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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.
One thing's for sure: There's no longer a shroud over Turin's OS source code.
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.
I use Windows XP as much as I can. I have a lighhouse puppy 4.1.2rc1 with Mariner(KDE 3.5) linux boot disk when I really have to get shit done - like erase recycled or system volume information, or other locked files, also resizing partitions with windows on it - but I use windows because it's more user friendly and faster on a lot of things, plus I don't want Windows to end up like BeOS or Solaris, something that might be really on the horizon given the major fuck ups with Windows Vista and 8 (7 was tolerably decent, though still a massive decay from Windows XP, which itself is like a decay from Windows 2000), and the onslaught of cheap laptoppy-like things at Micro Center from Arm based systems and Chrome OS based x86 systems, neither Microsoft based, back in April, when I last looked around to see if I can find another laptop with a better battery life than this HP Mini 200 Intel Atom thing with 9 hr battery life, and like a 7 Watt chipset+cpu, which is like unheard-of-ly energy efficient, unfortunately it needs XP and can't run Windows 7 well, and even in XP it's a constant constant constant struggle to keep it down, somebody from Microsoft always logs on and restarts services when I kill and keep almost everything disabled, run none of the dotnet/silverlight/new C runtimes/windows live/office crap from microsoft, run the last non-dotnet version of zonealarm to kill every program possible - lsa (export) shell , lsass, Nt Session manager, smss, and the like are not killable, which is bullshit, so I thoroughly hate Windows for the constant struggle I have to put up to kill every useless fucking snooping thing wasting my CPU on it to get decent speed, with the 500 or so services out of which I constantly have to kill 495 and 15 I have to leave up and running simply because the computer won't work without them, when Ideally, I'd like to kill those too, and even then, once in a while the harddrive goes into this churning mode, like somebody from Microsoft or the NSA logged on and set off something, when I have Indexing service and System Restore Service killed, remote assistance killed, windows update service killed, and absolutely nothing should be moving on the computer, but it does, you can see it from the CPU use in task manager, and even that one lies sometimes saying it's 0% when the harddrive is going absolutely crazy.
That was a very long sentence . . .
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.
Holy fuck you actually read that wall of text enough to respond to it? That takes some effort...I forgot what I was doing after the first period. My combat log looked like this:
sillybilly's Wall of Text hits YOU for 923,532,262,523 (Critical)
You die.
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.
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.