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City of Turin To Switch From Windows To Linux and Save 6M Euros
jrepin writes: The municipality of Turin in Italy hopes to save 6 million Euro over five years by switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux in all of its offices. The move will mean installing the open source operating system on 8,300 PCs, which will generate an immediate saving of roughly €300 per machine (almost €2.5m altogether, made up from the cost of Windows and Office licences) — a sum that will grow over the years as the need for the renewal of proprietary software licences vanishes, and the employees get used to the new machines.
A entire brand new PC capable of running Linux, LibreOffice, web browser, and typical programs that the average office worker or bureaucrat needs.
Hell, you might even be able to buy a smart-TV for $300 that can run the same items.
Microsoft either better cut their prices or give out free XP upgrades, unless they want to be upgraded out of business.
Then you've never worked in an enterprise environment that uses it. You'll have a ton of tech support and maintenance costs with Linux. You not only have all the regular user shit, people who can't figure out how to use their computer, administrative stuff, etc. However I've also observed that a good bit of the stuff in Linux requires a lot of sysadmin work, scripting and such. We do Linux and Windows in our environment and we certainly make Linux work on a large enterprise scale, but our Linux lead spends an awful lot of time messing with puppet, shell scripts, and so on to make it all happen. A lot more than we spend with AD and group policy to make similar things happen in Windows.
Licensing savings are certainly something you can talk about savings for, however you aren't getting out of support and maintenance. That is just part of running an enterprise. The question is what would their costs be, compared to Windows? that is likely to vary per environment.
It is more than E85 a year, as this is only the upfront cost, excluding renewal of licenses.
The amount is small on a per-employee basis, however that E6 mln that the city saves can now be used for other purposes. If there's no benefit of using Windows over Ubuntu, this E6 mln (or more, over time) becomes a waste of money. Explain that to your voters, why you'd throw millions of Euros to some foreign company for some unnecessarily expensive product!
And why all or nothing? Because it makes the work of the IT staff a lot easier. Standardise computers, give them all the same hardware and software, and the bulk of the office can do exactly what they have to do. Maybe put in some non-standard (higher end, different OS, whatever) machines in the mix for the people that really need this - this are probably also the people that need the least support, so not much of an issue there.
OpenLDAP, NFS and home folders on a file server.
Jesus Christ, Microsoft junkies well and truly believe there's no alternatives.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Language support. MS is American and only do English well. Any other language is a total clusterfsck on Windows.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This installs PostgreSQL on kubuntu with all dependencies.
sudo apt-get install postgresql
You can do that from a GUI too. Same thing for mysql. We can argue about PostgreSQL/MySQL vs SQL Server but you would install sqlserver with sudo apt-get install sqlserver if MS made it run on Linux and cared about building a deb package for it. The Windows way of installing software is conceptually broken.
Language support. MS is American and only do English well. Any other language is a total clusterfsck on Windows.
That's kinda impressive - from experience, there aren't all that many Americans, that "do English well" :)
Why would you need to install individual apps on each computer? All enterprise apps use a browser interface these days.