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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.
(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.
Of course, when switching from one version of Windows to another version of Windows, the cost of training the average city employee to use that new version of Windows could buy you a dozen copies of Windows. Especially if you're factoring in training on the newer versions of Office.
The interface changes between Microsoft versions are as radical (or more radical) than the interface changes in transistioning between XP and Linux.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
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.
Click this icon for the word processor, this one is the folder that contains all your work related documents. This icon is for web browsing, but stay off that unless you're on break. This is the menu icon down here in the lower left corner, just like you're used to, just look for the name of the program you need to run if it's not already on the desktop.
Click here, click there. It's all the same no mater what OS you're using. If it takes more than an hour to train the average employee how to to use a new OS with similar software, you need a new employee, that one's broken.
Now it may take a day or two to train the ones who create documents and a few days to a week to train those that write scripts/programs in it, but it is not going to cost more than the several hundred dollars (or Euros) it would cost for each user.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
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*
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Why would you need to install individual apps on each computer? All enterprise apps use a browser interface these days.