only he understands.

In one of the offices that I "modernized" there was an employee that used a typewriter to keep up with the inventory. It worked flawless for him, and since the trucks arrived very early in the morning, he had all workday to do the tallies. He would white out the totals and add new truckloads to the bottom of the list, cross out the truckloads that were no longer at the warehouse, add up all the numbers, and put a new total at the bottom of the list. He would then make photocopies of his "master list" and send them to the other office workers. He did this every day for the past 15 years, and he was able to do all this quickly (much faster than I thought possible). I was able to "win him over" by creating a specialized spreadsheet application that allowed him to continue to work the way he was accustomed to, and he saw that the instantaneous totals made his job easier. The key was to make the software conform to the worker.

Today I see the reverse being done. Terminals that had forms that the data entry clerk could quickly fill in are being replaced with window machines running software that don't even come close to being the same thing. Worse I've seen terminals being replaced by windows machines running terminal emulators. This shows a lack of thought by IT. No wonder employees despise them. Of course IT people are accustomed to windows, so they don't see why the employees are so problematic...

I did this all in the 80's when personal computers in the office were new. I'd thought people would have it easier today.

Re:They weren't using a decent distro!

[h4rm0ny]

They should have used something more viable...

That's uh, um, very, um... WHAT??!?!?!?!?!?

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[juasko]

Well you and I can figure it out, but far from everyone. People have trouble going from windows version to an other windows version. So changing systems is far from just like that in a company.

And companies needs workers that do their job also, not just tweaking with their computers. They still need that old dude who knows his engineering, but cant handle a computer, and all the other "ill-literate" employees.

Therefor, Windows to Linux migration is more problematic, as everything changes. Than Win to OSX, that keeps some familiarity.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Candid88]

What? You're calling me biased?

LOL, this coming from someone who wrote "what is not available to the mac is usually not worthy to have most often low quality stuff".

Re:until they are hacked like the Swiss, the Austr

[kiwix]

Actually, MS will allow governments to inspect the source code. It's not much good for spotting bugs, as with Open Source's "thousand eyes", but it is useful in allowing governments to check for deliberate sabotage.

You can only avoid deliberate sabotage if you can compile this code with a third party compiler, and run the version you compiled yourself -- but I guess that's not allowed or probably even not possible. Otherwise, Microsoft could easily give you a sane source code and a sabotaged binary. I'm not saying they do it, but if you need the source code to be convinced that there is no backdoor, you also need to compile it yourself.

Re:Diplomats don't do GUI very well , much less CL

[kiwix]

he couldn't format it to the peculiar formatting rules in his office (A bizarre format not compatible with any of the standardized Business Letter styles[1]), and requires you to fumble around with the bulleting, tabbing and rulers. And those things didn't behave like they did in his Office 97 or whatever.

The interesting question is: if he had to migrate to the next version of Microsoft Office, would he have been to do this fumbling around by himself? I don't use any office suite myself, but I guess that the interface can change a bit from one version to the other, even if you keep using the "standardised proprietary client solutions".

The goal...

[bmo]

...was to make a secure intranet.

Now they're moving to Windows XP.

Secure
XP

Secure.
XP

SECURE?
XP?

And the reasoning is scanner und printer drivers.

http://www.google.com/images?q=jackie+chan+my+mind+is+full+of+fuck

My next thing on my todo list is to scatter thumb drives in the parking lot of the nearest German Consulate for the lulz.

--
BMO

Re:B.S. I say

[smash]

I still don't get the driver issue. I bought a brand new Canon all-in-one printer and found Linux drivers for the scanner and printer in a few minutes of googling.

As opposed to your end user taking their laptop home, plugging the device in, and having windows update automagically install it and configure a print queue (yes, in win7 this is reality more often than not).

Re:Calling bullshit on your bullshit

[Sprouticus]

This is a completely spurious line of thinking. Seriously, where does this kind of paranoia come from? Im not saying it is not possible, but stating it like it is fact is just absurd. And modding it up as insightful is reinforcing that absurdity.
Likely Scenarios

1) They have a special use printer (someone mentioned Zebras above) that they had to create drivers for (I had this same issues with Linux based thin clients connecting to my citrix servers)
2) MS gave them a hell of a bargain to get back onto Windows/Office
3) Users did complain as you asserted. Although I would argue that the use of the word addicted is very ‘fox news-esque’ in that it implies that users wanting to use a tool they were familiar with equates with addiction. Lazy and showing lack of ability to embrace new things, but how is THAT a surprise to anyone.
4) There was some kind of backroom/unethical deal, in which case a corruption case is warranted. I could see this happening, especially when combined with #2. Give the people a reason to be shortsighted and send them to a ‘seminar’ for 2 weeks at a coastal resort as a reward. That kind of thing.

This is a case where I think the anal retentive nature of the German government might be useful is getting to the bottom of which of the cases above (or one I have not thought of) is the real culprit. I would assume that whatever the equivalent of the GAO in Germany has some real teeth.

But just being a bigoted asshole and accusing someone (or in this case multiple someone’s) of being an criminal does nothing to further the case for ensuring ethical behavior and just makes you look like a rabid douchebag. I swear, every day it seems like I see more and more examples of people being extreme asswipes. Apple, Google, Lunix, xtian, Muslim, Spain vs Basque separatists, boxers vs briefs, pop vs soda, ect ect etc. It’s all meaningless bullshit. In the end this is simply a fucking Os. A desktop OS at that.

Maybe it’s just a get off my lawn thing, but why can people just look at things rationally without getting whatever irrational crutch they gravitate to get in the way.....

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[juasko]

And that is true, not long ago I bought a veb cam, well as usual there was no Mac support for it, I tought well usually they work anyway. As printers and many other peripherals work on multiple platforms.

Well this one didn't, I was cheap I know, then I tought well I just hook it up to my Windows PC. Installed the drivers etc all according to manual.

Did it work, well hardly it was pure crap from the beginning. Since then, I never buy products that hasn't outspoken support for multiple platforms. And I get quality products then. It's a simple quality check to do on products. If they support all platforms, they actually put some time on it to make it work. If not there is a great risk it's all crap. But then, that is not entirely true, but holds water quite well when it comes to "unknown" products.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Gandalf_the_Beardy]

You see this is where I come from... Windows does do what I want 100% of the time. It has a nice desktop, it is after XP SP3 stable, secure (enough if you use common sense) and has all the software I need. Linux does it about 98% of the time. But I run things in Wine and use Linux - the reason being that I've gotten burnt by vendors ceasing to trade. Ceasing to offer support. In particular, one vendor who is now defunct stopped providing updates for their software. That's when we found that there was a timebomb in the application and it became unusable, meaning all out historical data and build methods was just that. History. With Liunx at the very least if it is easter egged or timebombed, I'll have the source, and if I don't have the ability or time, I can pay someone to have it to fix my stuff. I'll have open format data structures so I can slap a bit of glue code together to port it to the new pacakge I use. That sort of freedom is worth real money and is something that a lot of Windows only people simply don't seem to appreciate. Most do "get" it but many don't - until it burns them. This is why open source solutions are always going to be around as an alternative. It's not about price, but the other sort of freedom.

Re:Yes ... Open Source can present some IT challan

[souravzzz]

Maybe they will realize this cost and take up using linux- all over again!

You need to re-read the post

[sean.peters]

Yes, all Macs nowadays have built-in wireless. However, not all of them (such as my older Powerbook G4) have built in .11n wireless. If I could find a compatible .11n stick, that would be one less machine I'd have to carry on the .11g side of my home network.

Re:cue the ac fanbois

[marcosdumay]

It's not that nobody sane would make a positive comment about a Microsoft product. The problem is that /. has a hight level of insane positive comments about MS products (and Apple too, but sometimes it seems that insanity is a requirement for buying Apple).

I've actually had decent luck w/ Ubuntu

[sean.peters]

It's Debian proper that made me want to slit my wrists. I ran Debian for years without too many issues, but as of a couple of years ago, literally every. single. update was breaking my damn machine, to the point where I would have to wipe and reinstall the OS. I finally got fed up, blew away Debian, and installed Ubuntu. LIfe's been good since then.

Ah the buttons

[SmallFurryCreature]

You are aware that the largest PC maker in the world has the buttons on the other side as well?

I have a neighbour whose IQ is pretty low. Nice enough woman but limited in her intelligence. So she often had problems with her PC which she used for nothing more then IM and online free games. Naturally as an IT guy I was asked to help with Windows problems until I installed Ubuntu for her, added flash and gave myself ssh access to her machine. Never needed it in over a year now. It just works. So well in fact that she has asked for her sisters kids old laptop to be switched as well because kids are even worse for accidently installing crapware. No complaint from the child either, about 6 years old.

So a woman with an IQ well below average and a 6 year old can handle buttons on the left. But you can't. Or do you simply not want to because you hate any change period and just want to whine?

As for Ubuntu updates breaking something... right... it might but it hasn't happened to me on over a dozen machines in years. And I mess around a LOT with my setup because I am a nerd. But I do have a windows gaming machine which occasionally develops a phantom network card, can't sort out which audio output to use, looses connect to samba shares (while linux, a mac and even my android phone keep the connection open) etc etc. Ain't anecdotes wonderful pieces of evidence.

No, I think what that the problem is simple in Germany. Government workers are well known for being highly resistant to change. Add to this a healthy dose of missed dinners paid for by the sales rep and it is very hard to get anything changed. Note that the same resistance was once encountered by Microsoft.

No, buy a better printer

[SmallFurryCreature]

Really, this isn't hard, it is government. Just write in your spec it needs Linux support and then buy the printer that has it. This isn't some small shop that has to buy whatever is available in the local shop, it is the government. Anyway, they buy big brands, not from this non-player who can't even support unixes.

Do you know what REAL government use for printers? Machines that RUN Solaris as their OS. Betcha those got linux "drivers". It is a whole different ball park.

Re:No, buy a better printer

[roman_mir]

It's hard not only for governments. A retail operation was trying to switch to Ubuntu boxes

Are we reading yet?

There has been a government change

[SmallFurryCreature]

What is intresting to note is that their has been a regime change in Germany that might well be the cause of this. The switch was made under a left-wing government. Recently a right-wing government came into being and MS made some promises to invest and gosh, a switch back to windows is announced... how surprising.

But the war is not yet lost. The right-wing government has been clobbered in recent elections and the left is smelling blood and asking questions already, the same questions being asked here such as what the hell the driver issue is supposed to be. The German left-wing parties ain't swallowing the BS either. Don't expect this to be a done deal.

Re:cue the ac fanbois

[LingNoi]

What's the problem?

because you end up with shit like this..
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2006166&cid=35279232

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[LingNoi]

You realise that Apple uses the exact same software (CUPS) to print that Linux does, right? In fact it's Apple's software. So if you've ever had a problem printing on Linux then you'd also have that problem on Apple, and it'd also be their fault.

Printer Drivers

[future assassin]

Wouldn't it have made more sense as a Gov to put out an announcement to the German people and say "We need printer drivers" for Linux. If you would like to write the drivers this is the hardware we need drivers for. Write them and you get a nice national pat on the back and possibly a new job from a tech company. Win win for every one.

Re:Printer Drivers

[darkwing_bmf]

If you want you printer drivers written by criminals or spies this would work well.

Re:Printer Drivers

[future assassin]

Thats why you open source it so anyone can have a look at the code.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Vancorps]

Hate to say it but macros in Word and Excel are incredibly useful, just never accept them from the outside ;)

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[ctishman]

Well, calling them shitheads is an awesome way to motivate them, isn't it?

Once again the Asshole OS Advocate rears his head. Sure, your OS of choice may be superior, but calling names and implying that they're so stupid they should be terminated shows simple disrespect for the user's time and expertise.

These people aren't stupid, they just have other things to do. Things like the jobs they were hired to perform, at which they are generally very good. Every hour of training time, every call to tech support over something that doesn't run exactly as it should straight out of the gate, every time the foreign office's entire agenda has to be put on hold for a week because there's no good driver for the passport press is lost productivity and an increasing backlog that can even bog down the rest of the government.

It may take them an hour to learn web browsing, document writing and emailing, but that's because these are instances where an inspired team helped Linux to rise to the occasion and meet the user halfway. Without teams willing to step off of their pedestal like that for the purpose of getting things done, you'd still have Linux advocates using PINE and moaning about how the user just has to be educated on proper CLI mail programs.

These opportunities don't come along very often, and this one seems to have been blown pretty badly. Whose fault is it? It's ours. Every UI that doesn't pick up and scurry to fulfill the user's needs. Every missing driver for an obscure printer that halts a workflow vital to the national interest. Every time some nerd on the internet sneers at the people who had the audacity to give his product a try.

It's our fault, because taking responsibility for the fun parts of changing the world also means taking responsibility for the failures.

Re:Calling bullshit on your bullshit

[Alex Belits]

1) They have a special use printer (someone mentioned Zebras above)

They claim they had to write drivers. I do not believe this ever happened.

that they had to create drivers for (I had this same issues with Linux based thin clients connecting to my citrix servers)

Citrix does its best to make their products impossible to use with Linux. It uses Linux in many of those products, but they still are only usable with Windows clients, so no sane person will use them in any Linux-based setup.

The only printers that I have seen unsupported by CUPS, are hopelessly obsolete or extra-cheap models specifically made for sporadic home use. Anyone who keeps those in a government or company office should be fired because those things have truly astronomical cost in in toner/ink, service and wasted time after they jam.

read...

[remusrm]

I am not surprise. Linux is mature in server but desktop is shit. Sorry geeks, learn to be more social and pay attention to users, we do not want gnome kde lxde etc. Too many choices means watered down options and ideas, work on one or two things and make them good. I will get flame for this since its easier then admitting the facts. Wireless does not work right, sound its a joke unless you tweak, apt-get and rpm installers are a good idea but people want to do double click, get it? Now back to the basements or "offices" beat one quick and think of what I said and this might get you some recognition and get laid. Being unique is not always best.

Users' biggest complaint:

[Locke2005]

No solitaire game!

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Vancorps]

Which study has shown OS X to be cheapest to maintain? In my shop both the hardware and software stack make it the most expensive platform by far.

Expenses rack up fast due to downtime caused by faulty hardware, since I can't virtualize OS X I have no way to limit that downtime besides having a hot spare machine ready. In the Windows and Linux world I have virtual desktops making downtime due to hardware failure a thing of the past.

I haven't yet seen automatic patch management on OS X like I have in the Windows and Linux worlds. I SCCM to push patches for Windows and I have a private repository for my Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian systems.

Windows licenses aren't that expensive, there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle and the fact that it is a complete stack with collaboration software and users already familiar with interfaces and features means that it is not very expensive to maintain compared to other platforms. OS X is not built for business users, people keep trying to use it as such but they are only increasing the cost of administration. There are some cool tools for it in the video and photography workflow arenas but everywhere else I've encountered is better served on another platform.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Vancorps]

Given the complete debacle that was the Adobe Creative suite all the way until CS 4 on OS X I think you have a varying definition of quality tools.

Why do my Mac users insist on always having the latest software while my Windows and Linux users are happy with their long term release products?

Say, that's a nice cherry picker...

[denzacar]

From that very same parent post...

In my own experience of getting ordinary people to use computers, Linux computers needed a lot more fiddling then Windows machines.

It's not the price - it's the quantity.
After all, any fiddling would be performed by hired employees who get the same paycheck one way or the other.
But, if the quantity of daily fiddling needed exceeds the quantity of fiddling provided daily by the hired technical staff... costs WILL rise.
Either through downtime, or through overtime, or through hiring more staff, or through training costs, or all of the above.

Re:Diplomats don't do GUI very well , much less CL

[ryzvonusef]

I think you are referring to the Ribbons. And no, even *I* can't use those properly, and I am a non-C.Sci. guy who some how managed to install Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog back in the day.

(seriously, where is the change font case button on that god forsaken ribbon, anybody know?)

His own laptop has that version of office (2003?), but he comes to my PC for this very reason, and that's the same reason his office hasn't upgraded to the ribboned version.

Mod heretic down

[judeancodersfront]

I find him to be religiously offensive.

Finally!

[The Wild Norseman]

Yay!

2011 -- the year of Windows on the desktop!

Re:cue the ac fanbois

[h4rm0ny]

It's not that nobody sane would make a positive comment about a Microsoft product. The problem is that /. has a hight level of insane positive comments about MS products (and Apple too, but sometimes it seems that insanity is a requirement for buying Apple).

I honestly don't see that. My impression is that Slashdot has a general anti-MS bias. Even TFS here ends with a "sadly" indicating that we are expected to feel disappointed that MS has triumphed. It is slightly sad as I would like to see Linux continue to do well. It seems to be doing so in large parts of South America and China so I don't think it's in any danger. Still, the point is that I see more Linux fanboyism here than I do MS fanboyism where you're likely to be modded down for a stance. I use fanboyism to describe an attitude of support, regardless of facts. It exists on both sides. But I don't think its at such levels where any post that is positive about MS or its products should be accused of bias, which seems to be the purport of the OP.

Re:until they are hacked like the Swiss, the Austr

[kubitus]

I know of no government which achieved a compilation comparable to the sold binary product - maybe except the Chinese one:

I run Chinese M$ software without getting the usual malware!

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Anne Thwacks]

My sister-in-law, who is barely even literate, learned to do all that on a Linux system without any effort at all. Not only that, on a dual boot machine, complains if its running Windows cos its "so inconvenient" and the scanner doesn't work. She just asked a series questions like "how do I go on the internet?" and someone showed her. She would have to do the same on any other computer anyway. She continues to ask "where did I save my CV?" quite often.

I am truely grateful that she only has the permissions she needs to save in her own area, and the system takes permissions seriously.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[marcello_dl]

> Apple uses the exact same software (CUPS) to print that Linux does, right? In fact it's Apple's software

Almost: CUPS was only recently "bought" by Apple (being GPL they cannot really buy it).

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Anne Thwacks]

Once an office has migrated, it is obviously stupid to switch back:

You would say that, but that is because no one is going to give you bribes.

A significant cash advance might easily persuade you to migrate someone else back to Windows.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Anne Thwacks]

Provided you have semi-literate employees

You have clearly never worked in a government department.

hahahahaha

[judeancodersfront]

You said Windoze instead of Windows. That's hilarious.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[node 3]

Firstly, the OP made the comment that something was "never going to happen". That's only a valid statement if everything is done and dusted and desktop Linux has died a death.

That's just wordplay. As it stands now, Linux on the desktop is never going to happen, is a valid statement. Things can change, but the only sliver of "well, it *might* happen" requires significant changes that are not historically justified.

As a proportion, it is small. But as a community of people necessary to keep Linux on the desktop alive and healthy, it is huge.

This is the crux of the discussion. 1% may be "huge" if you gathered all these people together in one room, but in the wide world they are wholly insignificant. That's why Linux doesn't have much in the way of commercial software or direct hardware support, which is what is meant by "Linux on the desktop".

It's vibrant as a niche platform, but it's not a major player in terms of driving innovation or any aspect whatsoever of the consumer/desktop market, which pretty well backs up SocietyoftheFist's post.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[SocietyoftheFist]

I'm arguing that the German Foreign office is served better by somebody that wants to make a profit off of making a product available to them instead of a product being available for ideological reasons. I used Linux for a long time but in the end, after over a decade, and with the introduction of OS X and well designed hardware built around it, I said no more!

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[SocietyoftheFist]

You're quoting the same lines I've heard since 96. You want to know how stubborn I used to be? I tried to get my family to use OS/2 instead of Windows, but gave up when it was obvious that they weren't going to catch on to something that wasn't like the computers everywhere else. I like your style of arguing that places the burden on those that you think won't put the "tiny mental" effort in to trying things you like. Linux has failed in the desktop market. You are way late to the game if you think things are getting better. The only thing Linux did was take over the UNIX workstation and light to medium duty server market.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[h4rm0ny]

That's just wordplay. As it stands now, Linux on the desktop is never going to happen, is a valid statement. Things can change, but the only sliver of "well, it *might* happen" requires significant changes that are not historically justified.

It's not "wordplay". You can't say something was "never going to happen" whilst the thing is still going on. Every year, the number of Linux desktops has grown. You can argue the liklihood of where it's going to go from here, but it can hardly be said with confidence that Linux desktops are "never going to happen".

This is the crux of the discussion. 1% may be "huge" if you gathered all these people together in one room, but in the wide world they are wholly insignificant.

And the point I was very clear on is that you may say 1% is a small percentage but in real terms that presents a very large number of people, more than adequate to support not merely one desktop environment but, as we have seen, several! And it is the real terms that matter. If there is a sufficient community around Linux that it can continue to develop, improve and draw in new members to that community, then there remains a possibility for Linux to gain larger shares of the overall desktop usage.

That's why Linux doesn't have much in the way of commercial software or direct hardware support, which is what is meant by "Linux on the desktop".

Hardware gets better year after year. If you want to put together a Linux machine, I can't think of any area of functionality you can't source modern, supported hardware for it. I invite you to name an area if you can. In regards to software, it depends what you're after. Desktop Publishing and art / photo editing are the weakest areas. Other than that, the only big omissions are bespoke software written for a company's specific purposes. That's obviously a problem for entrenched systems, but not a problem for new systems, meaning you can adopt Linux moving forward. And more significantly, with applications increasingly being web-based, it's becoming less of a problem year on year.

The OP made the case that Linux on the desktop was "never going to happen" and I don't see anything you've said as showing that it wont happen.

It's vibrant as a niche platform, but it's not a major player in terms of driving innovation or any aspect whatsoever of the consumer/desktop market, which pretty well backs up SocietyoftheFist's post.

Re:Not surprised

[remusrm]

and it will always be until the linux peeps get that thousand of wms, or apps for doing the same thing is not worth it. Put your power into a major project and be proud, not your own crap and hope it will get famous...

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[khellendros1984]

*shrug* "Linux on the desktop" has been a reality for me for the last 9 years. I think that the whole debate about whether it will become completely mainstream is a little pointless. As long as the community is large enough that hardware support expands along with new development with the consumer market, I think we're set. If you want desktop Linux, it's available and highly functional. That's what matters to me.

Re:cue the ac fanbois

[dwarfsoft]

Ubuntu on my home laptop seems to have OpenOffice,org crash constantly, whereas MS Office works fine on Windows XP with the same laptop.
Windows 7 on my work laptop seems to have MS Office crash constantly whereas OpenOffice.org works fine (on Windows 7).

Nothing works perfectly... It's a matter of building a SOE and testing thoroughly with the hardware. I like MS and have defended them here before (both openly and as AC). I also defend Linux (I have used more than just Ubuntu, but I am using it to bring my wife into the Linux fold :) ) but only on its merits.

Windows still has a far more consistent approach to UI. It sucks in places, but overall it is far easier for users to pick up (which is possibly due to exposure).

Re:cue the ac fanbois

[nemesisrocks]

You're implying that anyone saying something positive about MS or their software must be doing so because they have a financial interest.

Which, in its essence, is the same argument Greenpeace uses to dismiss studies about Global Warming. Adverse finding ==> Must have been funded by the oil companies!

It's the _Foreign_ _Office_

[IBitOBear]

It's a bunch of people who have to accept and send documents to a bunch of backward places like the United States. No other office would be more hounded and pressed by the idiots sending everything from wordstar to Microsoft .docx files.

Given the amount of effort Microsoft makes to make sure that they can use other formats but nobody else can use theirs fully, it is no wonder that the one place where the German government rubs up against the rest of the world the most often would have the most problems avoiding Microsoft contamination.

This is not an indictment of Linux at all, it is further proof that Microsoft secret innards should be considered harmful to all comers.

Interoperability of _Microsoft_ products with all others is _extremely_ low. And training anybody, let alone a bunch of diplomats, exactly how to hop through all the hoops to access a readable version of a .docx file sent from abroad is a non-trivial task.

It is easy to blame the fix (Linux and Open Office et al) for the woes of the common but broken (secret Microsoft document standards) that flood you when you use the fix. And really, while I use Open Office almost exclusively for my own work, it _isn't_ exactly the best piece of software I have ever seen. It is just as quirky and annoying as virtually every other word processor I have ever used. [To date, WordPerfect has been the best word processor I have ever used, but it is dead and there is no pining for the past.]

And scanner support in Linux is not as sane (pun!) as you would hope. This is not a "Linux flaw", its a scanner vendor flaw, as even the good "hp printer drivers" don't include any kind of decent "hp scanner facility" under Linux. And my outstanding Cannon mf9170c at home has no Linux drivers at all so it took non-trivial effort to discover that cups 1.4+ and the generic PCL6 support drivers was the magic combination that _still_ borks up if I put it in the (unnecessary, but you know a diplomat is going to use it) "high quality mode". So the people to blame for bad "Linux printer and scanner driver support" is the manufacturers of the printers and scanners.

In fact the whole "looking for drivers" issue is a red herring. I have spent hundreds of professional man hours looking for Windows drivers for hardware in my lifetime and I am not alone. Every vendor always puts their drivers in odd and bizarre places. And since everybody is non-root on a linux box by default they can't just pull off the normal "cram in everything I can find till something works" techniques people use to get stuff to work under Windows.

In all computing, changing the interface of an implementation is the hardest part. And in international document exchange, that interface is going to be the foreign office of a major government. I am disappointed sure, but they gave it a good run and I would expect this office to fail on the first go.

Changing OS is like quitting smoking. Some failures and restarts are to be expected. But when they start coughing up blood again they'll try quitting again.

Re:It's the _Foreign_ _Office_

[Alex Belits]

And scanner support in Linux is not as sane (pun!) as you would hope. This is not a "Linux flaw", its a scanner vendor flaw, as even the good "hp printer drivers" don't include any kind of decent "hp scanner facility" under Linux.

This is a complete and undiluted bullshit. HP maintains hplip for years, supports all their modern hardware, and considering how awful is their Windows software, switching from Windows to Linux results in a massive improvement in their devices' usability.

And my outstanding Cannon

It's Canon, not Cannon.

mf9170c at home has no Linux drivers at all so it took non-trivial effort to discover that cups 1.4+ and the generic PCL6 support drivers was the magic combination that _still_ borks up if I put it in the (unnecessary, but you know a diplomat is going to use it) "high quality mode". So the people to blame for bad "Linux printer and scanner driver support" is the manufacturers of the printers and scanners.

Canon MF9170C is a ~$1800 USB printer/scanner (kind of expensive for home use) fully supported by CUPS. Canon supplies CUPS-compatible UFRII driver for Linux, and you can use PPD files they distribute for use on other operating systems. Congratulations for finding a model that is not mentioned by name on Canon site, yet supported along with the rest of their devices.

Re:cue the ac fanbois

[Foredecker]

No ACs here...

-Foredecker

Funny that they are not providing figures

[dave87656]

In RTFA, it is clear that they are not providing any actual figures on money saved, something they have been easily providing up until 2010 on the money saved using open source. Secret deals with MS?

Re:Not

[dave87656]

I find it funny that they write that there were no "immediate" increased costs, which probably means that they have a moratorium on license fees for a year or two after which the costs will skyrocket. The article also says that security issues were independent of whether or not open source was used. That completely contradicts every unbiased assessment ever made.

And, of course, the results of the actual studies performed in 2009 and 2010 came to a different conclusion (my translation) "Both studies referenced in the unpublished reports come to the conclusion that the open source strategy for the foreign ministry has worked correctly and that Linux desktops are a viable route. However, there are issues with interoperability and acceptance issues which need to be addressed. McKinsey warned that a return to Windows would cause significant middle-term license and migration costs, even though this route might seem attractive to users with less linux acceptance."

Original: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Linux-im-Auswaertigen-Amt-Rueckmigration-auf-Windows-nicht-zwingend-1192284.html
Beide Male, wird aus den nicht öffentlichen Ergebnisberichten zitiert, kommen die Unternehmensberater zu dem Schluss, dass die Open-Source-Strategie im AA funktioniert und dass Linux-Desktops ein "gangbarer Weg" seien; allerdings müssten die Interoperabilitätsprobleme angegangen und gegen die vorhandenen Nutzervorurteile angekämpt werden. Für den Fall einer Rückmigration auf Windows warnt McKinsey vor mittelfristig erheblichen Lizenz- und Migrationskosten, auch wenn dieser Weg angesichts der geringen Linux-Akzeptanz bei den Mitarbeitern aus Nutzersicht attraktiv sei.

Management ... ptooooiiieee!

[Dabido]

It would not surprise me if part of the push was possibly from a new manager who couldn't use Linux and was unwilling to change. There are probably a lot of workers who are also unwilling to change who spent their time with Linux bagging the system.

The mention of training costs in particular reminds me of people 'unwilling' to change who deliberately do things wrong and blame the system. (We had some guys who recently kept adding information a day late to an excel spreadsheet and kept blaming the system, so we put a trace on when they were adding stuff ... and voila, it was them and not the computers!) :-)

We've had a weird experience at work with a new manager. He can't understand how we do things (or why we do things certain ways) and has spent the last few months forcing everything to be changed to suit his needs. This included him wanting an entire re-write of a backend for a system so that it works the way he wants. It started with him wanting the reports it spits out coming out in his format, and so we did that for him, but he discovered that there was all this other data that is used that gets 'totalled up' and has 'calculations' done on it to give him his reports. He wants the back end completely rewritten so that that data is not used and just the 'Totals' and other things that he has on his summary page are used in the back end. We've tried explaining that the summary stuff doesn't exist in the back end, but is created using the data ... he will sit there nodding his head saying, 'Yes, I understand that.', but then after the meeting still demands we rewrite it to remove the data that's obviously slowing the system down. *sigh* Then, there is the fact that the very system he wants a rewrite on is being integrated into our main database systems and a rewrite is a waste of time because by the time we finish the rewrite the integration will have already occurred.

That's just the one thing I'm involved with, I've heard he is even worse with what he's been doing to other people and systems. But, it did get a lot of people talking today about managers who come into an organisation where things are running smoothly and insist on changing everything to suit how they think they should run and end up ruining the system. Most of those managers are only there for a short period of time and leave disillusioned (or get fired) and when a competent manager does get into a position they have to spend three years fixing things to get them back the way they were ... only for them to leave for greener pastures and be replaced by another idiot!! :-)

In five years, maybe we'll see the German Foreign office return to Open Source and claim the migration back to MS was too expensive etc.

Which reminds me of another story (yes, once at band camp) ... we purchased software to run on our Sun boxes ages ago, and one manager had 'friends' at IBM. The IBM salespeople convinced him to buy some servers from them that ran Windows. We tried to explain that the copies of the software we had only ran on Unix, but the manager had purchased the Windows servers because the IBM salespeople had told him that the software would run on windows. The manager would not budge on the fact that he was right about the software ... so when the Windows servers arrived the company had to re-purchase the software to run on Windows servers and that manager had left the company to go stuff up some other place! Please note, I don't think the IBM salespeople were nec. to blame. The manager probably only asked them if the software runs on windows and they probably thought he meant it in a general way (ie there is a windows version), so the Manager was to blame. (Though the System Architect at the time said the IBM salespeople knew what they were doing and just wanted the sale). Who knows! But, our data centre went from being Unix only to having about four Windows servers sitting there.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Alex Belits]

Well, calling them shitheads is an awesome way to motivate them, isn't it?

It's not to motivate them, it's to discredit them, so they will not be able to convince other people. It's easier to call shithead a shithead early than to deal with hundreds of people parroting his shit later.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Alex Belits]

Another poster who posts absolutely nothing but Microsoft marketing.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Alex Belits]

If anyone did not notice, for many years CUPS remains being the only print server/spooler/driver supported on OSX. If printer does not work with CUPS, it will never work on a Mac.

While it's possible for a printer vendor to create a OSX-only last-step backend, no one so far was stupid enough to do so.

I forgot

[TheDarkMaster]

I forgot in my earlier comment: I use Slackware because is the only one who does things in a more or less standardized way at the kernel level. But I am not the "average Joe" from my example, I'm a mad scientist:) As such, I have no problems installing an application from source if I need. But you can not require that from the average Joe.

Re:I forgot

[Alex Belits]

I forgot in my earlier comment: I use Slackware because is the only one who does things in a more or less standardized way at the kernel level.

This is absolutely wrong -- and yes, I am a kernel programmer. You are talking out of your ass.

Re:I forgot

[TheDarkMaster]

Ohhhh was offended? Poor soul. Want me to apologize, kernel guru and master of the universal truth :) I will not touch this subject, if it bothers you so much, and since you apparently are unable to understand criticism because appears you still think I'm criticizing the kernel or the distro.
Oh, footnote: It is because of attitudes like yours that the year of desktop Linux will always be the current year + 1.

Re:I forgot

[Alex Belits]

I am not "offended", I have called you on you bullshit.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[commodore6502]

I hope you and BVis have a heart attack at age 40 and die. Then maybe you'll be replaced with a customer service ITT rep that's not a dick.

Re:Penguins & unjustified downmods? Helpless H

[Alex Belits]

What "facts"? Most vulnerabilities (privilege escalation) on Linux desktop mean that local user sitting in front of a console can become root without entering his password. They would matter on multiuser systems, but the whole point of a desktop is that it is a personal computer. You need a combination of privilege escalation and remote execution to cause any damage.

Windows, on the other hand...

Re:Ambiguous support

[Alex Belits]

It means, you are a retard, and configured wrong PPD.

That HP and openprinting helpfully supply for all those printers.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[juasko]

Well Adobe hasn't been a company that has delivered quality for many years. E.g. last good Illustrator was version 7, or maybe 8(which I never used).

Some of the crap they made wasn't sorted until CS3. That is v.9, 10, 11, and 12 that was a pain. FYI I've used the Adobe applications on Windows after that time. So the quality issue is not only on the Apple platform. It's the same issue as we have with Adobe Flash.

Adobe is LAZY.

Re:Does Javascript run on Linux? Yes, therefore...

[Alex Belits]

I have no fucking idea about the rest of your text (as it is completely unreadable), but security bugs on Linux don't even live long enough to be exploited. Certainly not a combination of desktop-exploitable remote execution and privilege escalation on a system that gets updates from a repository.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[Alex Belits]

I am 41.

Re:The profit motive is a great motivator

[lsatenstein]

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So, all your solutions imply Linux!! Wow. The government did the study. They got results that are quantified. The Windows 7 environment is a good alternative to Linux. Gnome is not the best ergonomic interface, but it is very usable. I think you must realize that Linux can't win all battles. But it will come in it's time

Re:Stunned silence?

[totally bogus dude]

Yah, apparently /. was choosing not to post the comments for a while. It just said 0 comments, and the story seemed old enough that it should've had a bunch. Worked out the obvious explanation after I made that post and /. continued to say there 0 comments.

Re:LOL, using the "last resort of the defeated tro

[Alex Belits]

Java and Javascript, when run in a browser, can not read, write or execute arbitrary files locally. Being able to do so, would be a security bug (and some such bugs existed and were fixed).

Java and Javascript can be used to run programs locally under control of the user. This is useless for any kinds of exploits.

Going back to Windows or just going backwards?

[aftac]

Having worked for AT&T all my life, now retired, I am primarily a unix user, and find Linux the natural OS for my home computing. Although I spend much time working from a terminal screen, I find Linux quite capable of competing with Microsoft in the windowed environment, except when it comes to playing games. At AT&T we also had Macs and MS computers, and while the Macs were used for work, the Windows computers were primarily used for non-work purposes. Perhaps the German Foreign office has too much free time for play? I find their reasons questionable for returning to MS, but that's their decision. Personally I wouldn't allow a MS OS to be used in a work environment if I was paying the wages.

Re:LOL, using the "last resort of the defeated tro

[Alex Belits]

Trojan.Jnanabot is a trojan. A user has to confirm running it when it is trying to launch from a browser. OS security has nothing to do with users running programs they have downloaded when their own browser tells them not to do that.

Re:Koobface on Linux HAS COMPLETE ACCESS!

[Alex Belits]

"Once installed", rm -rf $HOME/* script will delete your files, too. This is why you are not supposed to install random crap. Also it's classy for you to post three messages about one stupid trojan.

Re:ANDROID ALLOWS INSTALLS w/out user consent

[Alex Belits]

What the fuck are you talking about? Android is a Google product, Google and carriers, not users, administer its installations.

Right tool for the job?

[derrickr]

I love Linux. I love the ethic, the openness, the dependability, the way it just works - for me. However, I'm a techie. Most desktop users are not techies. They need a business tool to be productive with the minimum amount of effort. Organisations don't want additional training overheads, they want their employees to be productive with an easy to use tool from day 1. Unfortunately, the (many) Linux distros do not provide this, out of the box. I always find I have to tweak settings, mess around with drivers and ferret out non-standard methods to get my machines working just the way I want it. Most of my computers run Linux, and a few also dual boot into Windows. I recently had to 'upgrade' from Vista to Win7 on a couple of my dual boot machines, and felt a bitter pang in my stomach at actually having to pay for the software knowing it would further help fuel Microsoft's profit margin (the shame). However, I did this for a couple of reasons, 1: to keep up with the Joneses (not much to report), and 2: to get missing functionality working (i.e. bluetooth). I also didn't take this decision lightly, and thought about the pros & cons before going ahead, but there are still a few reasons why I still need the (actually, very good) business tools that run on windows. Specifically, I still haven't found *good* alternatives to Visio or Project. Next, I'm still waiting for my beloved Android phone to be able to sync in the same way it can only currently do with Outlook. I'd honestly appreciate anyone pointing me in the right direction to overcome these deficiencies. Thankfully, I can dip in and out of whatever OS, and use the right tool for the task in hand. This is a privilege that we enjoy, but your average user can not (easily). I feel at the end of the day, it's about using the right tool for the job. Linux is great for those with a few more brain cells and are willing to put the time and effort (sometimes) into getting a working desktop that's right for them. Windows is about productivity in the corporate world's desktop arena. An observation: Instead of the huge amount of talented individuals and companies hell bent on creating THE best Linux distro... why not concentrate on making the best Linux based (productivity) tools - maybe more Summer of Code? C'mon guys/girls, show the corporate world why Linux is so good, there's some great apps already out there, why not make them even better, fill in the gaps (i.e. missing apps) and give them no reason for not wanting to choose Linux. We all know Linux is a great server platform, maybe it's about time to make it a great desktop platform too!