Slashdot Mirror
The City Of Munich Now Wants To Abandon Linux And Switch Back to Windows (techrepublic.com)
"The prestigious FOSS project replacing the entire city's administration IT with FOSS based systems, is about to be cancelled and decommissioned," writes long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino. TechRepublic reports:
Politicians at open-source champion Munich will next week vote on whether to abandon Linux and return to Windows by 2021. The city authority, which made headlines for ditching Windows, will discuss proposals to replace the Linux-based OS used across the council with a Windows 10-based client. If the city leaders back the proposition it would be a notable U-turn by the council, which spent years migrating about 15,000 staff from Windows to LiMux, a custom version of the Ubuntu desktop OS, and only completed the move in 2013...
The use of the open-source Thunderbird email client and LibreOffice suite across the council would also be phased out, in favor of using "market standard products" that offer the "highest possible compatibility" with external and internal software... The full council will vote on whether to back the plan next Wednesday. If all SPD and CSU councillors back the proposal put forward by their party officials, then this new proposal will pass, because the two parties hold the majority.
The leader of the Munich Green Party says the city will lose "many millions of euros" if the change is implemented. The article also reports that Microsoft moved its German headquarters to Munich last year.
The use of the open-source Thunderbird email client and LibreOffice suite across the council would also be phased out, in favor of using "market standard products" that offer the "highest possible compatibility" with external and internal software... The full council will vote on whether to back the plan next Wednesday. If all SPD and CSU councillors back the proposal put forward by their party officials, then this new proposal will pass, because the two parties hold the majority.
The leader of the Munich Green Party says the city will lose "many millions of euros" if the change is implemented. The article also reports that Microsoft moved its German headquarters to Munich last year.
That this discusssion will get Godwin'd very quickly
Well there's your problem.
libreoffice is just as good!!!*
*as MS Office 2000
I've seen this: some high-powered MS rep chats up a boss, and *presto*:
MS is great
We've got to migrate
Put that to whatever jingle you want. Also: inspect bank accounts and campaign funds.
Note also that the study supporting the move back to WIndows was carried out by Accenture (some of us know them better by their old name, Andersen Consulting). Accenture was Microsoft's Alliance Partner of the Year in 2016, so I'm sure that they have a neutral, objective reason for recommending Microsoft software.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Thunderbird IS a "market standard product". In fact, here are (some of) the standards:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3207
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4422
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4954
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6409
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6531
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6533
I have seen great compatibility problems with Microsoft's email offerings, so perhaps that's what they're seeking to avoid in their desire for the "highest possible compatibility".
Everyone is going to point at MS Office, but that's no the problem. There are man many "proprietary" applications that have become standards across certain industries and organizations such as municipalities where Wine simply isn't an option.
But speaking of Office, and I'm sure the subject will start great arguments, but there are some who like Outlook, and many that rely on some of its features that, sorry, Thunderbird et al just don't replicate well or at all.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I hope they will enjoy the wonders of compatibility of Microsoft products*.
(* only applies when everyone in the world uses the exact same language Windows, Office and Outlook, the exact same version, run updates at exactly the same second, Microsoft sends the same updates at the same time to everyone in the world, and the whole world runs on identical hardware.)
As a fun experiment, take a Word file with images, indexes, etc. Save it to Microsoft office 98 format, from your choice of Microsoft office version. Then open that file using the _SAME_ Microsoft office version that you just used to save the file. enjoy your up-side-down images.
1. The basic stuff has to work without any tech support. A typical Linux install, unaided by a visit from tech support (and endless rounds of downloads and compiles and patching and dependency resolving and package management goofiness), will not properly support many printers and scanners, will have sketchy ausio support, and will not play common media formats.
2. Linux office apps will never be exactly like visio and powerpoint etc and thus the flunkies in government who have "learned computers" will be frustrated by these machines that sit on their desks and LOOK like computers but do not have visio and powerpoint etc.
3. If it cannot support all Windows CODECs, Linux will not allow lazy employees and bureaucrats to spend most of their work day watching online porn.
Microsoft will helpfully "analyze" all of the software and data files on your system and send the info back to Redmond. Windows should not be allowed anywhere.
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer
Have gnu, will travel.
Great comment, the nazis respected islam and collaborated with the palestinian mufti. Islamized germany will surely become a great threat, demography is destiny after all.
Linux is a great kernel, but the Desktop Environment is lacking and buggy. Microsoft spends lots of money to make all sorts of peripherals and desktop standards work. F/OSS programmers don't care about a bunch of that stuff.
The in-browser versions are a little more clunky and don't have all the features of the desktop product, but it's a good option if you want to collaborate with those using Microsoft's format when you personally use Linux.
I would love an Ask Me Anything from some of the sys admins. I'd be curious how the switch went, the troubles or lack of them they had during and after the switch and why there is pressure to switch back to Windows.
--I bet somebody's getting "compensated" in some way to bring this forward. Not only would they be giving up flexibility for a corporation-centric solution, but they would be giving up privacy as well. This site alone is full of Win10 articles detailing what a POS bit of spyware it is, masquerading as an OS. Not to mention random reboots due to upgrades.
--I can only hope this doesn't get approved, but in this world currently nothing is apparently safe or predictable.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Why anyone would choose Linux for an office desktop in the enterprise instead of Windows is beyond me, unless you're a charity with literally no money for capital investment.
And before you're all "muh data security", this is not Windows 10 Home.
Even MS knows Linux makes a great server, but it makes a crap desktop.
If the leader of the Munich Green Party is right and the city will lose "many millions of euros" if the change is implemented, it's too bad they don't use all that money for hiring an army of programmers. They could implement the changes they want in the FOSS themselves, and give something back to the community for the billions they will save over the next 100 years.
Dude, the cooperation between Nazis and Muslims was about as ideologically motivated as their cooperation with Japan. All that united them was a common enemy. If Germany had had those colonies in the area, they'd have allied with the English.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
ssh makes makes working from home or anyplace with a wifi hotspot just as convenient as working at a desk in my company office.
A lot of "enterprises" including my employer went to office365 and it doesn't matter what the client OS is. I use Linux at home and Mac at work to do employer's things, it just doesn't matter
The desire to switch to an office suite with the "highest possible compatibility" clearly indicates they've had trouble opening MS Office documents, and that people with MS Office have had trouble opening ODF documents.
To maintain their position in the market Microsoft make a deliberate attempt to make other software incompatible with their formats, and make their software incompatible with other formats. For example, they claim 100% technical comparability with the ODF formats, but if you open an ODS spreadsheet in Excel it strips out all the formulas, thus rendering the spreadsheet worthless.
This seems like intentional abuse of their market position to me.
the year of Linux on the desktop.
It would be nice to have another choice other than Microsoft or Apple, but until the various Linux communities figure out how to make their software work as easily as either of the big boys, which means running real programs such as Photoshop/DxO Optics Pro/Capture One for those in the photo field, or the numerous games out there for most other people, it's just not going to make decent penetration on the desktop even if it is free.
Granted, Microsoft conspiring with Intel to lock their chips down doesn't help, but that's not the fault of the Linux community.
For general web surfing and such, Linux is there. For everything else, it has a long way to go.
Sending emails to idiots to remind them that you exist and deserve to be paid for existing is not work.
captcha : billed
It does matter. We're stuck with Vista because several of the Microsoft apps we have to run won't run on any newer version of Windows. From:
https://products.office.com/en-US/office-system-requirements
"Office 365 is designed to work with Internet Explorer 11." But, the highest version of MSIE that is allowed to be run on Vista is MSIE 9. And with Chrome already dropping upgrades and Firefox scheduled to drop them in September, Office 365 is quickly becoming unusable on many of the versions of Windows that Microsoft requires us to use to use some of their products.
NSA servers will be the backup servers for the city
I'm sure the founders of the LiMux project thought that by 2017 the YotLD had long since come and gone, that mainstream drivers and software would be there almost by default at near zero cost. The latest stats from StatCounter says that worldwide Linux has 1.55% desktop OS market share. Even if I pick Germany which is a very pro-Linux market it's 3.46%. From a local politician's view I can understand that it looks like an endless uphill battle, regardless of the actual merits of the OS there will be far more solutions for Windows. It's just a fact of running an obscure solution.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Never heard of a place that standardized on Vista of all things, that's kind of weird. Your employer better get themselves some 7 or 10
Nice try. The Nazis had a lot of odd beliefs, but if the demographics were like they are today, they would be the top target of their hate (particularly Turks), not Jews. Jews made for an easy ethnic group to rally hate around then, like Muslims are used by the far right today.
Obviously, the go-to assumption is that there was a deal made on a golf course somewhere. It's entirely possible - probable, even...but let's take a moment to suspend the "crucify Microsoft" direction and consider a possible alternative...
Libreoffice is a solid product. I do not mind it one bit; in some cases I even prefer it to MS Office. Munich probably did save a bundle in licensing costs for Office. However, that's not the whole story. Integration with Office can frequently be a mission-critical requirement. There's a whole lot of reporting software, calculation software, CRM software, and document management software that integrates with Office. These vendors do not typically include integrations for LibreOffice, which means there are two options:
1. use products that work with LibreOffice.
2. roll your own.
Option 1 is a bit of a quagmire because it's not like they were moving to a computerized system from filing cabinets and typewriters, so it's not like they could just start with "linux/LO compatibility required" as a bidding condition. If they did, it probably would have been better for OSS as a whole, but alas, there is data residing in incumbent systems which need to be considered. Thus, we land at option #2.
How many programmers would be required to make a LibreOffice/LogicalDoc rollout roughly comparable to MSO/Sharepoint, move all the data over, access the same set of databases and workflows, etc., and do it in a timeframe that doesn't bring the city to a halt? Well, that needs to be compared to the cost of just using MSO, and do so favorably...but let's say that it did, and we ignore the user training side of things. What about the server side of things? Were they still using Windows Server and Active Directory, or migrate all that over to LDAP? Same with Exchange and Dovecot? MS SQL and Postgres? It's a bundle of money, but moving everything over, everywhere, ever, is almost as challenging as getting Linux desktops to work flawlessly with a Microsoft backend.
Now, let's head back to the golf course. Who called the meeting? If it was Microsoft, that's a good thing. Do you really think that Microsoft will be able to convince the city to migrate back without giving them one hell of a good price on it? If MS wants the contract back, you know they're taking pennies on the dollar for it.
If the takeaway of this exercise is that Microsoft is giving the city of Munich a software contract at 70% off for the next decade and that the OSS community ends up with a to-do list of functions that were considered shortcomings, then it sounds like some good ultimately came out of it. If it really was an offer they couldn't refuse, then by all means, crucify them.
They can't. The lost money goes to Redmond.
It's Windows that wastes time with upgrades and balloons that get in the way when someone is trying to get work done, not to mention forced unwanted reboots that lose work and the "installing updates" during shutdown or powerup that can go on for over an hour when user is in a hurry to get stuff done. And installing something might require reboots and reconfig and registry editing, what a colossal time waster windows is. It is very badly engineered bloated garbage. We won't even talk about powershell, I pity the poor bastard who has to write a script with that shit.
Confirmed basement dweller. None of these are problems if you buy Enterprise versions..
Sounds like you are the incompetent nitwit that doesn't know how to manage anything on the enterprise.
16 years a developer using desktop linuxfor server and embedded development. It kicks windows $!=$ for this use.
For me, Linux keep food on the table, the bill collectors from calling me daily, and the wife from staging an "accident" to collect the life insurance. Can't beat Linux for highly scalable infrastructure, embedded systems, and mission critical systems. As a desktop OS, Linux sucks hairy donkey balls. I can't be bothered to fight holy wars. Just give me what works whether it is Windows or OSX.
Given that you can basically spin up Linux userland stuff with Ubuntu/Bash on Windows Services for Linux - including Compiz - on Windows 10, switching would simply allow them to keep what they have on the Linux side on the same desktop as on the Windows side without resorting to VMs. The big expense in any rollout of this type isn't licensing, it's deployment and maintenance of the environment. Nerds are always more expensive than licenses - especially the nerds with the unique skillset required to manage a Linux desktop production deployment of this complexity.
Just be glad you're not stuck on XP. We're a Microsoft contractor working on something that requires XP. It's getting hard to even buy laptops that will run what we need.
I'd guess that might be problematic on account of the apps they use that won't run on those versions of MS Windows? Good suggestion though. Are you an MCSA?
MS Enterprise Agreement Licensing is expensive and confusing.
An EA operating system license gets you unlimited upgrade rights for $80 per year per machine. This is unrealistic for government agencies who upgrade OS maybe once every 5 years. Also unlimited upgrade rights on Office for just $300 per year, also upgraded once every maybe 2 to 5 years.
The only benefit is yearly licensing can be budgeted. Where if you upgrade every 5 years, the money will not be in your budget.
Just as evil as ever. To this day, the pustulent ghost of Grand Architect Gates still restlessly wanders the halls of Redmond, shedding clouds of toxic dandruff that instantly purges whoever it contacts of all morality.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
80% of the employees at the "enterprise" where I work have the misfortune to use windows. Glad I'm not one of them.
The hundreds of Linux and Unix machines I admin are doing just fine, thank you.
It's not Linux they object to, so much as devices that use electricity. They are hoping to standardize on cuneiform pressed into clay tablets.
Have they made a post-mortem of what was good/bad about their experience with this setup?
Have they state why they want to change? Or is it just a "vote" of some interested parties that decide what to do?
capcha: discord
For moving there.
News at 11
I just did a migration for a Windows 7 customer to a new Windows 10 machine. Manually get all of the accounts and settings on the new system set up like the ones on the old system. Copy over all the data folders. Change over from the old Windows Live email setup to the new Windows 10 Outlook that won't import Windows 7 mail archives and with the People contacts application that doesn't work. Then for the hard part: wait while user thrashes through every file cabinet and closet box looking for his software install discs so I can reinstall the applications. In three cases, download a trial-mode application copy from the company site and wait while user calls Support to wheedle for a usable copy of a license key that he last used eight years ago. Elapsed time, about five hours.
Now a Münchner were to migrate from an old Mac to a new Mac, all he needs to do is unmount the up-to-date Time Machine backup drive from the old machine, plug it into the new machine, click on Migration Assistant, and go pour a Spaten Optimator while it sets up the new machine to be just like the old machine, including all the installed applications.
Confirmed basement dweller. None of these are problems if you buy Enterprise versions..
Right, so the solution to the problem of Microsoft software getting in the way and reducing productivity is to..... Give them more money?
Where I come from we have a word for software like that.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
would make me dump the whole thing, too. Easily one of the Worst Email Clients, ever.
Yes, both shared a common hatred of Jews: a cursory side by side reading of Mein Kampf vs the main Islamic texts - the Quran and Bukhari's Hadith - would reveal a lot of very stark similarities
I own a private museum with about 100 computer-driven displays and half a dozen admin/office PCs. Originally I used Linux for 95% of it. Ten years later I have 2 Linux boxes left and the rest are Windows 10. I used to believe all the pro-Linux arguments I'm reading again here, but in the real world there are just too many problems with Linux. It's not any one problem - it's the plethora of annoying niggles that eventually wear you down. For example:
- Unavoidable but incompatible 3rd party hardware and software.
- "Linux-compatible" versions of software that are just crap.
- Driver issues.
- Minor but frequent differences in the way MS Office docs are rendered.
- Browser rendering differences and problems with 3rd party websites (shouldn't happen but does - nothing I can do about that).
+ many, many more little things.
If I was a better sysadmin/programmer and enjoyed spending time addressing these issues then maybe I could make Linux work better. But I'm not and I don't, so Windows it is.
Wow, straight out of the marketing literature! Seriously, who other than microsoft would mumble something like "served up securely" when talking about the "cloud"? Only someone from the market department would ever say "knocked it out of the park".
G-Suite is Certainly a cost savings solution which improves team collaboration and (if implemented by someone who is not clueless) offers better security.
If they want to have better compatibility with docx and xlsx files then installing the Android app on ChromeOS will ensure they can work with the majority of these files (except for certain macros).
Either way, Google Drive and docs along with add-ons like lucidchart will be a great substitute with many added benefits versus returning to the virus plagued world of Windows.
Big reason is that when an organization goes w/ an FOSS approach, the schedule of whether and when to upgrade is in their hands. With Microsoft, they were first forced out from XP to 7, and now from 7 to 10. A lot of organizations don't have the inclination to upgrade every other year just b'cos...
Besides, in this case, Munich had gone to Linux some years ago doing a complete exercise, from rolling out their own distro - Munix - to getting all their document systems to this. So their entire software infrastructure is already on this. Now, it could be that that leaves them unable to use things like Visio, or lose some of the previous Excel functionality that they had. But they need to assess how much (as a fraction) of their time and effort is spent on such Microsoft-only approaches, vs working on things like a LibreOffice document, or being online on Chrome.
Your argument would make sense if they were already on Windows and considering whether to go Linux. Or maybe even if they had no computing platform and were determining which one to adapt. But it doesn't in this case where Linux is already there, and the move is to migrate to Windows
The restaurant chain I work for has several locations in Microsoft buildings, and many of our customers still is MSIE 6 so we're forced to use it for our devs and QA.
When everything is SAAS, the OS does not matter.
Hmmm...so keeping your valuables in MS clutches will not automatically make them available to any authoritarian state that asks for them?
That's very tidy. How...Putin-Trump-Erodgan of you. You do realize they are the same person, yes?
If the leader of the Munich Green Party is right...it's too bad they don't use all that money for hiring an army of programmers ...
It could just be that the city government feels that its competence lies in providing traditional municipal services like police and fire protection and not in the development of an office suite.
These days we can never know...
I'm more interested in what MS software only works on Vista and why the heck they used something so obscure that I a MS admin can't even fathom what it might be.
Where in ze Deutsche is mein Zolitaire???
100 years from now we'll all be muslims.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
if effectivity of work decreases by only 1% because of software problems / incompactibility, etc ... and each employee has salary cca 4000 euro brutton, then city is loosing 40Euros every month for one employee, for 10.000 employees it is 400.000 euros each month .
And the loss of effectivity is much more in this case than 1% , software not working at all, incompactibilities, employess all day without access to SAP, etc ..... Munich loosing tens of millions each year because they switched to Linux which is not desktop ready OS .
ps : i use Ubuntu on my computer and i'am very dissapointed by linux desktop .
Face it folks. Like liberalism failed, so too open source. Linux is still popular as a server, I won't argue that, but its impact in the technology world is SIGNIFICANTLY smaller than the amount of hype it has gotten would indicate. Hopefully with Linux's complete and total failure as a desktop OS, just another failure of open source top pile up on top of the many others, it will be politically acceptable to say that CLOSED SOURCE is the best way to develop software again as it always has been.
I thought I wouldn't be dead in 40 or so years.
Should I convert now or can I sign some sort of promissory note which says that if I'm still alive in 100 years, I'll convert?
Will the people responsible for providng the desktop systems to end users allow them to run things like Crossover Office and Wine, or are they OSS fanatics that force the users to use crappy software even when better albeit non-free alternatives exist? I suspect the latter is the real issue, not the fact that the systems are running Linux.
SAP is a piece of shit. That last I heard usually ran on Linux or UNIX based servers. So is your problem with a (probably) web based client?
If you think poorly written software won't crash in Windows I have a bridge to sell you.
Really? Last I heard Apple applications break with OS upgrades quite easily.
Many prefer to email within word and not open a million compose new message in Outlook. Also the ribbon UI. The file menus are quite dated and mellinials do not know how to use menus outside hamburger ones from their phones
http://saveie6.com/
Gee, what a coincidence. MS moves their European offices to Munich, and Munich "decides" to switch back to Windows... Boy, have I a deal for you!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Google migration wizard at Microsoft's website?
http://saveie6.com/
If you want proprietary, go with MS-Windows.
Some here think that that statement is over-emotional bashing, but it's not. I really mean it. Microsoft does proprietary better than Red Hat.
There are advantages to proprietary. An OS controlled by one group will be more coherent. Today's Linux, by contrast, is all over the map.
The downsides of a proprietary system is deliberate obfuscation, and vendor lock-in.
Red Hat is following Microsoft's playbook to the letter. Right down to the exact same propaganda, FUD, and astro-turfing. I followed MS business practices for decades, and to me, it's glaringly obvious.
From another forum:
> This sharper division between developers and users is also a goal of the freedesktop/systemd/gnome push. If you don't believe me, go look in /etc/udev and tell me humans are intended to touch anything in there. No line breaks, no comments, no reliable documentation other than the source. Same for dconf, although it least it, unlike the Windows Registry, has an explicit feature for help text as an option for each key... although it is pitiful how few actually have any supplied. Again, the assumption in actual use in the field is that dconf is for applications. Developers will write apps that store values in the 'registry' and those apps alone will manipulate them. If an app doesn't expose a knob to change one the user isn't supposed to manually tamper with it.
> This reminds me of Microsoft paying De Icaza to attack Linux from the inside with the Mono trojan horse. Now, it is Red Hat (no doubt directed by their customer Fed Gov) directly attacking the simple, modular, do-one-thing-right Unix design philosophy and replacing it with the far-reaching, metastatizing blob that is SystemD. Why? To bake-in impossible to find, intentional backdoors and vulnerabilities as designed by Poettering and the rest of his paid-off coven.
In a migration, OS X carefully identifies applications that are not compatible with an OS upgrade and places them in a special folder. In a major release there is usually one or two of these.
Your link goes to a Not Found page, but there was a Windows migration utility in the past. It is no longer offered with 10.
That would leave them in Dia straits :)
The FreeBSD desktop is PC-BSD which recently got rebranded TrueOS. Regrettably, the latest versions are somehow buggy: I've simply been unable to update my system to that, w/o having it hang. I'd really like to install the 'Playonbsd' and on that, Steam, and get going.
Has the whole world gone bat shit? I swear Trump has something to do with this and probably Window$ email snooping exemption too. For some reason, Window$ can sue for unwarranted email snooping, but Google can't. Wonder what they got to hide they need to switch for? Maybe use encryption and not worry about it? If anyone could figure that out, it's Germans. And, the document compatibility issue is bogus unless your a moron and add media to it because you can't type. PowerPoint is better than Impress, but Apple's Keynote is the best just very few schools and businesses have enough Apple products to make it a viable solution without losing features during a conversion. Actually, Prezi is the best. Ironically, most of the money Apple makes goes to Germany to pay the software engineers. Does Cortana speak German? The German government has already been caught putting Trojans in their Skype servers. The good ol days. Make Getmany Great Again! No this time guys.
Besides looking a bit different, and fixing serious shit bugs, outlook 2015+ is hardly any different to 2007.
Why cant people use software for 10 years + like they use cars, its not like software degrades over time like food, it still works, just companies dont fix bugs.
Ahh i know, its policy to always have bugs, never fix anoyying bugs in present released, but only in new releases so that people have to upgrade.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
either use online outlook.com or use google apps.
Which ever $/user/month suits you.
Saves you in power bills and running hardware, give the old server away to your IT guy or ebay it.
Its amazing how many quad core xeon 3ghz, 16gb ram servers you can find for under $500 online. If anything, good for a home cloud/server.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I don't understand how moving to Microsoft would improve compatibility. Their handling of open formats is nororiously bad.
alternative facts!
I suspect one of the reasons large, public IT projects like this, tend to fail, is that they are unrealistically ambitious and ill-planned. It is possible to make a transition like this, if it is done gradually and with buy-in from the people who have to use it. It is all about impact management; there is always going to be a set of problems for each new component, and if you replace all components in a large system in one go, you end up with a situation where all users are hit by the sum of all the problems at the same time. What you have to do is make smaller transitions, limit the number of users hit with problems, work with them to fix everything, and get them to like the new system; then the rest of the users are all going to want it. Then on to the next component.
As for using Firefox - it is perfectly doable to have a mix of browsers and mail clients and concentrating on sorting out the problems you may have on Firefox. Firefox has many advantages (or used to - I haven't compared them for a long time) over IE - once people are confident that they can do their job just as well with Firefox, they will probably want to use over their old browser.
Most likely their forms and submissions relied on MS Office docs. Then add probably some other things like Autocad for plan review and what not. I can see where all of this failed without proper prepping.
It supports legacy formats better and because it's an orthogonal production, can recover from errors in the document better.
The article also reports that Microsoft moved its German headquarters to Munich last year.
*sigh*... like this is going to be a rational vote for what's best in the city. And for a temporary boost in jobs, they're going to shoot themselves in the foot over the next 5 years. I never thought I'd see this narrow-minded short term profit mentality spread to Germany, of all places...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
I'm surprised there isn't a national government somewhere funding open source software.
In the US, the National Endowment for the Arts spends $146 million a year on stuff which most Americans never see or are affected by in any way, and some of which is offensive to large segments of the population ("Piss Christ", nude "performance art, etc.).
Imagine how much quality open source software could be produced with $146 million per year? For comparison, LibreOffice has a budget of under a million euros per year.
Munich never really switched fully to Linux. They also made matters more complicated by not using an off the shelf distro and instead rolling their own. Nevertheless, it does show that desktop Linux is lacking tremendously in user experience and that support of especially MSO formats is sorely lacking. I use LO and once in a while I get a docx file that is unreadable when opened in LO. For some part due to MSO not fully complying with OOXML despite Microsoft ramming this horrific format through standards bodies, but also that FOSS is notorious for "we do it because we like it that way" and "not invented here" attitude. How many times did I try to make the switch myself just to find that it takes hours just to set up a network share that can also be accessed by Windows systems? Or the not that unusual hardware like a Brother network printer that has craptastic hardware support under Linux. Or the inexplicable need by desktop managers to ape the look and feel of OS X. Don't get me wrong, for free the Linux distros are excellent, especially when running on low cost SBCs like a Pi 3. Using a Pi and Linux one can build a desktop system for less money than what a Win 10 license costs, not to speak from the large amount of free software. Nevertheless, Linux desktops will be a niche as long as UX, file format and hardware support do not improve significantly.
Are you serious? We're not talking about upgrading some kid in his basement from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
If you are an administrator in an Enterprise, this sentence alone should get you fired on the spot for gross incompetency
Sigh, another MacTard that is clueless about Enterprise requirements.
i think the tools to some degree dictate the way a work will be done.
there might be a problem that the operating system dictates a way on how to go about doing your computing work.
in the real world, the goals exist, either way, if you use linux or windows. but reaching these goals with the mentioned tools might require a different
way to go about it.
so munich got the tools and they work but the process of acquiring, storing and processing the data still wants to walk on the windows path.
i assume if everybody involved would take a step back, look at the problems and requirements of running a municipality and then trying to do it
with plain old, paper, typewriters, binders and filing cabinets, it will yield some insights on how it can be automated and simplified with a computer running linux.
teh question is, does the work have to LOOK a certain way or do the results matter more? in a way, it doesn’t matter if you show up unshaven, in your underwear or barefoot, if you give the same results as the armani dressed-shaving-water-smelly-crocodile-leather-shoed guy ...
me thinks linux keeps you honest to the work that needs to be done whilst windows will always try to sell you a "nifftier" way to do things, like get a API that tells you when the community coffee maker is free to be used ...
if there's a OSI model for running a municipality then linux will let you restart at level one (re-invent how a municiplaity is run) ... windows will always be a LAMP solution (specifically it will always be a tool that requires the municipality to make enough money to pay for using the tool) : ]
An enterprise installation is a different animal. The admin sets up one user system to the desired configuration, images it, and then copies the image into umpty identical machines. This works the same way for Mac and Windows, so the easy IT path is for the lowest-cost hardware. When a Windows box gets trashed by the usual malware, you just re-image it from the company standard.
Again, this is in the absolutely simplest sense. Prior to this the admin has, of course, used System Center or similar, to make sure that each user can only run the applications he is allowed to run, and that those apps are in fact installed on the PC when the user logs in etc...
Now, to your repeated jab at Windows, why does Apple run its entire iCloud infrastructure on Windows (Azure and AWS)? If Windows is as bad as your Fan-boy religion tells you,wouldn't that be counter-productive? Which do you think needs the better stability and up-time, iCloud or the toy you use to play games on?
Azure is a server OS that has nothing to do with consumer Windows.
It would be so great if Bill Gates returned the Munich government's check with a little handwritten note. "Have fun with Linux, bitches."
A lot of "enterprises" including my employer went to office365 and it doesn't matter what the client OS is. I use Linux at home and Mac at work to do employer's things, it just doesn't matter
When you're talking "Enterprises" rather than small businesses then sharing / calendars / meeting management / becomes the killer app instead of "Word". This is done with Outlook and even MacOS' version of Outlook is behind and crippled. For this, there is no Outlook for Linux "solution" so the statement that "it doesn't matter what the client OS is" fails to hold truth?
Additionally, Skype for Business (aka "Lync") is a GotoMeeting contender for conferences and document / screensharing that has no has no support for Linux anyway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5e9web/skype_for_business_on_linux/
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2m6sir/lync_on_linux/
Beyond windows, it fails to do the same things even on MacOS's privileged waters.
With regard to MS Office / LibreOffice, I'm not surprised.
I've edited a few large contract documents in the last year, and LibreOffice Writer consistently mangled the images and in some cases the formatting, even with things which had been added to the document by LibreOffice itself. In other words, we'd save a file in LibreOffice, load it back, and get something different than we had before we saved it.
MS Word has the same kind of problems (can't reliably save and load back to itself), however when I was working on those documents last year, it proved much more reliable than LibreOffice Writer.
Which is a shame, as apart from the open source goodness, and the price, LibreOffice has a nice change history / diffing tool (which we kept on using).
In one case, loading a file into LibreOffice Writer mangled the formatting of some text so badly someone thought a financial proposition was quite different than what was really being said, causing a right panic, and only when I loaded the same file into MS Word were we able to clarify the problem.
Also I don't think I've ever seen an MS Word form render properly in LibreOffice.
We really had no choice but to buy MS Word licenses, though I'd really rather not, and can't really afford them.
From the article:
"At the moment in many cases it just takes far too long and costs far too much for the city to implement software that's available as standard on the market. This must change, so that the city remains competitive in an increasingly digital service society," she said.
"The mayor was against free software from the beginning," said Matthias Kirschner, the president of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). "When he was elected, he took pride in getting Microsoft to move their office to Munich [a move that took place last September]. He even gave this study to Accenture, which is a Microsoft partner."
"I used to believe all the pro-Linux arguments I'm reading again here, but in the real world there are just too many problems with Linux
"I own a private museum" ref
What's the name of this private museum?
Te Awamutu Space Centre. www.spacecentre.nz
Azure is a server OS that has nothing to do with consumer Windows
Azure is Windows Server. Windows Server and regular Windows are built on the same core with some parameters changed on Windows Server to prioritize differently than what is required on a client OS. You should cure your ignorance before continuing.
Please note, there is also an amount of Linux servers in Azure, but these were added to the platform subsequent to Apple moving to Azure and are not used by Apple.
So, I take it you're one of these "mellinials"? As for Millennials, many of us have been using computers long enough to have gotten to use Win7 if not older versions such as WinXP, especially since K12 schools can often be expected to have their Win boxes running older versions--those of us at the older end can even remember working with Win3.1.
I've personally worked on everything from command lines to ribbons and honestly have had an easier time with things I had to rely on using badly-documented command lines to get to work than quite a few ribbons. They're a mix of the worst of toolbars and menus, wrapped up with the assumption that the enduser is barely literate in any sense of the word. (I've worked on systems where I wasn't fluent in the OS's language, too. Still a better experience than ribbons.)
You might want to be a bit cautious about calling an entire generation stupid when you can't even spell its name right, especially when browsers typically have built-in spellcheck. I will, though, agree that most of it is--it's just not this stupid outside of the delusions of the people who believe that the current UI trends are a Good Idea.
"Linux tends to have good printer support..."
No, it really does not. I love Linux and run my business on it, but I have about a dozen printers and only two work with Linux - and getting those two to work took over a week of fidgeting with downloads from possibly untrustworthy websites (i.e. they were NOT supported by default on any of the mainstream distributions we tried) and even these two printers do not fully work; double sided printing on one does not work, the other sometimes refuses to print in color and both frequently gaak and can only be restored to operation by shutting them off and rebooting the Linux machines to which they are attached.
"and decent audio format support."
um, no. Out of the box - no audio. Fedora25 cannot play a 20 year old MP3 file directy after being installed. Many videos on the internet which are things users expect to be able to watch in their web browser will not play on Linux - the user is confronted with a message that no suitable MIME type can be found. Not only do I use Linux in my business but I have set up some relatives with Linux boxes so I do not have to spend lots of time helping them with Windows systems that get gummed-up with malware - one of the big complaints I get from them is that they cannot see any video clips from Twitter (go figure). Linux simply cannot support the audio/video CODECs that need to be supported for most average people to think that their computers are working properly.
"This can be distributed to clients via various forms of bare metal bootstrap and/or configuration management such as Puppet, Chef, etc. Of course the same is true with Windows and is how you should be managing a large organisation."
Here's where your delusion is on full display. No average human being (or business) wants to waste time figuring out and then trying to implement "bare metal bootstrap and/or configuration management" or would even know to look for "Puppet, Chef, etc" before becoming too intimidated by the install instructions and dependencies etc. This is made worse by the modern evil Linux distros that do not include full sources and therefore are more-likely to not be able to build lots of packages in an automated way without even more expert user intervention.
"Office365 covers most things...
More delusion. There's a terrible assumption underpinning lots of people in the tech world - that everybody is going to be running the latest software on the latest hardware and with high-speed internet connections. If somebody is using a different flavor of Office, then FOR THEM Office365 covers NOTHING. If somebody is running a perfectly-respectable quad core Pentium but it lacks 64bit functionality then the 64bit version of Linux is of no value. If somebody lacks a highspeed net connection, then just updating a system with all the latest patches and rebuilding some packages with all the dependencies can take a damned WEEK. Morons who insist that package managers and a million dependencies that can be automatically resolved over the internet == a reasonable solution to anything are idiots. If you do not have a high-speed net connection and unlimited bandwidth, or if you do not expose your internal network to the internet for security reasons, then any solution that assumes tons of fast downloads is no solution at all. Windows is not like that - you do not install Windows and then spend a week getting it to work (and I say that as a Windows hater)
"... a few Windows machines via a VDI should suffice...:
If the solution is "a few Windows machines", then you admit there is no solution - the user should simply use Windows since he is not likely to need a few Linux machines to do the stuff he needs to do that Windows cannot. A true Linux advocate needs to see shortcomings like this and find Linux solutions. Linux developers need to spend time fixing these actual problems rather than coming up with yet another Window manager, another disk format, another cool subsystem that other deve
I have read the whole thread, and all I can say is, it's very disappointing. Having your business rely on Microsoft works sometimes, and others not. If making the Microsoft solution work includes even the tiniest little secret of their proprietary office software, you can be placed in a double bind. Years ago they hung me out to dry, leaving my simple questions unaddressed, and publicly answering the question the liked, instead of the question I asked. I received tons of email from other social network users on the Microsoft forum that could see I was getting the runaround. How many times should a contemporary techie fall on Microsoft's sword?
Wait till the City of Munich learns how much more Windows will cost with ransomware payments.
The world has changed since OpenOffice was implemented - more and more things are moving to the cloud.
Google Docs / Slides / Sheets etc will be more than enough for 99% of users, plus you get all of the benefits of using Google infrastructure and better interoperability.
We moved to Google for Education a few years ago and have never looked back.
Small businesses can use office365 or G Suite or similar. works on any current platform including Linux.
by the way, I use outlook for mac (and all the other office for mac stuff) at work, haven't had problems
It's about principles. FOSS isn't about saving $$ (though by most objective measures that does happen) ... FOSS is about the principles of openness and liberty. Windows ... is about the principles of corporatism and pay-to-play. Note I didn't say capitalism ... corporatism.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
The worst part is it's an intentional decision. Microsoft decided that the risk of something crashing due to mismatched library versions was more important than countless billions of man-hours. It's one of the more staggeringly wasteful decisions in history, in my opinion.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Put in 1 Windows Terminal Server and keep Linux on the desktops.
Put 10 remote desktop licenses on it to be shared by everyone in city govt. This will accomplish a few things.
100% compatibility with Windows-whatever.
99% pain in using it.
Limited sprawl of Windows and MSFT stuff.
Provide a demonstration to other German govt agencies why THEY should switch to Linux too. If the entire Govt switches, they can get off the MSFT-$$$ sucking treadmill. There is savings in scale with F/LOSS. There isn't savings at scale with MSFT, just larger bills.
I'm surprised there isn't a national government somewhere funding open source software.
In the US, the National Endowment for the Arts spends $146 million a year on stuff which most Americans never see or are affected by in any way, and some of which is offensive to large segments of the population ("Piss Christ", nude "performance art, etc.).
This right here is a great argument. They should be advancing open source software but they are pissing away the available funds instead. I wonder if Microsoft and the likes have anything to do with this directly. Maybe they are lobbying to prevent funding from ever going that way.