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Munich Reverses Course, May Ditch Linux For Microsoft
alphadogg (971356) writes with news that the transition from Windows to GNU/Linux in Munich may be in danger The German city of Munich, long one of the open-source community's poster children for the institutional adoption of Linux, is close to performing a major about-face and returning to Microsoft products. Munich's deputy mayor, Josef Schmid, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that user complaints had prompted a reconsideration (Google translation to English) of the city's end-user software, which has been progressively converted from Microsoft to a custom Linux distribution — "LiMux" — in a process that dates back to 2003.
Well, yes, of course. When Microsoft throws that much software license cuts and maybe a few junkets for the mucky-mucks in exotic places for âoeconferencesâ, well, this is the way it goes.
Is there anyone who really thought it would go any other way?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
And of course Microsoft now likes to act like they are an open source company that believes in open standards. Maybe they do, but that sure is an annoying stance for them to take.
These Germans. Cant follow through on anything. Fascism, Nazism, linux ..... No wonder they got their asses whooped by Americans. USA ... USA ... USA ...
Well apparently it was the decade of Linux on the Desktop in Munich. Who said it would last anyways?
Yeah, this is absolutely excellent. Definitely something to laugh and rejoice about.
There may be a way to blame this failure on Ballmer.
..wonder if it was cheaper, or indeed more expensive, short-term, for Microsoft?
Their course only became part of city politics. There are people not wanting linux, but the city council still stands behind linux. The news is only that one of the people against linux started a study regarding linux effiency.
Ha ha!
Yep. And then all that money that would be used to pay salaries that would be used on expenses locally, making the local economy work, will be redirected to Bill Gate's pockets.
I remember when Munchen waived Windows, in 2004. This was noticed a lot on Open Source news, as Quilombo Digital and BR-Linux in Brazil.
I did my share of criticize - Star Office was not ready at that time for the task, and a lot of documents were locked down in a proprietary format that would be a nightmare to convert from and back to be shared. As it's nowadays, by the way.
And things are gonna be worse.
When in a few years, when all our documents will be locked in a proprietary cloud (that anyone with the right influence will have access) or stored locally in a format that you must pay to read, remember 2004.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
The actual source article says they are *considering* going back to Microsoft, while the title and summary here imply its a foregone conclusion.
Because no one in history as switched away from a Microsoft dependeny and been happy with the transition.
Not one.
Ever.
The rest of the council disagrees (google translate)with the second mayor.
From arstechnica
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
Limux is a project which, up until 3 days ago, has been widely reported as successful. It's been going on for 10 years for god's sake.
Now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it's a failure - according to one politician.
This is a single politician in the german government trying to derail the project for personal gain.
Most peons growing up and using Microsoft Windows exclusively are too dumb to learn anything new, even if they are paid to do so.
It's like a brothel staffed by people with down syndrome.
The basic office-type products for Linux still kind of suck. I've been using them since the StarOffice/SunOffice days, and now use LibreOffice. They've improved a lot, but they're still flakier than they should be, a decade after initial release. Nobody wants to fix the hard-to-fix, boring bugs which damage usability.
Oracle buying the remnants of Sun didn't help.
As I don't speak or read German, and translation is light on detail, can someone who is familiar with this story highlight what the 'userbase' is complaining about exactly? I'm curious to see if this is an actual inhouse function issue, software not working correctly or troublesome, or it has entirely to do with external facing parties; i.e., websites and 'Internet' related content.
From TFA, some guy named Limix invoked the right to be forgotten. Nothing to see here, move along...
That's correct.
As far as I can tell from that horrible translation the only real complaints from users are about document interoperability problems and a unified messaging platform. Document format problems were going to be a given as MS will NEVER allow their software to default to an open standard (gotta sell dem Office seats); the best you can do is tell everyone who is going to be dealing with your city to send your documents in universal standard. As far a unified messaging platform goes, somebody screwed up if they couldn't get a fleet of smartphones to talk to a standard email server. Integrating with an open caldav/cardav server is tougher, but not impossible. They've already dropped a lot of cash on this transition and if those are the only two real complaints it seems more likely that the politicos are banking on a pile of $$ concessions from MS.
will be zero, once Microsoft products are installed. Sure. And don't forget to put those old LiMux dvds under your pillow for the dvd fairy to exchange for credit at the Windows Store.
I'm sort of kidding, but at the same time Microsoft actively maintains their bloatware and has profit as a motivation to do so.
And "normal people" are used to it because as sheep, they are familiar with the product.
On the other hand, the various open solutions are ok on a screen shot level and for very elementary tasks, but unfortunately when you go to do complicated things, you frequently find the Microsoft product has a feature to handle it and the open solution either doesn't or it is rather messy.
Which is a shame. Firefox gets $$$ (from Google) and can afford to polish up, but the open source office solutions --- while nice --- are not polished to such a level.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
"Year of Linux on the desktop" exist only in your head. The term is a complete fallacy. Linux has had many desktops for over a decade now.
The problem for people like you is that you can't fathom the idea that Linux Pty ltd does not exist and there is no CEO taking to the stage in silk pants announcing it.
Just install the desktop software for yourself already and get on with life or do you require a corporate messiah to tell you when?
Our (S&P Midcap) company switched to Google docs + Google Apps packages successfully. It lets people buy Microsoft products too if they ask for it. But except for a few fancy presentations including lots of animation no one on the engineering side uses Microsoft. Some in accounting use Excel. But almost 90% of the time people stay in google docs. Slowly people have figured out what features not to use in Microsoft to interoperate with Google docs. There is relative peace and clam. Its integration with gmail, and collaborative editing and sharing makes google docs very useful. We no longer have multiple versions mutating through the email attachments. That is the biggest benefit as far as the users are concerned.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Government employees probably weren't able to properly load cat videos in FaceBook while they were supposed to be working which would cause a huge outcry.
Governments should not be using proprietary software; it results in being stuck with whatever company that made it for updates, and you can't see the source code (or even if you could, The People can't) so you have no idea what's hiding in it. Neither schools nor the government should be using proprietary software.
That's not the one example. Lots of unix, mainframe and mini shops transitioned quickly and easily. Lots of business where the owner forced the change transitioned easily. Lots of institutions with a Windows culture looked at the cost and balked early on. Munich was an example of a large public group that put the time and effort in. But it is not the only example.
Well, to be honest Gnome3 didn't help things any. Neither did whatever that mishmash that Ubuntu is up to. xfce isn't really slick enough for corporate work. Etc. KDE4 still isn't as good as KDE3 was, but it's definitely mainly usable, and can look as pretty as you desire.
My real guess is that they forgot what a nightmare it was to deal with MSWind, so now the problems with Linux are looming a lot larger in their minds. Please note, however, that this is just a guess.
Linux Desktop developers have pissed me off mightily in the last few years, but not enough that I'd consider going back to MS, or even back to Apple.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Isn't this where OSS should shine? If users are complaining, take those complaints into consideration and modify the software to fix the problem.
One politician said it failed... all other reports of the project (even very recently) have said it's been a success. The actual article says they are convening a panel of experts to consider whether to go back to Microsoft, so despite the misleading summary here, nothing has been decided.
Seems like they missed the good and bad about Win7/Win 8.
Don't know why they shy from Linux. Jut this morning we heard about how the updates for Win7/8 went haywire.
I just met a 50 something guy who bought Nokia latest phone Lumia 650 or whatever. His phone constantly forgets the google log in, changes the ring tone and randomly shutsdown. Normally some kid or a nephew would have fixed the issue had it been a iPhone or android. There is no kid in his extended circle who knows to troubleshoot a microsoft phone. His complaint is not the problems with the phone. ALL his phones malfunction because he answers yes/no to prompts without fully understanding the questions. But there are always children who would bail him out.
I wonder how long its desktop monopoly is going to provide the cash to try these gimmicks.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft now likes to act like they are an open source company that believes in open standards.
But they DO. It's step one - embrace:
1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish
4) Profit.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well compositing sucks for thin clients - I will admit that. X was efficient at rendering pre-composited windows on the client. With compositing it just streams the image blob since it has no clue what to do with it but just display it AS IS. Maybe thats the problem here? Upgrading to Gnome3/KDE4 just crapped their thin client setup?
As yes they need to really get moving on Wayland. Can redhat please pump some cash. Seemed to work for systems....
They should "upgrade" to Windows 8 and see how much their userbase complains compared to the change to linux.
CAPTCHA: bribers
So maybe it was MS afterall!
Work has recently added Lync to our standard MS environment. It's far from perfect, but we now have integrated everything. I do mean everything. We get IM/VOIP telephony/email/shared calendar/book rooms and meetings/desktop sharing/n-way calls/webcam video conferencing/etc, all in one package.
Is there any open source equivalent that has all these features? Because that is what MS is bringing to the fight.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
What are you talking about?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooxml
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dmahugh/archive/2010/04/06/office-s-support-for-iso-iec-29500-strict.aspx
http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_ics/catalogue_detail_ics.htm?csnumber=61798
Microsoft supports an open document standard, standardized by the ISO, with Office and has for some time, though admittedly not "Strict" support until Office 2013.
Please, stop posting blather about Munich adopting Linux. This drama has been going on for years and years and I'm tired of it. There are stories going back past 2004; "City of Munich Freezes Its Linux Migration", "Munich to Go Ahead with Linux After All", blah blah blah.
Munich uses Linux to pressure Microsoft for better deals, which is just fine, but not interesting to me or most of the rest of us I imagine. Linux is not some struggling underdog begging for attention. So much computing today is Linux, from super computers to $90 smartphones, set tops, huge cloud infrastructures, corporate data centers, weapons systems, etc. — what Munich's government clerks happen to use to print emails or whatever just doesn't matter anymore, if it ever did, and I don't care either way.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Linux will not do means. Germans have a very, very odd sense of humor. Captcha was "erection".
The Microsoft party-line has always been that retraining employees to use Linux is far more expensive than paying those license fees... It was always a ridiculous argument, since Microsoft products make major UI changes between versions that require just as much training.
But here, the employees are trained and working on Linux. So how is it that the fees for all that Microsoft software, PLUS the retraining fees, PLUS the undeniable reports of money savings, are still going to make a switch to Windows somehow worthwhile?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Reading TFA I suspect that the sorts of problems are:
The best way to fix Munich's problems is for others to grab the LiMux distribution and use it. This will:
* Reduce compatability problems. A tipping point will eventually be reached, look how MS IE was king and then it went to less than 80% and suddenly slid as web sites had to take web standards seriously.
* Hardware vendors will have to test against more than just MS Windows and its ecosystems
* Others will contribute software and patches, the cost to Munich will drop.
* Munich IT department will not be seen as maverick since others are also doing it. Eventually they will, hopefully, be lauded as pioneers and visionaries.
Almost every news site has been reporting this story as being an emphatic move back to MS Office/Windows. It's not. It's a couple of politicians throwing their weight around and some "consideration" as to whether to move away from Linux or not. There have been NO changes set in stone, none. And yet Slashdot is stating a reversal of course as a fact rather than a possibility - clickbait at its finest. I'd expect it from Neowin (which has happened, since they're reporting the same story but saying that Munich will definitely be ditching Linux rather that it being a possibility, but I'd expect nothing less from a Microsoft fan site), but not from Slashdot.
This whole issue is despicable. If Munich falls here then no-one will ever touch Linux on the enterprise desktop again. Microsoft have a LOT of interest (and money) in making this happen. Let's face it - going against the grain is never easy and there's a lot of people who want to keep you locked into an ecosystem. It's fucking hard I know, but Munich are one of the few who were looking at this as a long-term project. If they reverse, then this kinda shows that Microsoft are unstoppable and the Linux desktop movement will be dead once and for all.
All the complaints people have about Microsoft are pointless if people aren't prepared to move away from them to alternatives. Either keep accepting being fucking in the ass or plan an exit strategy for goodness sake.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/linux-on-the-desktop-pioneer-munich-now-considering-a-switch-back-to-windows/ is a bit better and actually contains comments from the implementation folks: this is a deputy mayor getting a lot of press.
I think it's pretty clear from the article that politics is behind this reconsideration of LiMux. Is it really such a coincidence that Microsoft is moving their HQ to Munich in 2016?
Reading this Ars Technica article, which reports that the Munich City Council has recorded significant savings (more than 10 million euros) and that the head of their IT department expected a user adjustment period, convinces me even more that it's just money in politics yet again. LiMux only went live in 2013.
Oh, and the Ars article notes that the new Munich mayor, Dieter Reiter, was involved in the deal that precipitated Microsoft's plan to move their German HQ to Munich.
Kind of suck? Last time I tried to use Base, it crashed as soon as I create a database with a single table and a single primary key in it. Not really enterprise ready there.
From:
http://www.heise.de/open/meldu...
It looks like mayor of Munich is the one complaining about Limux, while the entire city council is united and calls it "sachfremde Einzelmeinungen", which translates into 'a single opinion from someone who's talking out of his arse'.
The mountains of madness have many little plateaus of sanity - Terry Pratchett.
Linux bad. Linux not break all the time and make Hulk money for fixing.
Hulk smash Linux. Linux still run. Bad bad Linux. Hulk have bad drug habit to support, need more windows computer to bluescreen from automatic update.
Hulk love Microsoft. Microsoft cause much business. Linux make Hulk angry.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhh
If they're anything like the public servants we have in Ireland then it's got nothing to do with Linux. We're talking about the kind of people that are barely literate and freaked out by the unorthodox or alternative. They probably just need something to blame and it's Linux..
And are they on the full cheap? or did they even bother to get Enterprise support from someone like Redhat?
Lurking variables methinks..
Alas, no. I hate M$ as much as the next geek, but I have to admit there is nothing like that. There are all sorts of open source mail clients and some calendar tools and IM clients, and some will connect to an Exchange server, but sadly, nothing open source can touch MS Outlook + Lync. Individual products have some of the functionality, but nothing has it all, and nothing has it integrated like MS. Doesn't seem like an itch that the open source devs want to scratch.
And being really happy about it? Every time I'm sitting at Windows machine I'm swearing out loud. Just unfriendly, slow and annoying. And please don't shoot: Ubuntu is even worse.
Too much focus on Unity and convergence. Too much talk about smart phones. Not enough hardware support and driver support. Not enough out-of-the-box Windows support. Codecs.. Etc.. I have to spend an hour to have a system that compares to a commerial OS. I don't really blame anyone. If you have money to burn or don't know how to use a computer, you can't really complain.
I can't help but to look at LiMux and question it. It sounds like Munich essentially spun their own distro out of this, which undoubtedly would have escalated operating costs. I don't want to sound high and mighty about a situation I'm not involved in, but had they chosen a typical "top tier" distro with a lot of support from thousands of developers, this would largely be alleviated. Given that LiMux is built on a dated package base, and who knows what else under the hood they've changed, it's understandable they've had some issues. I mean, I can take a Windows base and change a bunch of crap and easily botch that up too. Food for thought either way.
We have a few thousand Linux machines at work. We stick to Ubuntu LTS's. Since this project began a few years ago, it's definitely been a success. I have little doubt that Munich can stay on the Linux track with a high level of success, though I do question some of their decisions along the way that amounted to this. That said, as I mentioned I'm not directly involved in the situation, so it's difficult to judge - yet on the other hand, given our own success with Linux, I just can't help but judge, and let my mind wander in regard to what they did/are doing wrong to even have this thought come on the radar. But hey, just my 2c.
Why don't they just hire hackers to fix whatever bothers them about the software they use? Would be a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for MS products, and it would possibly benefit the community at large. I think one of the biggest problems with free software is that people don't know what to do with it.
It's like the baby elephant that is chained to a stake in the ground when it is young so that it won't wonder off. When it grows up, and becomes a huge fuckin' elephant, the handler mearly needs to chain it to the same dinky stake, and it won't try escaping.
People are so used to being consumers, they forget they have the ability to change and effect their own environment. It's a problem that largely affects free software, but even on a broader scale. You see it everywhere. People buy all kinds of shitty processed food, as if they've forgotten what a vegetable is. People are stuck in cities, in towns, in houses, cubicles, in boxes, and bring all the boxes with them when they do get out of those other boxes. I suppose it's a symptom of our culture to subjugate and dominate our surrounding environment, and we can't all go back to stone age, however, for fucks sake...
Problems like these are not an overnight fix. It's a constantly evolving change. It's adaptive.
And back to the original problem as well, there is this large misconception that Free Software is something that needs to be advertised and sold. It doesn't work like a typical product, because it's not a product. It's a resource. Not only a resource, but a resource that lacks scarcity. It's in a completely different economic model, if it's even inside one to begin with. Economics itself implies scarcity resources, and the ensuing mess that follows. Free software is a free unlimited resource. Yes people need to hear about it, the word needs to be spread, but advertisements aren't about spreading the word. An advertisement uses trickery to play on basal instincts while the higher mind is distracted for a bit. Advertisements can be funny and useful and have their place, but it is not in the nature of free software to offer convenience, or to offer anything of, 'value', at all. A lump of coal has no real value, unless you know what to do with it. Oil is just this black burny burn burn stuff that can catch on fire. Gold is just a shiney metal. However, if you have a use for those resources, they gain value.
With the above stated, it seems like this is a case of the consumer being fooled. The consumer was expecting a product. Instead what they got was freedom from consumerism and an unlimited resource. And instead of trying to find uses for the metaphorical fire they have discovered, they are getting upset about it being hot and burny to the skin.
Yeah us to. And boy does it suck. And it is actually several packages (office sharepoint sharepointserver lync). Its like Microsoft has to reinvent the wheel but shitty every damn time.
You do realize we had all that before with open source software, only it worked better and wasnt annoying right?
As I walk though our office, mostly accountants, over 50. They have spent their professional life in ms office. We almost had a revolt updating office this year. We just finished xp to 7 rollout. You think we changed the language on them.
I can't imagine even considering a chance.
If you can find more than handful of people in the German government who have never been exposed to Windows I will be very surprised.
I teach IT classes for a living right now, and my experience has actually been the opposite.
In our intro courses, we double check that the students know the basics of the Windows GUI (what's on the start menu, control panel, etc.) and then teach them basic administrative tasks. We also do the same for Linux.
Windows is NOT user friendly. Neither is MS Office, etc etc. Pretty much anything Microsoft. How do I know? Because we have plenty of older students -- we're talking age 35-40 -- that used to be mechanics, truck drivers, etc., that are going back to school for a degree and have to take a basic computer class. If they don't know Window's idiosyncracies, which trust me they don't in general, then they are COMPLETELY LOST.
We really take for granted how much we've been indoctrinated as IT professionals into the Microsoft way. I mean, I'm not even talking configuring group policies or IIS or anything -- I mean, just finding things on the start menu, understanding that icons on the desktop have HIDDEN extensions, knowing when to left and right click on menus to get what you want (seems to switch in every program!). Where did the A and B drive go, why is it C? Why is it called C: anyway instead of just "Main Harddrive" or maybe even simpler "Main Files". You click and drag a window to move it out the way and now suddenly you moved to far and it is maximized. Let's install Firefox -- uhoh, pop up telling me "This came from another computer. Do you want to continue?" SHOULD I? IS THAT BAD?.
This stuff absolutely confounds my students. Nothing says anywhere that icon extensions are hidden -- you have to know how to go enable that. Nothing says anywhere "Right click here to change resolution!". You just have to right click everywhere and figure out what menu you get in every place. Stuff like that. List goes on and on.
It takes a while to teach them the basics. They can "use computers" in the sense of get on the internet, but they really have no idea what goes on otherwise, and really Windows gives no direction on what to do, where to do it, what is possible, and only bare minimum of messages (such as the error message -- instead of yes/no, why can't it ask if you want to install or not? Or explain why it might be a bad thing, or why it might be ok?). I mean seriously, they flip out.
Windows is NOT user friendly to a newbie. It just seems that way because we are so used to it and interact with it so much, and since it was the only major player for so long, a lot of its terminology has rubbed off people. Not because its easy, but because we're just exposed to it.
I won't say Linux is perfect, but they seem to get it pretty well, at least as well as Windows. A lot of the students have told me they actually enjoyed Linux more.
Why not phone up Peter Hofmann and ask him ..
.. We visited the city and talked to Peter Hofmann, the man behind the migration" ..
"Munich city council has migrated 15,000 workers from Windows to Linux
They're just pretending they'll switch to get Linus to give them a better price. Nothing to see here.
I am certainly not aware of an open source alternative that works as poorly as Lync. If that is what they are bringing to the fight, then it is going to be a short one indeed. Jitsi.org is way, way, like a million percent better. Why? It actually works.
The new mayor once brokered the deal to get Microsoft to move its German headquarters (and the tax revenue that comes with it) into Munich proper instead of some satellite city and now that he's been elected, he and his friends constantly spread rumors about problems with the completed Linux migration (never any lists of actual concrete examples) and they want to look into whether they should move back to MS products.
I don't have video for Lync but I have everything else on my work computer with Ubuntu 14.04. I can get video on Lync if I buy a Wync license but my WIndows colegues hate Lync and we don't use it for video call. Also.... shitty Lync server checks for user agent like websites used to in the '90 and not all SIP clients know how to lie tot the server that they are Lync and not Pidgin, Empathy etc.
Likely some MSFT graft in the picture. MSFT is relocating regional headquarters and Munich is a front runner. Lots of potential tax revenue, both directly from MSFT and indirectly from the employees and spin off economic activity.
Selection of Munich would undoubtedly be contingent on the city migrating back. I dont believe any outright bribing was involved or required. All Microsoft had to do was have a bean counting meeting with the high ups...if you go back to MSFT the extra money spent on migration, licensing, hardware and administative burden of the windows platform is more than offset over time by the economic benefits of a new major employer in the city.
And, well, how could you expect MSFT to do such a favour if you continued to spurn them at city hall?
Give it a rest. You keep peddling this "misleading summary" bullshit around. "May", motherfucker, "may." You know what that word means? By the way, the only people saying it's a success are the people who have their ass on the line for backing the stupid decision to use Limux in the first place. It's all about saving face.
Also.... shitty Lync server checks for user agent like websites used to in the '90 and not all SIP clients know how to lie tot the server that they are Lync and not Pidgin, Empathy etc.
There still appears to be plenty of webservers trying to interpret user agent strings. Which, ironically, can cause issues with the latest versions of MSIE.
When has there ever been a "panel of experts" assembled by a politician
which was not stacked with "experts" guaranteed to deliver a predetermined
result? They're the consultants of the public service world.
Hell, one of the famous Microsoft Halloween Documents even discusses this
exact scenario: stack the speakers in a public panel with ones known to
favor your side and to the public the discussion and conclusion looks "fair
and balanced".
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Most employees probably have a computer at home. MS dominance ensures it will be running Windows. Nobody non-tech wants to change their mindset every day they go to work. Surprised that Win8 didn't make Linux seem easy, though.
Sorry, but the pool of "end users" are a seething, bottomless morass of rampant, drooling idiocy.
Switching to another platform isn't going to magically "fix" things. You're still going to have a bunch of nincompoops who're unable to comprehend your systems and who will complain regardless of what you put in place. Simply because bitching at you is easier and more fun than actually trying to learn something.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...it's this:
"The deputy mayor said that the government will convene an expert panel to consider whether to move back to Microsoft products. The report also notes that Microsoft is planning to move its German HQ from nearby Unterschleissheim to Munich as of 2016."
Microsoft has 2700 employees in Germany and I'm pretty sure quite a few of them work at the HQ.
This is about people who don't like using computers. Many non-technical people see computers as a hindrance to performing their job. Complaints go to what is simplistic to grasp. This is usually the OS. When Munich switch over to Microsoft many of the same users will then complain about Microsoft.
This isn't about complaints, it is about Microsoft lobbying Munich to make those complaints an issue.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
since Microsoft products make major UI changes between versions that require just as much training.
While they do make very annoying and nonsense changes, Office is not something you need training about except in macros and Excel formulas which remain unchanged.
Training aside, most new computers come with OEM Windows and you can get office by adding a little $$. While the total sum of money look shocking, it's actually a very tiny part of the entire hardwares+softwares in workspace.
One person, with no such decision authority, and who co-incidentally brokered Microsoft's move to Munich wants this to happen.
I wonder why.
One wonders whether the real issue is lack of MS office, rather than lack of Windows?
I live in Munich, and our new mayor, in more ways than one, is an incompetent fool. I rather doubt that he will manage to return the city to Microsoft's poisoned embrace.
nothing open source can touch MS Outlook + Lync. Individual products have some of the functionality, but nothing has it all, and nothing has it integrated like MS.
It's fucking terrible! No wonder there's no OSS software which can "touch" it. Seriously, I'm convinced Lync is the reason MS bought Skype.
I don't think I've had one conversation where Lync hasn't decided to randomly screw up the microphone and speaker settings of one participant. The meetings would invariably start with a 5-10 minute prelude as people tried to unpick the mess Lync had got itself into where for example (my computer *loved* doing this) it would use the hedset headphones for audio out but the computer microphone (not headset) for audio in giving terrible but sort-of-audible call quality. Oh and forsome things you have to restart the call because for some things it won't let you change the settings while its ongoing.
Oh and the volume settings---WHAT THE FUCK? I never thought I'd say this but Lync and Windows made me long for pulse-fucking-audio. Seriously. PulseAudio. I actually missed that little fucker ofter going the Windows route for a bit. How the fuck can pulseaudio ever be the better choice?
And the desktop sharing is worse than skype and laggy and generally crap.
The Lync conversations are integrated with Outlook suuuuure, except ^F no longer works and Find ahs gone from the menu! What gives? Sure it's possible to convince it to search but what the fuck?
And yes it likes shitting emoticons all over any code you paste in lync. Sure you can disable it... for a while. And then it decides that yes actually you DO want emoticons in your code. *Poof*
Oh and the Lync client for 2010 doesn't work on many Android phones, and the 2012 client isn't compatible with 2010 servers.
I love it how lync file transfers don't have a "resume" feature like what has been in http since nearly forever. Yes you've got 95% of the nice big download, butyour network farted so enjoy waiting another 3 hours to redownload evewrything again!
OWA if fucking terrible.
OUTLOOK is fucking terrible. It has completely utterly broken quoting. This encourages people to fuck around with fonts and colours because by default it's more or less fucking impossible to tell who has replied to which bits of an email.
And switching to "plain text" emails is the most shockingly unreliable thing I think I've ever seen. It is amazingly terrible. Quite astonishingly so.
Seriously who gives a fuck if its integrated? You've just integrated a turd with a piss. Big-fucking-woop.
In my next post I'll tell you how I REALY feel.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
AMD A10/ATi Drivers/Kingston SSD. No issues here that I can detect. Video performance while playing Xonotic is questinable but it was hot as hell for the last two weeks so might be the CPU/GPU heating up.
My Window 8 experience. Went into NCIX Langley BC to get the A10. All their laptops had WIn 8. I moved the mouse and some tiles screen showed up. I was like WTF? Yup that was my WIn 8 expereince.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I remember when I saw the post that they were switching over and I knew this day would come. I don't like windoze very much myself, I like apple but not a fanboy...
But a regular computer user, read one that does not visit this site, is not going to know how to do many things on Linux. Linux still has a very long way to go in terms of standardizing the experience to make it more apple somewhat windows like.
This in terms of functionality, I won't list them since I haven't used a Linux desktop in a while but plently of Linux server terminal.
Anyway incoherent enough of a post I really don't care to fix so I will end it here
I have done such a setup with Zimbra, Asterisk and generic opensource SIP clients.
The only functionality I am aware of that I have missing in my setup is Outlook Journals. Does anyone even use that?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The one, who is responsible for this move ist the mayor of munich!
The same person who was involved in the relocation of the MS headquater into the city of munich!
Idiots in charge. The Mayor is complaining that it took weeks to get email on his smartphone. That certainly is not a Linux problem. And if their groupware is still based on Exchange that needs some bizar mobile setup, it's quite a stupid idea to switch to Linux in the first place, if you aren't ready to switch your groupware aswell.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Because email and "one note" shouldn't be part of an office suite.
LibreOffice also doesn't include a Quake 2 port.
Just because Microsoft has decided to bundle those things into it's "office" branded product doesn't mean that it's appropriate to do so.
There are plenty of alternatives to outlook - I converted my company of about 200 typical end-users from outlook to thunderbird with a calendar sharing plugin, and had only minimal fuss and only for the first few weeks. As for "one note" - chalk that up in the "apps that shouldnt exist" category.
You actually WANT that?
And just yesterday I had a nice long discussion with some internal users about how they wish they were LESS tethered to their desk ....
The comment shuffling on here is disgusting. First of all - why even bother with the smaller comment previews?
Clearly this is a big slap in the face to a company on the brink of a downward spiral - pumping as many tricks into their stock price as they can.
Absolutely they've been influencing this from the start. First of all, there is no "Munich". There are people, holding random budget strings and decisions, who have their own self-interests. The people who can affect the decisions on this _CAN FIT IN A TELEPHONE BOOTH_.
You understand that?
Follow the money. Who is involved in the decisions - who thought "let's leak this early so people aren't surprised by it" - or who is making this all up?
Who is involved? What are the motives? Did MSFT stick some people into their team to keep things going bad?
First of all they want jobs in Munich, Microsoft is moving offices there tadaaa
2nd of all.. the claims of the main dude have been refuted or are outright ridiculous: "I had to wait weeks for my mobile phone!"
AT LEAST make a goddamn reference to openoffice / libreoffice. I read an update to do, lots of numbers - WHERE ARE THE USABLE BUILDS?
First build of libreoffice "Don't expect this to work, we're just putting things together". I've never seen the suite in such a poor state the last 24 months.
Clean it up, give people something they can RELIABLY use.
Why doesn't big business (or government) post bounties for specific bug/feature requests? Perhaps the hard-to-fix, boring jobs would get done, and fast. In fact, it wouldn't be hard to imagine a system whereby users could 'suggestion box' feature request/bug squashes and the biggest complaints/needs would get 'funded.'
-g-
If Linux can get rid of XWindows and build seomething modern that pleases both the mac and windows users we have a winner
My employer recently did the same as yours. I am wondering - do you have chat history in Lync?
An instant messenger without chat history is way further away from perfect than just far. It always has been, not just in 2014.
Now they hope to get back to XP. And they'll face Win8. Sure, the support center will be "free" now.
Ars Technica may so far have the best coverage, as they also mention that the same mayor who now says "users are unhappy" without supplying any evidence for that statement (a) has claimed responsibility for bringing Microsoft to Munich, (b) calls himself a "Microsoft Fan", and (c) has been under investigation for corruption charges before.
That same mayor also has no majority for his personal pet peeve in the city council, which is actually responsible, and has already said his opinion was unsubstantiated and technically uninformed.
Now the mayor is pushing for "a commission to investigate".
Likely that commission may come up with the conclusion that 500 MB of RAM is a bit small even for a Linux based PC. How well did Windows 8 run on that, again?
I know I'm only slightly going against the grain here.. But for god's sake please stop trying to make Linux on the average desktop work. So much wasted effort. It's never going to happen.
The newspaper reports that about 80% of all Munich city workers use LiMux at the office, and that, according to Schmid, many of those workers are “suffering.”
So after well over ten years they've now just discovered that users are suffering? Microsoft are moving their headquarters to Munich? Pull the other one.
Like most competing software products, groupware feature sets tends to play leapfrog - at some point Netscape was better, then IE was better, then Opera, then IE again, then Firefox, etc. ad infinitum. We've seen this before in many software niches.
Lync was built to fight Jabber. Right now it is arguably more featureful (it's still very buggy, which is why I said "arguably" - do features count when they aren't reliable?) than any competitor, and I'm sure the bugs will be fixed in future service packs and releases.
But soon enough there will be something compatible with Lync, and something else better than Lync, and the leapfrog game will continue. It's how the industry works, whenever the market's reasonably well regulated for both freedom and fairness.
But the difference will be that Lync will always be a closed-source product, so you'll be on the upgrade treadmill forever. No third-party patches or self-maintenance for you!
Use what works for you. But remember that not everybody needs or wants a closed-source product that rolls a dozen services into one failure point... some of us want integration at an open API level instead of masses of intricately interlinked closed source daemons that masquerade as monolithic products. Use what works for you. Lync would be a cost/benefit boondoggle for me in the long run.
There are a couple ways to set it up, but one method is with Exchange integration. In our setup, there is a folder in Outlook called Conversation History. All chat logs and call history end up in there. Lync will also show you some of the information from the Lync client, but older history can be searched there. You can also set up archiving to go to a central database. You can also continue past conversations from within Lync should you wish to.
As far as I know there is not a single solution to cover everything mentioned in open source. That being said, although Microsoft offers integrated solutions, they are still separate products. Your named features span Lync and Exchange. For the open source side, I would point you to Asterisk and OpenFire to handle the Lync side and you could probably use Open-Xchange to handle email/calendar (though I am unfamiliar with Open-Xchange). Integration between the products would still be limited though. One of the best distributions I have played with is called Elastix and combines almost all the features you are looking for. Not sure about the calendar aspect though.
Yea it does, dealing with this right now at work where all staff went from Office 2K3 to 2K7 to 2K13 in the last 2 years. They all hate the changes but a handful of managers that are in a building elsewhere make these decisions without asking for the opinions of the people who actually use them. Hooray for bureaucracy.
We just switched from Groupwise to Outlook/Exchange. Completely agree. We lost a bunch of functionality and gained a bunch of shitty buggy problems.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAAHAH.
i am glad someone there came to their senses though... as much as I use linux desktop, I would _still_ never wish it on non technical people
Yep. And then all that money .... will be redirected to Bill Gate's pockets.
Who in turn gave the vast bulk of his money to end disease, educate children, feed the world, etc.
But much of that money was obtained by cheating and crooked business practices (eg exploiting monopoly, "cutting off air supplies", corrupting Standards committees etc). He should first give back the proportion to those he cheated, let them decide if they want it to go to charity (of their choice, not Gates') and Gates can then do what he likes with the rest. Even then, I would start to admire him only if he gave so much away that he was left no richer than the average educated US guy.
He is not a saint. The fact is, it would be a physical impossiblity to spend it all on himself and enjoy it. Eg if he spent it all on new cars, he would not have time to get out of one and into the next fast enough even if he did nothing else for the rest of his life (do the maths). So if I had that money I would also give it to charities (but not Gates' charities) for lack of what else to do with the stuff, and I don't even consider myself a giving person.
Check out hipchat, https://www.hipchat.com/ , windows/mac/linux clients and all work very well.
> Linux, plain and simple, is not user friendly.
Ten years ago, Linux was not as user friendly as Windows. Today, it is very much the other way around.
Updates in Linux are *much* easier than Windows. No waiting to shut down the PC, now waiting to get started. It's all in the background, far more friendly.
Gnome2 is far more like classic windows than that horrifying Windows 8.x crap.
LibreOffice is more like classic ms-office than that ribbon crap that ms uses.
Linux installs go far faster, and more easily, than Windows. And you can re-install whenever you like.
Linux boots faster, and is far less susceptible to malware.
I used Lync for precisely one thing, and that was to redirect my handset to my personal cell. I never touched it again. Instead I plugged in Pidgin which has relatively ok IM support for Lync and never touched it again.
Desktop sharing is built into the OS, and frankly I never used. I try to use hangouts whenever I get the chance, but sometimes I'm forced to use gotomeeting with some customers when they use it. No customer has ever asked for RDP / Lync based demos, and frankly I'm not even sure if its possible externally (well RDP is, but its an even worse demoing tool).
Meetings/N-way calling/video conferences / etc.. all rely on you converting your entire PBX infrastructure over to the MS way of things as well. So yeah, if you're FULLY VESTED in MS technologies, then absolutely you're going to get lift.
Bye!
It sounds like the complaint is because of file incompatibilities. They should identify the compatibility problems first and fix those, rather than scrap the entire GNU/Linux operating system. The problem is that Microsoft Office formats are incompatible with true open standards and there are formatting issues going between office applications like MS Office and LibreOffice, OpenOffice, etc.
After 10 years Linux is the devil-you-know -- and familiarity breeding contempt, it's easy to see why M$ would be considered. If M$ were put in place it would be the black sheep in 10 years too. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Nope, that's jus tnot true.
There were lots of complaints. Only dureing the elections for a new mayor the problem surfaced a few months ago.
Now on of the citycouncils calls for a discourse about the disapointing results after 10 years of migration hassle.
Some of the city council members still want limux/linux but not all.
Let's wait and see.
"Microsoft announced last year that it was moving its German headquarters to Munich. This move is planned to take place in 2016. While Reiter was involved in the deal that precipitated the move and describes himself as a "Microsoft fan," he says the criticism of LiMux is unrelated." http://arstechnica.com/busines... One polititian making convenient claims?... microsoft intervention?... hard to tell from where this is coming. (This looks like nokia's disaster)
but sadly, nothing open source can touch MS Outlook + Lync
Have you used Lotus F*ing Notes? At work here, we use Lotus F*ing Notes and it has the best F*ing UI in the whole world. Really, it is a beautiful, elegant, and easy to use. It is so simple that I can use it with my eyes closed, ears shut and a bullet in my cerebrum.
Well sure -- I do not know but would assert() that MS gave them a major
sales effort. Full court press perhaps with promises and discounts.
Linux is not free. It does take work and is not monolithic.
The biggest gap is one that customers of Munich must bridge
in terms of document tools, multimedia tools, codecs and
even Adobe Flash tools and development.
Having said this it is clear from the most recent blue screen
of death Tuesday updates that any critical business could find
themselves in a monster tangle with a botched patch, an aggressive
zero day attack and any number of other risks. All of which would
be worse if there was only one OS in the house.
Some might recall the old IBM executive directive that overhead
slide presentations be prepared ONLY with a typewriter and only
in black and white. The flood of artistic efforts and costs to contrive
fancier more marketing rich eye catching song and dance presentations
and production company tail wagging the dog expense was diverting
and distracting from the ability to communicate content.
Decades ago at Silicon Graphics there was a move over MAC program
to focus the company and eat your own cooking in the decision making
levels of the company. If an SGI executive could not communicate with
other parts of SGI with ONLY SGI tools customers would have the same
problem and no mater how worthy the hardware could not get the job done.
The important lesson for the world and especially the US to understand
is monoculture is a big risk as any that have looked into the Dutch Elm
disease that killed more trees than Xerox (perhaps an exaggeration).
The attack surface for computers and digital infrastructure and data should
not be in the hands of one company or one QA, or one release test group.
There are a couple of ways to divide and identify the issues and needs. /. and we could make some positive /.
There are a lot of smart people on
comments --- but hey this is
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
"The one example of transitioning to desktop Linux. And it's failed."
That's not the one example. Lots of unix, mainframe and mini shops transitioned quickly and easily.
Did you miss the word "desktop" in there?
No. Reread what I wrote. I'm talking desktops users.
Don't get me wrong. I have been an advocate for *NIX for a long time, but I think that OS X bridges the gap between toolkit users and novices better than any Linux, FOSS or not. I know that people hate Apple for using a closed platform that can deal with FOSS sources, but the critical upside is the level of integration and reliability that is gained. Still, I would hate to see a monopoly given to Apple, especially if its systems end up replacing Windows. The point is Linux has not learned an important lesson from Apple, that control of the hardware and a reliable install of packages in more important to most people than complexity and choice.
I had an exchange on Ubuntu Forums recently that illustrates the problem. Now, I know the command line and have done *NIX administration, so none of what I am going to say is out of reach for me to solve, but the gap between me and the average user is large and it could be reduced by some carefully thought out integration which is not happening in Linux distros. There is still too much free-for-all and where that shows is when something is done incorrectly, getting help is not as easy as it seems, and any mission critical system not managed by a competent Linux system admin is vulnerable.
The issue I was discussing on the Ubuntu Forums is the single filesystem install. The revisions of Ubuntu roll out every six months or so and despite the Long Term Support, a system is vulnerable to package and package database corruption within 18 months or 2 years time, requiring a re-install. Ubuntu's upgrade path only extends reliabilly to the next rev. What this means is that users need to get a full reliable backup of their own files from /home for each reinstall. Ubuntu does not ship so that it creates a separate partition for /home that could survive through a re-install. Many *NIX systems allow either for a default separate partition for root and /home, and can reinstal without threatening users' files. I have proposed that either the filesystem concept is too advanced for users coming from Windows, or that the install should give an option to divide free space on the disk between two or three partitions, for root, /home, and swap. I have also asked if there is some way to reconsider the issue of filesystems and partitions in a new way, either an emphesis on virtualization or sandboxing an install within an existing filesystem or freespace. To not have this worked out for users at Install is a reason why Linux does not replace alternatives. Why not either allow for a subdir for any version of linux in an NTFS filesystem or adopt some standard to do the same for an ext4 or ZFS filesystem made up from the freespace. Any Linux you want to try installs in a sub-dir and grub knows how to find subdirs and look for a kernel in them?
There is really no excuse for the complexity of this and not developing a solution that hides this from the kinds of people who don't want to know or care. Dealing with disk partitions is something that ought to vanish with the MBR. I would love to be able to install and boot from 10 Linux distros without having to worry about slicing my disk. If disks are routinely 500 gb or 1-3 tb, why do I still have to worry about 20 GB slices? This should all go away, along with having to worry is /home is preserved during a re-install.
Must be a different Lotus Notes than the one I had to use back in the 90s. That one had a an actively user-hostile interface. It actually looked for ways to break your heart and spirit and make you cry. It was forged from pure evil. Shat from the very buttocks of Satan. Well, anyhow, it wasn't very good.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I've actually run business Linux desktops for years, and I had endless problems.
* Random GNOME profile corruption. Lots of it. XFCE was no better, just different corruption issues;
* OpenOffice bugs and crashes;
* OpenOffice crashing, starting "recovery" but failing to find the tempfile it's trying to recover, and endlessly trying to recover that file every time the user launches it from then on;
* Mail clients (Evolution or Thunderbird) crashing but leaving dead processes around that had to be manually killed before they'd relaunch;
* Painfully difficult and buggy central configuration and management of things like desktop profiles, mail setup, etc;
* Handling of archives in email attachments, those horrible broken outlook TNEF files, etc, sucked;
* Printing was painful and buggy despite my being quite careful to get only native PostScript printers. Various apps would generate broken PS in all sorts of exciting ways, or CUPS would set job options that printers would choke on, basic printer features were unusable, etc etc;
* Random app devs who decided to call umask(0700) and override the system umask before creating files, because OBVIOUSLY they know better than the user and sysadmin what the file/dir creation perms should be;
* Numerous apps that'd suppress the setgid bit when creating new subdirectories in shared working trees, leading to more permissions issues;
* I was nervous about even minor upgrades to fix bugs, because for every bug fixed there'd usually be three new exiting bugs;
* For the Windows desktops (for a few users who needed accounting packages etc) using Samba for roaming profiles, *tons* of profile corruption issues, endless printing problems, incredibly poor performance, and difficulties interoperating with the Linux desktops
These were "basic users" who needed little more than word processing and occasional use of other simple document exchange, PDF viewing, printing (oh god, so much printing), email and simple attachment handling, and image viewing/sorting/saving. They weren't doing anything complicated.
Windows 7, Active Directory, and Group Policy were an incredible breath of fresh air when we bit the bullet and switched over after acquiring a Win2k8 R2 server for unrelated reasons. Sure, they have plenty of problems - but wow, did it work better overall. Things like volume shadow copy snapshots of server-side roaming profiles were a huge improvement over periodic bacula snapshots of bits of user homedir state.
The main problems we had with Windows were with roaming profiles - and were caused by obvious bugs in OpenOffice, Firefox (moved to Chrome which was better), etc, especially keeping piles of temp state in %APPDATA% not %LOCALAPPDATA% where it should be, modifying SQLite databases directly on remote storage, etc. These apps don't get tested on "business network" type setups, with roaming profiles and redirection, and they don't follow MS's recommendations on file layout etc. It shows.
The only serious issue I had with the Windows deployment was that %APPDATA% redirection for roaming profiles is horribly broken with caching enabled; the sync tool just throws a spak, gives up, and waits for the user to resolve conflicts. It's quite capable of creating conflicts even if there's never any connectivity problem, and the results are messy. Once I disabled offline access and caching for %APPDATA% (a significant performance hit, and it meant that if the server was down even briefly all clients would just freeze) the sync issues went away, but it wasn't a great compromise.
I wasted a huge amount of time babysitting the Linux desktops. I reported so many bugs, wrote so many patches - even though back then my C programming was ... er ... limited, so I could only tackle some issues. It was whack-a-mole, and it was no fun at all.
I use Linux on my laptop for work, and I'd hate to use anything else. Though with the KDE4/GNOME3 thing I'm getting less fond of it. For basic end users, though? Nope. No way, never again.
A Google search shows many versions of this news with some actually saying that the decision to switch has already been made. Not so, according to another report at TechRepublic: "Ditching Linux for Windows? The truth isn't that simple, says Munich" http://www.techrepublic.com/ar... What is certain for the moment is that a study will be made internally by the Munich city council, the new mayor and deputy mayor are in favour of Windows (and even MS fans) and reportedly instrumental in bringing the Microsoft German head office to Munich. The final decision will be made by the elected members of the council. From the many comments on this piece of news at different sites, we can gather that Munich likely mishandled the process e.g. Limux (their version) is still at 10.04 which is really old and should have already been upgraded to 12.04 (used, for example, by Google and the French Police). Munich migrated some 14,000 workstations to Linux while in complete contrast the French police have 37,000 workstations running their version called Gendbuntu (Gendarmerie + Ubuntu) and their plans are that by the end of this summer to have it running on 72,000 workstations. http://ostatic.com/blog/french... The French police also claim they have saved 40% on the total cost of operation using Linux. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/co...
So good there is even a fan site dedicated to it: http://ihatelotusnotes.com/
This is harder to make work than many think. I work for a local government organisation in UK, smaller than Munich, and we went part way, adopting Star Office rather than MS Office from 2005. Small document-formatting problems led to widespread exemptions from the policy: many users went back to MS Office, wiping out any cost savings. The initiative was eventually dropped. I had mixed feelings about this: good to try an alternative to Microsoft but in practice I go to work to get my job done, not participate in a software values war. Alain Williams above tells us what would be good to see but I donÃ(TM)t feel itÃ(TM)s realistic: by now most people are not expecting next year to be the year of widespread Linux on the desktop.
Linux on the desktop can work. My desktop has been running linux for years. But so many areas are missing components that really are key to making Linux on the desktop useable. All of these basically come down to developers expecting an upper power user level, and not just a user level.
Settings, without editing text files. If we ever want users to be able to really use linux, we need to get to where we have a standard utility for this.
Here are two examples, both involving projects I love and contribute to:
First example: SANE. (Scanner Access Now Easy)
Most of the time, SANE just works. This is true 90% of the time.
About 10% of the time, you need to edit various config files to make it work.
What we should have is a settings utility, complete with pluggable logic, to make the changes with that is easy enough for the average user to make work..
For example, the utility would have the option to "Add New Scanner". When clicked, it have options for local and network. When local is selected, it should probe for known scanners, and add the resulting scanner to the config file. If no scanner is found, or if what is found doesn't match what is in its database, it should then allow the user to select the driver (backend) to use, activate the backend in the /etc/sane.d/dll.conf file, run the sane-find-scanner utility and add the relevant options to a menu for the user to select (including an "its not here" option), and then add the scanner to the back end file. Brother, Samsung and others could have plugins to automatically download and install the sane drivers distribute.
When "network" is selected, it should scan the LAN for open saned servers, and present the scanners it finds to the user, check the ldap directory for published scanners (if on ldap), or give the user the option of entering (or browsing the network) for the scanner. Once found, the utility should enter the proper values in the net.conf backend.
The above is a process grandma could be talked through. That means that the average office worker could be talked through it.
Here is the ubuntu help page on SANE. It's good (I wrote most of it), but grandma, and the average office worker, has no real chance of trouble shooting linux scanning with it. It's not that it needs better docs, its that it needs end user configuration tools. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/sane
Second example: Networking with LDAP, NFS, CUPS
Setting up a small office domain with Windows Server is trivial. It should be just as trivial in Linux. Right now, its not trivial for even a power user to make linux domain and join computers to it. At some point, us linux folks have to understand that we need a default way to do things that works for a small office, and then lots of options for custom shops.
The process of setting up the server should be trivial. The setup should ask what the network architecture is, single NIC connected to a LAN behind a firewall, dual NIC, public and private or custom (more complex). The setup utility should then ask the domain name you are using (assuming a .local or .lan, perhaps with some logic to see if the server is already set up with a DNS resolvable domain name), and then assume reasonable defaults for everything else to assume a small office (larger offices will have the people to make the needed mods). This includes opening firewall ports, etc.
All other steps should be automated. You should not have to sudo ldapmodify anything. You should not have to add any shema to get basic functionality needed for a small office.
Printers, scanners and server shares should be set up next, plus any pluggable server options (mail, calendar, repos, programs to set up, etc). Again, graphical utilities.
Once the server is setup, you should get a graphical utility to save a setup file to make client config easier. This should also be saved to a predetermined RO share.
Next you should get a graphic
The one politician was reported to be seen in a bar with a M$ handing over a lady of the night with wads of cash and coke.
But, Germany is practised at doing just that... Does anyone recall the shaming of men, by the females of Munich, who demonstrated how easy it was, to install, and run, Linux? 11 years ago, and some virus lover is now fomenting rebellion? Typical.
Can you Gnome 3 strikes again? Sure you can.
If there was anything that would convince people not to use linux it's Gnome 3 and the morons who use it that insists on turning the human race into Gnome 3 using teletubbies.....
Did Alphadog get credits or bitcoin from M$ft?