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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.
These Germans. Cant follow through on anything. Fascism, Nazism, linux ..... No wonder they got their asses whooped by Americans. USA ... USA ... USA ...
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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......
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.
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...