Munich Has Saved €4M So Far After Switch To Linux

New submitter Mojo66 writes "Mayor Ude reported today that the city of Munich has saved €4 million so far (Google translation of German original) by switching its IT infrastructure from Windows NT and Office to Linux and OpenOffice. At the same time, the number of trouble tickets decreased from 70 to 46 per month. Savings were €2.8M from software licensing and €1.2M from hardware because demands are lower for Linux compared to Windows 7."

Comments

Not Surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is better, faster, and more stable. Just the savings on support calls alone would be enormous.

Re:Not Surprised

[ozmanjusri]

On the various computers where I've installed most "trendy" modern distros (ubuntu, etc), they actually run slower under Linux than Windows.

In what way?

Reduced CPU speed? Slower network access? How does your OS reduce the speed of your hardware? Do you have any benchmarks showing comparative speed?

(The incredible sluggishness of nautilus is one of the things that made me reinstall windows on one of my development machines).

You're a developer and you changed your entire OS because you couldn't change the settings to speed up a file manager? (hint: Nautilus shows thumbnails and previews audio). Please tell/warn us which projects you're working on!

Re:Not Surprised

[cjav]

First, I couldn't tell for sure as for more than 10 years Linux and recently some OSX have been all I've used. I do however have to troubleshoot Windows PCs for friends and family, none run as smooth as my Linux machines. Why?, the only reason I can come of, these aren't new installs. Please make the same comparison 6 months after using your Windows machine. Maybe you are fine doing clean reinstalls every 6 months, I'm not.

Re:Not Surprised

[rve]

Wouldn't help that much. When I worked for the provincial government IT, literally 90% of calls were people forgetting their passwords.

Seriously, that's your fault, with your password policies (passwords expire each month or two, have to be so and so long, contain the usualy mix of upper & lower case, numbers, special characters, and the icing on the cake: may not have 3 or more characters in common with a password ever used previously), the only way to remember your passwords is to write them down, which is officiallly a firing offense by the way. At some point, users, even the techies, are just not going to bother trying to come up with a new password that will pass the validation and can still be remembered, they'll simply call you and ask you to reset the password every time it expires. That's what I did.

Re:Not Surprised

[dudpixel]

If you care about performance, why are you running nouveau?

Yes its the default, but use a recent video card in windows and see how you like the default.

Just because its linux doesn't mean you dont have to install the right drivers from the manufacturer sometimes.

Re:Not Surprised

[macshit]

The policy at the time was 6 characters, with at least 1 capital and at least 1 number, and couldn't be the same as the last one.

What do you want? One character passwords?

Of course not, but also not useless-yet-annoying rules like the above...

Require a capital letter? 95% will make it the first one. Require a digit? 95% will just append "0". Increase in difficulty for someone trying to guess passwords? Zero.

Re:Does that include cost of training and transiti

[iroll]

Training? Ahahahaha, ohohohoho, eehehehehee.

Purely from an office drone's perspective (all software proselytizing aside), training is the bogeyman. The vendors bring it out to scare the customer, but it doesn't exist. It "costs" eleventy billion dollars! Nobody will know how to do anything if you don't buy training!

But big offices make big changes all the time, and they don't *really* do squat for training. They might gather the group around a conference table and click through some slides, and tell everybody that Joe has used the program before and they should ask him if they're having trouble.

Hooray, you wasted a day watching powerpoint and you got a photocopied certificate that you get to scrawl your own name on!

How many offices have gone from something, to Lotus, to Exchange, to Google... etc.? And it's not just email infrastructure. Your billing system as a consultant might change every few years; your code management system as a programmer might change. Your document control system might change. The way your network space is apportioned, the way you print; any number of things can change depending on the way the wind blows in management.

And then, you top it off with planned obsolescence: remember going from Office 97 to Office XP? And then to the new craziness of Office 2010? A little old lady secretary wouldn't be any more confused by moving to Open Office... and she's not getting any training when MS Office 2014 comes out and scraps everything she knows for touch-screen inspired insanity!

Even universities, where you would expect old systems to soldier on for far too long, seem to do that kind of thing in less than 10 year intervals. And the employees who you would expect to get some "training" (office staff, geezer professors) don't--they complain, they suffer, and then they figure it out ;-)

Re:Glad the saved 4 million euros

[Anonymous Coward]

> But how much have they lost?

- Lock-in to a single-source supplier
- Worries about not being able to read their own archived documents saved in legacy formats (OpenOffice supports over 100 office file formats)
- All trace of malware
- The need for a license compliance officer
- Any threat of being audited, or having a disgruntled employee dob them in to the BSA
- The upgrade treadmill
- Long delays during Windows updates