Spanish Extremadura Moving 40,000 Desktops To Linux

jrepin writes with this quote from a post at the European Commission's JoinUp site: "The administration of Spain's autonomous region of Extremadura is moving to a complete open source desktop, replacing the current proprietary desktop platform, confirms the region's CIO, Teodomiro Cayetano López. The IT department started a project to install the Debian distribution on all 40,000 desktop PCs. 'The project is really advanced and we hope to start the deployment the next spring, finishing it in December.' The project makes it Europe's second largest open source desktop migration, between the French Gendarmerie (90,000 desktops) and the German city of Munich (14,000 desktops)."

Comments

Europe is broke , Linux to the recue

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is a pity that Europe is sliding into socio-economic oblivion, it's a great chance for Linux. Never waste a crisis!

Re:Europe is broke , Linux to the recue

[mcgrew]

Now these 40,000 people will need at least 8 hours of training

FUD FUD FUD!!!

I see it's been over a decade since you tried Linux. KDE is so similar to Windows that anybody who has ever used Windows would have no trouble using KDE. I have folks bring me "broken" PCs all the time that are hopelessly infected with garbage and who have no reinstall disks for Windows. None ever needed any training to use Linux, and most came later and told me how much better they liked it than Windows.

How much retraining did it take to migrate them to Windows 7 from XP? Moving to Linux is less of a change. All of the "hard" parts, the administration, is going to be done by IT staff who presumably are well versed in Unix. Any admin that doesn't know UNIX is, IMO, not competent to be a network admin to begin with.

10% of these peoples [sic] PC will need to be upgraded, Yes yes Linux can run better on older hardware however if they are going to upgrade their OS they might as well upgrade their oldest PC's [sic]

That's just stupid, and I'm not talking about your misuse of apostrophes. That old machine is going to run a hell of a lot faster under Linux, since it has no ever-growing registry nor antivirus to slow it down. If it's powerful enough to run the software it needs, replacing it is a waste of money. They're not going to be playing FPSes or calculating PI to the tem millionth decimal point.

800 euro for a new PC seems fare.

I hope English isn't your first language. And 800 Euro??? WTF??? A good office computer doesn't even cost 800 dollars.

When you are in a depressed economic times is is sometimes it is better to stick with what you got [sic] and don't upgrade and maximize the use of your purchase.

Odd how you didn't take that into account when you stupidly suggested that since they're replacing an expensive OS with a free one they might as well spend more than a new copy of Windows costs on hardware "just because".

(I like Linux I really do)

Considering the earlier part of your comment, that's VERY unlikely. If you'd run Linux in the last five years you'd know migration woudn't take any training whatever. Sorry, but I'm calling you a liar. An illiterate one, too.

Be nice if this actually happened

[jimicus]

OK, so I understand from other posts that Extremadura has historically done a good job of supporting Linux. Whatever. I still can't shake the feeling - particularly given past experience with other big migration projects - that this is a ploy to get a better price from Microsoft.

Re:Be nice if this actually happened

[JasterBobaMereel]

They have no MS licences, they currently run Linux (their own custom Distro) and are migrating to standard Debian

Perhaps it is a Ploy to get a better price from Apple/Oracle etc ..who they also don't use ...?

Re:Extremadura has done a lot for linux

[serviscope_minor]

Money shouldn't be the only incentive, of course (I find the other upsides to a FOSS environment to be much more compelling), but anyone who understands the current state of affairs for software licensing would be reasonably expected to acknowledge that in a discussion about moving away from it.

True to an extent. I find FOSS particularly convenient and in the long term, fully open almost alwys winds up as the pragmatic choice as well. For me as an individual, that is easy to evaluate.

For a large business or organisation, probably the easiest way to get an overall number is by the cost.

It is, of course difficult to do. How do you factor in the short-term cost of lost productivity as users retrain? How much does it cost to have the exchange server down (again--is it that bad or just impossible to find good admins???)? How much will it cost in lost productivity as one has to mess around with DOCX versus ODT in the short term? What about in the long term (if you have 40,000 desktops, you are large enough for people to play by your rules). What about the long term advantage of hiving found that bugs that you find (and perhaps fix) get merged in upstream?

Hard to put an excact figure on.

Of course since it is a government organisation, there are yet more benefits. Even if it costs the same, the money spent on licenses which would otherwise disappear will be more likely spent locally on people to make the syatem work benefiting the local economy.