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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.
Is there anyone who really thought it would go any other way?
Yes. Linux fans have been absolutely sure the Munich transition would complete successfully. You can't pretend it was always stacked against it now, just because it didn't work out.
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?
Yea, MS money made the users hate the experience. Just be honest, Linux kills it in certain situations, and the desktop for a regular office worker isn't it.
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.
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
Sure, just sweep under the rug all the complaints made by so many of the people who actually tried to use the system.
The actual source article says they are *considering* going back to Microsoft, while the title and summary here imply its a foregone conclusion.
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.
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.
From TFA, some guy named Limix invoked the right to be forgotten. Nothing to see here, move along...
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.
Not all Linux fans. I'm a Linux fan. I recognize that it's not suitable for non-techie users. There is literally no focus on end user development - that's what I like about it!
It's sysadmin / developer oriented and I hope that never changes.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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
In fairness, there are at least two ways that could happen:
1) MS bribes people to complain. Unlikely, but not impossible.
2) MS bribes the relevant officials to *say* there have been overwhelming complaints. I mean, there are inevitably going to be complaints; that happens any time *anything* changes. The question is at what point they become important enough to sway the overall decision.
With that said, I suspect you're right.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I did. I've been following this since it started. They seemed to have a fairly high degree of commitment and had made tons of progress. I'm shocked to see them throwing in the towel since after a decade I'd assume they no longer have a Windows culture. We know that institutions that never developed a Windows culture were able to switch to Linux easily.
So yeah put me down for surprised.
Maybe its a queue for Linux developers to pull their heads out of their asses and start collaborating a little better for a easier user experience. Don't get me wrong, I use both OSs for different things, each on its own merits. But despite what the FOSS crowd seems to want to believe, most users aren't as smart (and masochistic), they don't want to use the command line, or have to wade through clunky confusing dialogs to do simple things. They don't care about customizing their window manager, or their boot process, they just want to get their work done and gtfo. Despite its aging and buggy code base Windows is just simply easier to use for the non tech savvy crowd, and until Linux devs stop trying to over engineer everything and give it funky names that make no sense, then linux will never be successful on at scale on the desktop. Its really not that complicated, and nerd raging on slashdot doesn't help the case (not speaking to you, but the guy a few threads up).
It is pretty good in places that never developed a Windows culture. There are certain advantages for a regular office worker that come for the Unix way of doing things. I'm surprised that after a decade they hadn't switched paradigms and people weren't enjoying the Unix advantages.
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.
This is a city that loves open source. Do you really, honestly believe hundreds if not thousands of people got bribed and not a single one turned it down and reported the attempt to the press? That's a pretty serious and frightening case of paranoia you've got there.
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.
MS money made the users hate the experience.
Well, I agree MS Money was horrible and I much preferred Quicken, but I'm not sure how that has anything to do with a desktop in the office...
(Removing tongue from cheek now.. )
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
I don't find that annoying, so much as unbelievable. What surprises me is that they can still find anyone to believe them after lying so often.
OTOH, I can hope that it's true, and that they actually HAVE reformed. I'm just going to let the evidence accumulate for awhile before I believe it. Possibly in a decade....
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
You seriously need to run Ubuntu. I think there are some distributions that have made some serious strides in user interfaces and Ubuntu is one of them.
What I would say is that Linux desktops are significantly different from Windows. The look and feel and the GUI standards are worlds apart. What needs to happen is Linux desktops and programs all need to ascribe to the windows look and feel as closely as they can without infringing on patents. X-Windows is just so different and we are bound by it's customs so this is a difficult sale.
That's not to say all is lost. Personally, I think Windows 8 (and presumably 9) and it's move towards "metro" interface might just give Linux a big push. Especially if we can leverage the Android look and feel, we might capture some of the desktop world and get users who are going to have to switch to "metro" anyway learning something else instead. It's a long shot, I know.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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!
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
Certain industries have expectations of what's normal. For law firms, it's Windows and MS Office.
Getting people to accept a Mac environment is tough enough. Some workers pass on the job because they know the NEXT job will be looking for Windows and MS Office.
That's the workers. After you walk off the job, that firm has to find a rare specimen who will be able to administer your fringeness. I took over a Mac shop once and converted it to what the workforce, and admins expect when we went to hire people.
You didn't do anyone any favors except yourself (if you actually did any of that stuff).
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Reading comprehension fail?
First, I said there were ways it *could* happen, not that I thought either had occurred. So no, I don't "really, honestly" believe that...
Second, bribes don't need to be anything explicit - in fact, they rarely are, simply because it's so likely that people will report it - there just needs to be some kind of incentive. It doesn't need to be anything traceable to Microsoft; the people taking the hypothetical incentive never need have known from whence it came.
Third, there are always tons of people upset about any given change; with the years this project has run, MS has had plenty of time to find them and encourage them to complain. No need to bribe people to file false reports; just convince those who wouldn't otherwise have complained to do so (and maybe those who would have sent praise not to do so).
Fourth, I'm a security consultant. It is literally my job to be paranoid about potential attack vectors. That doesn't mean I think they'll happen - in fact, another part of my job is rating the risk of each threat coming to pass - but it's there.
Fifth, anybody who *doesn't* see that as the obvious answer to how MS having a bunch of money at stake could lead to this is (IMO) dangerously naïve. It's not complicated; it just requires asking yourself how you could generate complaints if you had lots of money and no morals.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
There's a line for that? Man I just thought we were supposed to do it on cue...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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?
I love linux as much as anyone on here. But I'm not about to pretend the sky ain't blue just to support my argument. Linux, plain and simple, is not user friendly. The only notable exception is Android. If they tried to just push their own Nix flavor at government types, I'm not surprised that they got complaints. I've never seen a Linux GUI environment that wasn't a tacked on joke. You're still required to go to the command line to do anything meaningful. Control panels that fail at even the most basic tasks, and on and on. If Linux is to ever take off as a desktop environment, someone will need to do a complete overhaul like Google did with Android.
Now queue all the people ranting about how the public is just dumb and don't know how to use Linux. To you I say, you're right... the public is dumb and don't know how to use linux. Yet those same people can use Windows. See the problem? You can have an IQ of a slice of Bacon and still get your mail open in Windows... that's how easy it has to be. Make Linux that easy and you'll have something.
That's because "IT" there is incompetent.
Setting printers up where I work, under Windows, is a breeze. You go to a web page, click on your location in the world, drill down to your country, city, building, click on the printer you which to have, click install, watch it install, print away. Point'n'grunt.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
Honestly, from reading the translated article, I get the feeling that a lot of the issues were because other agencies outside of Munich had difficulty interacting with them and this translated into Munich user unhappiness.
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You had me at Bacon...
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Here's the missing piece of the puzzle:
MS has been in talks with the city administration about moving their HQ from Unterschleissheim to Munich, which would result in a rather nice chunk of extra municipal tax income.
Ubuntu 14.04 user here. Every time I login I am greeted with a stack of "System problem detected" warnings. Both Firefox and Thunderbird are extremely unstable. Firefox crashes a few times a week. Thunderbird does so twice a week (about). Now and then the whole system hangs when doing a rsync to an external disk (hangs, not busy).
Oh, I am sure Linux apologists blame me, my hardware, etc. But I've been running 10.04 for years on the same hardware, except that I replaced the 320G HDD for a 1TB one and switched to AHCI. Maybe that's the problem?
One issue I see often is this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu... It gives a very unfinished/unstable feel to 14.04
Perl Programmer for hire
It is pretty good in places that never developed a Windows culture..
I think this poster has identified the real issue. I doubt that Microsoft bribed people to complain, though I'm sure they provided subtle encouragement. I'm sure they also worked at a high executive level, not with outright bribes, but in the way that sort of thing is always done, the old FUD method.
But really, it comes down to people who are used to Windows wanting Windows, and they'll do that (mostly) even in the face of a mess like Windows 8. "What's this weird Linux thing they're making me use? I never had to use that anywhere else! Other organizations aren't converting, why are we?" And so on.
I don't buy that Windows is inherently more "office ready" than Linux for the vast majority of office users, all else being equal. The thing is, all else isn't equal. I do buy the idea that Windows is heavily entrenched and has a huge "incumbent" advantage, one that is going to persist for a long, long time, whether we like that idea or not.
but figured that the city would prefer to save money
If you spend more than 2 days total over the course of an employees time at a company to convert them from MS Windows and Office to Linux you've lost money, even on the lowest paid employee you have.
Contrary to what you think, the cost of Windows and Office licenses are nothing as far as cost of doing business.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
They seemed to have a fairly high degree of commitment and had made tons of progress.
There is a feature of OSS that is often touted and that is that you get to enjoy the progress of software development "for free". That is when someone solves a problem you get to benefit. As a developer I see this all the time and it's incredibly true. As a developer I love working with Open SDKs since I can make small changes and our powers combined results in improved results.
The problem is with someone like Munich it's Munich's IT department trying to create software on Linux which solves the problems a municipality faces vs. THE REST OF THE WORLD. Sure some die hard linux gurus will volunteer their time to improve OpenOffice with only slight gain to themselves. But would I ever bother contributing to OpenOffice? No. I imagine that over the last decade what Munich has found is that a competitive marketplace of multiple software developers has created a pretty nice rich ecosystem of software that's improving and updating while their linux stack has been largely dependent on their internal team to push forward.
All of our in-house development we try to open source--we would love another company to improve our internal tools. We've even gotten one of our internal tools pushed into an off the shelf product in exchange for free licenses. But even studios far larger than us have started giving up on in-house development because it's just not economical to pay in-house developers to try and replicate consumer software.
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.
At my company (125 users) a while ago we moved to OpenOffice to save money. Users were not happy and started to call it "BrokenOffice". Only people who needed to exchange documents with outside clients were allowed to use MS-Office, and this created a lot of tension between the haves and have-nots. Bootleg versions started to appear, etc.
The company has since switched to the Office.com deal (annual $100/user for 5 floating licenses), so each employee can install MS-Office on various computers in their family in addition to their workstation without requiring assistance from IT (plus they get more OneDrive space). With the recent version it's possible to "share" the licenses, so employees can authorize their kids who are in college and let them install the applications themselves.
Employees see that as a perk, and helpdesk is less busy with "BrokenOffice" problems (real or perceived), so everyone is happy. It's more than pennies but it's not that expensive either.
lucm, indeed.
I use RHEL at work and Windows 7 at home.
Linux is a joy for software development and network administration, and is 97 percent as good for web browsing (Windows gets the edge b/c sites other than Slashdot don't test Linux clients). For rich documents, though, MS Office is far superior to Open Office. Microsoft spends a small fortune in getting the UX right and it shows. FOSS developers are like, well why are you whining if it's free, contribute some localizations and bugfixes if you find problems. But nobody wants to wade through a million lines of 15-year old source code that isn't the least bit cutting edge or technically interesting.
It was a political decision that was reversed by politicians. The original decision wasn't some shining beacon of light and the reversal wasn't the triumph of the Dark Lord. The original decision was made to cater to the audience of the party in power, and no doubt the reversal was the same.
And to be honest, there's the typical "user" experience. They think Microsoft is big, they must know what they're doing, they can find a "Learn Word in 21 Hours" book, they can find thousands of people with Microsoft certificates they can hire, so why not use Microsoft? Issues like have open standards means nothing to the person typing up memos or creating a database; Microsoft *is* the standard and all those other standards bodies are annoying buzzing sounds. If twenty years from now all the records are lost because no one can decode .docx files properly then it's not their problem but the problem of the lazy IT guys.
Bucking the trend is hard, when the herd of gazelles turns and runs one way then all the gazelles follow, unless you're a wildebeest.
There's no need for bribery or incentives to switch back to Microsoft, all that is needed is for the bureaucracy to forget the original reasons for open standards and transparency. Those were thought to be important back when Microsoft was under the spotlight in Europe for monopoly issues, but that spotlight has been off for a long time.
http://www.binarytides.com/ubu...
Seriously? Google is your friend.
"On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle." -Linus Torvalds
Oddly enough, I've had unrecoverable filesystem errors under Linux and OS X and Windows over the past year. On top of that, I've had random system errors on the above platforms and application crashes with proprietary and FLOSS software. So I guess none of the above are suitable for use?
It's not incredibly HOME-user or POWER-user friendly...
But locked-down CORPORATE-user friendly? HELL YEAH.
Your IT department sets-up a computer with just 5 big bright icons on the desktop. These are the only applications you use for your job. You can't do anything else but launch these applications. It just keeps working like that 99.999% of the time. When something doesn't work, you call IT about it, move yourself to another computer and resume your work there. There is no way for any computer to possibly be more user-friendly than that.
Linux does it, Windows doesn't.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yep. I used Linux almost exclusively for many years at university. Back when I had the time and desire to fix things when they broke. Eventually I was worn down by the endless cycle of update break fix that you get in Linux. When you can't even safely update to the next version the system is broken.
About once a year I do a project on Linux or install it somewhere to see how it has progressed. In the important areas, it hasn't at all.
We did a project just recently using Intel NUCs running Ubuntu and some of our software to be connected to TVs. Here's the linux specific problems we encountered
1. Installing Qt dev environment is a huge pain. The default packages in both 14.04 and 13.10 are broken for multimedia playback in Qt and need files to be manually moved to work. Using a Qt build from qt-project.org also doesn't work with multimedia.
2. On Kubuntu we accidentally changed the desktop resolution to one the TV wouldn't accept. There was no confirm. X totally broken, no obvious way to fix it. Reinstalled.
3. On Kubuntu, we had to delay our delivery at the last moment because we discovered that when using a TV as a monitor and the TV was turned off, our application window disappeared (still running, just invisible). After many hours of debugging and no info, we ditched Ubuntu.
4. Had to install Ubuntu several times and fiddle with Bios settings for it to work (some kind boot issue with UEFI).
5. No standard mounting point for DVDs caused problems
etc etc
In the end it would have been far cheaper to put Windows on there and just have it work. Hours and hours wasted during development on silly bugs that should have never happened. And this is on quality hardware from a vendor that supports Linux (Intel).
I've seen non windows office environments. They have an answer to you ". "What's this weird Linux thing they're making me use? I never had to use that anywhere else! Other organizations aren't converting, why are we?" They do things that Windows just doesn't do. For example a lot of them actually use network transparency and share windows between workers. I can't message "Ron take a look at this" and send him an image of my screen. Then he says come over and I move the applications screen to his system. Or (especially prior to things like VMWare View) they loved to pass whole environments between physical computers so they don't have fixed desks. The same way that employees frequently login and logout of their phone in remote offices they can now do that with their computer so they don't even need a laptop. Something like building their applications on Docker and thus they get the advantage would be the modern equivalent where Linux far surpasses Windows where they can run just about any piece of software on any system without having to worry at all about the underlying Linux. Or a lot of the gurus who in the windows world would be your Excel or Word gurus pick up a little scripting and love to automate tasks and so you have shell scripts or Perl scripts flying around the office. There is for example much more blurring of lines between servers, and network shares and desktops because server solutions are also free.
If they are still doing things the Windows way then Linux is just a bad Windows. That's the key. The office culture changes and people don't do things the Windows way anymore. When new workers come in the work culture is so different they immediately see it is nothing like their old job.
Well, that's what you get for running Ubuntu in a dev environment. It's a distribution that's meant to be installed from Ubuntu's repositories, only updated from those same repositories, and never really used for any third party software. I've got a 75+ year old guy using it, because he kept getting infected when he was running Windows. Hasn't had any problems with it at all, other than when a stick of memory went bad, and it started crashing all the time.
For stable servers (and even workstations) I've been running Debian since at least as far back as 1997. There were some issues like you describe in the first 5 years or so, but honestly, the only thing I've run across in the last 5 years was when I tried to do a database server upgrade, and uninstalled the old postgreSQL version 7 before migrating the data to the new version 8 server. That was a relatively easy fix, though, and it only happened because I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. Other than that, every Debian machine I maintain (and there are A LOT of them...) just runs perfectly.
I have a customer who installed an Ubuntu server because "it has a GUI and it'll be easy for me to use". I stuck with it for a while because they liked it, solving problem after problem that cropped up because we kept needing to add third party software to it, which broke on literally EVERY SINGLE kernel upgrade.
Finally, I figured out the amount of time I'd spent fixing shit that wouldn't have broken if we'd been using Debian, and how long it would take me to back up, blow away, install Debian, and restore data. Turned out the customer would have been 4 figures richer if I hadn't had to fix all the Ubuntu screwups over a couple of years. Recommended migrating to Debian, they agreed, and that machine hasn't had a problem since. That was 6 months ago.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
My remark stated "the vast majority of office users." Those people don't do AutoCad, don't need to "photoshop" drawings, don't need the obscure superpower features in MS Office, etc. Linux tools will do 99%. If you're in the 1%, you might need Windows or a Mac or whatever. Maybe. I still think most of it comes down to liking to use what you're familiar with, and Windows is the giant incumbent in this game.
There's far too much broken desktop stuff for Linux to be usable on the desktop en-masse. Playing a video file from the network. Simple, right? OS X will play directly from share. Windows will play directly from share. Linux will copy it (all 4 GB or whatever) before it will play.
Errr...WTF are you talking about? Linux plays directly from network shares just fine. I do it all the time. In fact, I've been doing it for years. I can't remember the last time I had to wait for it to copy the entire file before it would start playing. (Although I do remember that happening, but it was YEARS ago. Maybe even a decade.)
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
If you're looking for a more traditional desktop combined with the Ubuntu ecosystem, Linux Mint might be worth checking out.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Indeed - people are complaining simply because it's different to what they're used to. Mac users don't like windows. If you switch back you'll have the same problem to a certain extent.
I'd be very interested to see how the number of complaints about the open-source software stacks up against a huge MS-imposed change like the office ribbon. I'd expect the numbers to be similar. People will complain if you change the default colour or font of something - of course they're going to complain when you switch the software they're using.
This does scream fishy to me. We all know that Ballmer flew out to Munich to try to talk them out of switching in the first place. It would be naieve to think that MS has just given up on Munich - there's too much at stake - if it goes well for Munich, other cities will follow, and then open-source could spread into the corporate sector, and that would be BAD.
A lack of integrated email/contacts/calendar? That's not a complaint - try Thunderbird with the Lightning add-on. If that doesn't do what you need, look for another option - there are probably hundreds. Maybe you want something web-based? There are a bunch of those.
Another option would be to take e.g the cost of one license for a mid-sized MS exchange server and split it into bounties for the features you want - you'd probably have your features in a couple of days. $10k would buy A LOT of open-source development. And the rest of the world gets your features too, for free! Compared with the cost of Windows licenses it's small potatoes, and it's a community service. It's win-win for everybody. Except MS.
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?
I like how you didn't actually refute a single one of my points. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to be subjected to insults on my intelligence from people who can't even make a counter-point. The closest you came was failing to understand what an implicit bribe is. If the crash dialog message - the one that pops up when the program segfaults, the equivalent of Windows' "do you want to send an error report to Microsoft?" box - includes a button to submit feedback about this whole project (which just ate your file and wasted your time), most people will ignore it but some fraction will take the chance to vent some spleen. That kind of thing is easy to get added to a project if you have a little money to funnel to some coder, but will inevitably produce far more complaints than accolades. There's opportunities all over something like this for money to subtly make life better for those who complain.
But, if you want to take the concept of "bribes" more literally, remember my third point above. There are, statistically, many times as many people who are annoyed at this software as there are complaints filed; given the number of people involved in this project that's inevitable. People don't like change, they don't like needing to learn things, they don't like it when the new thing introduces even minor annoyances that the old thing lacked (and conveniently forget that the old thing had worse annoyances that the new one doesn't), and there's always the minority who honestly like even an inferior product. If Microsoft managed to identify even 10% of those people and give them the least bit of incentive to file a complaint, most of them would not turn it down. "Oh wow, sure, I'd love tickets to the football [soccer] game! ... Ha, you want to hear my thoughts on the software? Be ready for an earful! ... You know, I'd never thought about it before, but maybe if I complain somebody *would* notice..." Hell, just offer entry in a drawing for some fairly-cheap prize if people submit feedback and then only advertise the drawing amongst the disaffected...
I will readily grant that I'm surprised that so many people thought gothzilla's post was insightful, considering that it literally contains a fundamental flaw of reading comprehension: the inability to separate the hypothetical scenario from the statement of fact. I never implied, or even "ask[ed] questions" suggesting, that this had actually happened. I pointed out that it was *possible*. In fact, I explicitly pointed out that it was implausible. Did you think I was trying some weird reverse psychology BS?
As for the "naïve" part, it's either that or simply ignorant of history. Microsoft, and various other moneyed interests on the other side of the libre-vs.-proprietary debate (Oracle, SCO-via-Microsoft, Sony, etc.), have a well-established history of throwing money are successful open-source initiatives and sometimes successfully making them go away. In what world is "Microsoft has money, Microsoft wants people to complain about the project, therefore Microsoft finds a way to buy complaints" not a completely obvious possibility to anybody who isn't the "oh, they would never do that!" category of naivete?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
But Schmidt's comments have already been derided (translated from the German) as appeasements to Microsoft, specifically since the company is already doing a migration of its own: It's moving its German headquarters to Munich, and expects to be operational there by Summer 2016.
http://www.fierceenterprisecom...
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.
there are inevitably going to be complaints; that happens any time *anything* changes
Obligatory
I didn't see any actual complaint yet, nor any meaningful description of the main perceived defects. Did you? I'm not saying they don't exist, I just highlght that the actual motives are not stated and thus the explanation is totally insufficient.
On the other hand ... it's pretty damn too easy to produce a document in ms word that renders like crap on open/libre office, I see it happening all the time. The problem is never the content, but dumb and irrelevant formatting practices. Comparing MS to a global infection, it is hard to heal by acting on a single point. TFA actually hints at this: "Wenn die ganze Welt mit einem Standardprogramm arbeitet, dann ist es wichtig, dass wir auf dem gleichen System sind". Sad, but they might have a point there.
The other alleged flaw, that someone had to wait weeks to get mail delivered on his smartphone because some obscure special mail server had to be set up on linux is obviously absolute bullshit. This, if at all true, speaks of incompence, not of platform suitability. So, this whole issue really stinks.
Why is it always Autocad anyway?
I am an engineer and I've not actually met one who uses autocad. The ones I know who regularly design 3D stuff seem to be rather fond of Solidworks. The richer and older ones prefer Pro/E. Autocad seems popular fot 2D stuff, but for 3D parametric cad it doesn't cut it as far as I can tell.
Anyway, I don't use any of them. I use Cadsoft Eagle which woks like a charm under Linux.
But yeah, familiarity is a HUGE thing.
The things is, this was from 2003. I wonder how many changes the upgrades to the unfamiliar Windows 8 and the Office ribbon would have garnered?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There is a third (unproven, but likely) option:
3) Bribe the officials to starve to project to dead. Wait until valid complaints from the users come in.
Clues for this (but of course this does not prove anything):
version 4 available from August 2011 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, although using KDE Desktop 3.5 and version 4.1 available from August 2012 is also based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
(Source: wikipedia page about LiMux). Especially the desktop environment is really old, first published around 2002 if I remember correctly.
Switch Thunderbird to off-line mode before you start configuring a new account. The **HORRIBLE** auto-configuration will not show up and you can just configure your account.
Bug trackers are not the right tool to deal with usability problems. Just imagine how many usability bugs it would need, to get from a Nokia 6070 to the first iPhone.
I am not sure if your are a troll or just stupid or ignorant. Libre and Open are WAY ahead of MS Word on this feature. It is far more stable and easier to use.
If people have trouble readng the docs with Word, tell them to download Libre - its free. It is Word that is an inconsistent, unstable (from version to version) POS, and it is DOCX that is poorly defined. If you want to share, you should be using internationally standard format for your documents, which works even with Word, not some unstable proprietry format. If you use a proprietry format as a government, you probably ought to be investigated for corruption (yes I know stupidity is the most likely explanantion).
I give you "calc" is wierd and lacking in the graphing area, but Writer is WAY better than Word and has been since version 4 got stable.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
It's not about the culture, it's about e.g. a spreadsheet which works.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Just wrong. For what most people do, LibreOffice is just fine.
That may or may not be true, but it most definitely isn't true at all for power users, and especially so for power users of Excel. These users may not be representable of a typical user, but they are the ones actually running the business and they have enormous power. Suggesting that LibreOffice is "just fine" for these people is ignorant, and also the reason Linux won't make it on the desktop. If you don't even try to understand your users, what you offer isn't going to be good enough.
It's not 1% of the top users, but probably 5%-15%. And if what you offer isn't good enough for the 5%-15% top users, what you offer isn't usable in the entire organization. And if it isn't usable in the entire organization, it isn't usable at all. MS has known this all along. The FOSS movement still hasn't udnerstood it. Sad, really.
I think if I had to use Open/LibreOffice day in day out that I'd be pretty pissed off with it too. It's fine for simple things, but start using it for complex documents, spreadsheets or presentations and lots of little annoyances become apparent - resizing that doesn't snap to things, text that wobbles around as you type, dialogs which aren't prefilled with useful defaults, clutter in the menus and toolbars, inscrutable icons and menu items, lack of outline mode (navigator doesn't count), lack of useful shapes etc.
This project would benefit enormously from devoting an entire major cycle to usability where the goal is to simplify the UI, make workflows more task centric and give the software a makeover.
Just building a better alternative wouldn't do it. You'd have to be able to read Excel files and their attendant VBA. Therein lies the rub. A better alternative would have a different (I use term "semantics" for want of a better term) semantics. Some concepts wouldn't fit easily, and if they did, MS would sue you out of existence for copying their alleged software IP. It wouldn't even have to be a good lawsuit, just one intended to keep you tied up in the courts for several years until financial pressures ground you down.
There's no competing against individual MS pieces, like it or not, MS ties its malware together and organizations come to rely on the tying together just as much as the individual pieces. In order for FOSS to compete, it would have perform similar integration. And that's a problem for FOSS because there isn't one organization that can make the rules and determine the interconnections. Open standards will solve this doesn't address the problem. You can have open standards for everything and you still have don't very little to address HOW to tie the bits and bobs of software apps together.
Think of it this way, MS is a many-armed snake. You cannot cut off an arm here and an arm there, the arms defend each other. And your fight will also be with you own management after they've been wined and dined in MS's padded torture chamber. MS offers stability and known abilities, expensively yes, but they offer them. FOSS offers a smorgasbord of capabilities which may or may not work together and no guarantee the organizations behind them will even continue to care for them. MS has the same problem of orphaned software and capabilities but they have a PR department designed to obfuscate that so the CEO never has to confront it. FOSS has some hairy guy who sounds like a communist.
I don't buy that Windows is inherently more "office ready" than Linux for the vast majority of office users, all else being equal. The thing is, all else isn't equal. I do buy the idea that Windows is heavily entrenched and has a huge "incumbent" advantage, one that is going to persist for a long, long time, whether we like that idea or not.
Seems to be the main point all the Linux fundamentalists can't understand. Incumbency has huge benefits regardless of any other argument.
I've converted those Excel power users. BTW also Word Power users can be tricky. First off one can just leave them on Windows and just treat it as an isolated non-intergrated application. So for example the accounting department uses Excel in a VM or Wine (lags about 3 years and some addons fail but core program works) or they run Linux with their office integrations in a VM on their windows boxes. That's the easy way.
If you want to make them go fully open source generally it requires a complete shift in their workflow which ultimately is beneficial. Your typical Excel poweruser is someone who is benefiting greatly from the flexibility and short time to answer of Excel while having become a poweruser to compensate for the lack of dimensionality and scalability of Excel. Introducing them to BI and Business modeling tools which are better in these areas allows the to offload their more complicated Excel functions. This transition makes them into non-powerusers and then you can switch the spreadsheet on them. They actually become more effective as they are now using tools which can handle what they really want to do with Excel. But..., and this is not a small thing, they training costs of bringing on new people are large. Accountants don't walk in the door with those skills. Which is fine for government (and Germany for that matter) with long employee retention.
Most companies have IT accounting. If you can get those people on board and they have the skills, then via. training it can migrate down to the Excel Powerusers and from there to the Excel heavy users.
Again this comes down to understanding Windows is a culture not just software and to change the software you really need to change the culture. Obviously this keeps getting easier as LibreOffice Calc gets more feature rich. It certainly would be easier today than it was a decade ago.
Where I've seen network transparency I'm talking about environments where the employees have high school or less. Thinks like repair or warehouse. I'm talking to someone we decide on what to do, then I push the screen to the terminal next to the relevant piece of equipment. Then maybe I duplicate it in the back to look for a part that's non-standard...
Betty from accounting is college or more. I've never seen it used in an accounting department. But I have seen it used above that level for things like planning meetings.
I don't. In my own company we have a Mac culture. OTOH I have seen those companies and that was the point in question.
Actually in my experience it is the opposite. The cost of in house development is considerably higher than just paying for commercial. The benefit is much higher productivity.
Me thinks you've never seen a non-windows environment being broadly used.
In fact... Here you go...
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wi...
So it scales to your 10,000 easily and readily and has around the world, Open Office has a lot of traction outside of the USA.
Some people always complain... the answer to those people is STFU unless they have a real compelling reason as in "you can not do X in Y and we need to do X to make/save/create money"
I dont like it or this is different is not a real complaint, but just whining.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The same Power Users are the ones that complain every time Office is upgraded because it broke their carefully made system of spreadsheets/documents etc ...
They are using Office to it's limits already and any change will annoy them at minimum, they are almost certainly using office as a substitute for a custom built package and do not represent the vast majority of users ..
LibreOffice is no substitute for these people because a) it is not MSOffice (they use all the features and rely on the quirks) and b) they use Office beyond it's real purpose and so any substitute will not do
These are the same kind of people who cannot use any substitutions for any package (even earlier versions of the same package) it is nothing to do with the inherent usefulness to the majority of the alternative packages
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
No, I don't think so. Where I'm not going to argue Quicken has improved, I don't think Money was better. Microsoft didn't either.
I seem to recall when Microsoft tried to buy Quicken but got it's hand slapped in the cookie jar by the DOJ, fearing it would be a monopoly. Microsoft even tried to GIVE MS Money away to a competitor and the regulators said "nope, not even then". Microsoft shuttered the Money operation shortly after that.
So where your preference might have been for MS Money, the market was going to Quicken.
Why Microsoft didn't open source Money at that point is a mystery to me though...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Solidworks offer a free (as in beer) 2D CAD package with a very similar look and feel to Autocad (and fully dwg compatible), and they even have a linux version. So you can have "autocad" on linux......