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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.
(Yes, I'm trolling, but desktop experience for the average Joe really is a problem, no matter how many excuses we Linux folks make.)
Well, which would you think is harder - switching from an XP desktop to a Linux desktop, or switching from an XP desktop to a Metro desktop? Either way, there's a learning curve, so since switching is going to be a PITA either way, why not save some money?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It's not that someone's moved the cheese. Microsoft have moved the cheese with every version, and it was only mildly annoying. "I'll just go to Add/Remove Programs and... wait, what? Oh right, it's Programs and Features now"
The problem with 8 and 8.1 is that they are deliberately making the cheese less enjoyable. They took a shit on my cheese, and rubbed it in my face.
The full screen menu has a direct impact on short term memory - i.e. the computer equivalent of walking into a room and forgetting why you went there, except with the menu on the regular desktop you probably had cues to remind you what you were about to do. When the entire screen is blocked, it's easier to forget why you brought it up.
This doesn't happen to me when I'm focused on a task, but it does happen a lot if I'm distracted - something that happens constantly during the work day.
Users in an office probably shouldn't be installing any software, if the right software is available to do your job (there is some convergent towards a decent web browser only) then why not switch to Linux.
If special sw is required then install the correct OS.
Do all 8300 employees need individual desktops? This is not a software development company, and those machines still need to be managed, maintained and replaced. Keep big depos of $250 chromebooks where anyone can get one for temporary or permanent use at office or home. Then return when done, as still working or broken. No IT costs, as data is in the cloud.
For heavier use, provide computer labs with a choice of platforms, so if someone really needs to work on the latest version of Office or Photoshop, they can.
And of course, anyone who is expected to work on computer for hours every day, or handle sensitive data, should get a laptop/desktop of their choice with reasonable price constraints. Savings from all the other use cases will more than pay for the luxury.
Europeans seem quite forward thinking when it comes to OSS. I found it interesting that a game I play and run servers for Xonotic has WAY more European based players than North American and they prefer the games because its OSS.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I agree... even 5 or 6 years ago, my father was visiting and asked to use my computer to check some things online... he sat down, ran the browser (Firefox at the time, which looks like the Firefox he has installed on Windows); he had to print out some PDFs he'd created that had his travel documents (hotel reservations and stuff), plugged it in, the window opened, he double clicked - they opened, he printed. Later I asked what he thought about using Linux, he said he didn't realize it wasn't Windows.
Of course, that's a simple example - he didn't do anything complicated, just double-clicked the Firefox icon and everything else was the same user experience, double-clicked some PDFs and the UX was the same... but while there are of course differences, anyone that can use MS Office could probably figure out Open/LibreOffice with little effort for all but pathalogical special cases.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I use Kubuntu and can say the same. Just today I had to install SQL Server Enterprise on Windows 2012 on an AWS platform in a subnet with no internet connection. Guess what isn't included in default 2012? .Net 3.0. Guess what you can't install with a download, even if you can get it to the server? You need the install media, and with AWS you don't have the install media. So now I have to find it and copy it up to the server, all 3G of it for a 20M install because Windows. A 15 minute "it just installs and works" MS product on an MS OS takes literally hours to figure out how to do because of "cloud" and new rules for installing on 2012 (Needed enterprise SQL Server for replication or I could have used an AWS image with SQL prebuilt).
Windows has become so difficult to use now and Kubuntu has become so easy, I'm not really sure why anyone would choose to use Windows anymore. People can make all the comments they want, but reality trumps them.
Well since you asked so nicely.
The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) earlier this month made available the next version of Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution. The distro is used on over 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says.
A few sysadmins with ssh plus puppet or one of dozens of other similar system management tools. They don't even have to be paticularly experienced since this is now a very well travelled road.
There's probably a few clusters that big being being managed by single sysadmins. Just because managing that many MS windows hosts with a bastard child of LDAP requires a lot of time doesn't mean it's going to take a long time with other platforms. With enough of a budget and a few recent graduates I could have rolled something like this out in 2004 let alone 2014 - as could have many others.
Compared to XP users with Office2003 - most definitely in terms of workflow. Nearly a decade on I still get users bitching to me about the ribbon and asking me to find things in the UI for them.
That only matters if you are exchanging editable documents with outsiders. Personally I'm not fond of the idea of outsiders being able to change the terms of contracts or tweak the findings of technical reports to their own advantage.
That "interoperability" problem is overstated anyway. I've been in a mixed environment of *nix + MS for over a decade and the secretarial staff have had very few hassles over the years with documents in both openoffice format and MS formats - although incompatibilities between different versions of MS Word forced an upgrade on the MS side. That's with technical documents containing a lot of graphs, maps and other images. With typical office stuff I'm sure it would be even easier.
The company I work for has a number of workstations close to that of the one represented in TFA, in the 5 digits. Instead of forcing such a radical change down everyone's throat, they went about it step by step, over several years, and it's still ongoing.
They started by gradually replacing several critical programs with web apps or frontends, killing off IE6 with "please use firefox" prompts for good measure. This part was met with only some token resistance by the users, mostly because of a couple of glitches that where promptly fixed. After the first couple of months, general opinion was that the change was very positive, especially because of how cumbersome and hard to use the old apps (some over 10-20 years old) where.
The next phase was replacing Office, and it came with a huge backlash. The chief complaints where not so much about OpenOffice funcionality (along with some "it's *UGLY*!"), but about compatibility with MS generated documents. As of yet, it has been impossible to take MSOffice away from the "higher-ups", as any single minor UI or functionality change is bitched about as if it was a sign of the Apocalypse. Coupled with the long standing tradition of "sending down" 2-slide ppts, it was a huge mess.
It's somewhat better now, as PDF has become the standard for operational documents, and xls or docs are glossed over to make sure nothing's horribly broken.
Some areas (notably, reporting and analysis of KPIs) still rely heavily on excel features. Work is being done on that front, not so much because of the OSS push, but mainly because of the nightmare levels of voodoo in macro and VBA scripting involved. One hears talk of chicken blood and other dark rituals several times a week, which is how frequently something breaks.
There's also a couple of critical windows-specific programs that haven't yet been replaced, but when that's done in another year or so, pretty much any OS is a viable pick. Though definitely not an easy change, it can be done in small steps and with minimal disruption. YMMV, mostly on how dependent you are on MsOffice...
We heard this argument many times before.
The problem with it is that with Windows you are pretty much forced to buy such solution, either from MS or from 3rd parties.
With Linux, it is really an option, a "nice to have".
For example, a small engineering company in Germany. They actually bought it for 12 desktops in their office. (One desktop is actually server.) Not because they had to, but because it basically freed them up from having a full time admin. (They have admin, but he wanted to go into the CAD/design, and the Ubuntu managed solution simply allowed him to.) (Why Ubuntu? They have tried it - it worked for them well and they have stayed with it.)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.