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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.
Well, the MS lock-in may just be starting to fray enough to make a difference.
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.
(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.
Because it is a stupid idea that died in the early 90's because it is bad UI design. For some reason MS thought it was time to try again.
It is mind-boggling how desperate the MS shill brigade is becoming.
but I have to say: "Try A Different Distro"
http://www.debian.org/CD
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
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)
€6,000,000/8,300 = €723 Euro per machine. Subtract 300, up-front (OS/Office) = €85 per year savings, after the licenses.
Let's say the average city employee makes €40,000/year (I have no idea what they make, but assuming one employee per workstation, those workers are about 1/4 of the cities annual budget of €1,266,000,000)
So, the half a day's wage saved (€85) per year isn't a big deal either way - either they are happy with the open source systems and they make out, or they go back to proprietary software and spend a couple of days wages, if needed.
And why does it need to be all or nothing? People should use what makes them most productive... within the support capabilities of the IT staff. Out of 8300 workstations I wouldn't be surprised if a large share of them could get by with basically running a web browser, but for those who need Windows or MacOS to get their work done, so be it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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*
Replacement memory, batteries, HDD's for the 20% that approach EOL from overuse around this time, plus the labour to clean out all the fans. If they didn't factor this in, half their fleet's going to be dead within 3 years. This can still be a venture of savings, just not what they expect.
Ubuntu user here... unless I'm installing something really odd (which, if you work for some municipality you probably shouldn't be doing on your work computer), software installation is just as easy - sometimes easier - than using Windows. The days of downloading something that won't install because of missing dependencies, so you download them and they won't install because of missing dependencies.... etc., etc., is long gone with pretty much every distribution.
Don't know how this will turn out, of course, they are all pretty much test cases, and I think some of them make these announcements just to get MS to make them really great deals, and I'm not saying it will definitely work... but when you whittle things down to what a company computer should have installed in it - office software, email clients, browsers, etc., then there's no fundamental reason why Linux shouldn't work (except that it's not MS... which is what most arguments seem to boil down to).
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Not much more than it would when Windows was redesigned in 7 or 8.
That's the problem with constantly changing the UI on windows releases. We saw it when going from 98/ME/2000 to XP and again from XP to 7 and again with 8. There will be a support influx with each change so I'm not sure it is of any concern.
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.
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?
Great point.
Anti-Linux folks get to count every possible cost of change, while the costs of anything that changes in the Windows world don't count, because, er ... look, a squirrel!
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.
Maybe 6-10 hours of staff time. What I mean is you have to factor what your people cost you. If someone costs $50/hour when you count in salary + ERE (meaning payroll tax, benefits, insurance and all other expenses) then 6 hours of their time costs $300. So, if your transition wastes more than 6 hours of their time, it is a net loss.
You always have to keep that cost in mind when you talk about anything: What does it cost your employees to do? This is the same deal with old hardware. It can actually cost you more money, because it takes more IT time to support. Like if you have an IT guy whose salary + ERE is $30/hour and you have them spend 20 hours a year repairing and maintaining an old P4 system that keeps failing, well that is a huge waste as that $600 could have easily bought a new system that would work better and take up little, if any, of their time.
That is a reason commercial software wins out in some cases. It isn't that you cannot do something without it, just that it saves more staff time than it costs. That's why places will pay for things like iDRAC or other lights-out management, remote KVMs, and so on. They cost a lot but the time they save in maintenance can easily exceed their cost.
Just remember that unless employees are paid very poorly, $300 isn't a lot of time. So you want to analyze how much time your new system will cost (all new systems will cost some time in transition if nothing else) and make sure it is worth it.
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.
As for interoperability, last time I looked, Germany is in Europe, where open document formats are now mandated in many jurisdictions. Much easier to do with LibreOffice than MS-Office, just by using the default settings. So as far as "shitty interoperability" goes, score one for switching to Linux/ODF/LibreOffice.
And lest you forget, a couple of decades ago people had a hard time with Windows 95 just turning off their computers. "What? I have to click on Start to turn it off?" The Metro start menu is a problem for people who are used to a different paradigm - especially one that they've had drilled into them over the last couple of decades.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Good thing you posted AC; you just publicly confessed to child abuse.
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.
Metro is dying before our very eyes. It has been deemphasized in Windows 8.1 and by Windows 9 will be little more than a fancy start menu.
For chrissakes, most suppliers if enterprise systems I deal with still happily ship you Windows 7 Pro machines, or at least heavily advertised downgrade rights. "Business class" systems still ship with Windows 7 preinstalled. The enterprise customers never bloody wanted Metro to begin with, and so act as if Windows 8/8.1 didn't exist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I believe that a lot of Windows users (including administrators) simply don't understand anything beyond the personal computer. They just don't understand a world in which one can sit down at another machine, log in and continue working just like they had sat down at their regular workstation. It's an alien concept to them.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Yes they do, because ergonomics require decent keyboards, screen and mouses. They may not need fat clients and would be off just as well with thin clients, but laptops or that form factor do *not* replace desk top systems since they still need the keyboard, mouse and screen and will essentially be used as a desktop almost all of the time.
They need access to their individual applications and data too. While it may be possible migrate all those to web applications or some client-server model, I doubt Turin has managed to finalize that sort of thing yet. Most EU cities have over a thousand custom applications that often run on antiquated proprietary systems and they will still have a burden of those for a long time.
Getting people the cheapest computer possible sounds like an easy way to save money, but in the end the price of the hardware is only a fraction of the costs and often the extra costs incurred by buying cheaper will make it more expensive. Starting with migrating just the desktops to linux and running the proprietary cruft on things like Citrix servers will save them a lot of money without a significant down side.
Oh, because they're not running windows, they can probably use their older systems a bit longer too, if electricity costs don't make it cheaper to upgrade anyway to more energy efficient devices.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
MS only supports English properly. Europe has dozens of different languages that are all supported very well by Linux. This is a major item for most people.
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.
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...
Munich, Turin --- Linux
Any other cities with a u and i in it? And would it work the other way, with i and u? /Simon
I just talked to a guy from Microsoft, and they find this a revolting Turin of events.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why would you need to install individual apps on each computer? All enterprise apps use a browser interface these days.
think about the savings from tech support & maintenance...
... because they won't need to support Linux or perform maintenance on it? Or do fairys do that for you with Linux?
Yep. The apt-get fairy does the maintenance. And it's considered axiomatic that a single operator can ride herd on about 10 times as many Linux machines as a Windows operator can on Windows machines.
The "retraining cost" boogeyman argument no longer carries any credibility. It's a lot easier for most people to adjust to a Linux desktop than it is to adjust to that montrosity that Windows 8 foisted on us.
Nobody's complaining about moving the cheese. They just figure that as long as it's moving anyway, the kitchen will be a better place than the toilet.
I remember when the Redmond faithful used to go on about needing Windows to get "real work" done. My work must not be real because I can do it on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS. I find myself using my Android tablet more and more for work and all my social media promotions.
The operating system is becoming less relevant every day. People are choosing devices, not operating systems.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage