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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.
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.
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.
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.