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.

Comments

Re:but but but

[AchilleTalon]

Seriously, anyone using animation in a presentation is a disaster himself.

An AMA

[MeanE]

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.

Re:Linux is only free if your time is worth nothin

[rubycodez]

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

Re:It's not office.

[Stephan Schulz]

I am starting my phd soon and when I do will have access to a discount office. There is no way in sweet hell I would use libre to write my thesis!

Well, a cheap office is nice for writing a thesis in. But writing a thesis in any technical field with MS Office (or Libre Office, or Apple Pages) is just masochism. That's what LaTeX is is made for.

Re: I predict

[OrangeTide]

If web based services are what most office staff and bureaucrats use all day long, then you only need a browser. And Linux runs a browser just as well as Windows. And ChromeOS, if you can call it Linux, runs a browser way better than a desktop. (but that's about all it does)
Office software on a desktop is still a little better than the web based options. There isn't a huge difference in terms of capabilities and usability between Office 16 and LibreOffice, but the compatibility between the two is quite poor so it's best to pick just one. Throwing data into a spreadsheet, making some graphs, and slides is pretty much a solved problem on Windows and Linux. Web based stuff is a few steps behind, I anticipate in 3-4 years that it will be to a point that my company can switch (10000+ employees)

When you get into content creation that you have to think carefully about what OS to us. Desktop publishing, graphic design, etc.

Re: I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear that a lot, but from the average person, it is a lot easier to get stuff done with Linux. The exception is games and esoteric programs. Yes, using Excel with trillions of cells is esoteric, and works better than libre office in that context. In fact, my wife uses Windows and frequently cannot do things that I can easily do on Ubuntu. Like open certain files. Windows send to be good for inertia, but that is not the same as getting things done. It's the difference in people vs systems. If you said it is better for people who favor not learning new things, then I would agree. The same could be said of Apple probably, but with more snobbery.

Re: but but but

[aix tom]

The funny thing is, that we are still on Windows Server 2003 in our company (We run not a single PC, just Linux thin clients that connect to Windows Terminalservers when they need a "Windows-ey" Desktop). We abandoned the move to Server 2008 a few years back, and now are trying to move to Server 2016. The main problems we are running into are compatibility problems between MS products. From what I have experienced there is that it seems Windows stability and comparability is becoming worse.

For example, one problem we are having is that about 50% of the 32bit applications we need don't seem to do name resolution for some obscure reason. Ping works flawlessly, nslookup shows everything in order, 64bit programs don't have any problems, but about a dozen 32bit applications throw "host not found" errors for an unknown reason when they try to connect to their databases / applications servers / etc... using host names. When we replace the hostnames in the configuration with IPs it works.

In my opinion everything before Windows 2000 was not good enough for a corporate environment, Windows 2000 was pretty decent (With the NT Kernel and the "W95 Desktop" experience), and Windows 2003 / 2008 was the peak of Windows Desktops for corporations. (Which would roughly equate to Windows 7 for Workstations)

Which is really a shame. There is nothing that would I like better than have decent current versions of both Windows and Linux.

Re: I predict

[geoskd]

I remember, oh, around 1995, when people were proclaiming "Linux is ready for the desktop" ! I was a full-time user myself and was in full disagreement with that idea too. Yes, some users can adapt and would do okay, but not the business world, average office workers, and so on.

I have seen a number of offices with employees ranging from superuser to imbecile. These days, even the imbecile level users are not afraid to poke the computer various ways until it does what they want. A decade of smart phones has given them confidence that they can't really break it, and in the few cases where you have an employee that just can't hack it, hiring a replacement that can, costs less than a windows license... For almost everyone else, you put icons on the desktop for the things they would normally need, and they wont even care what the OS is, they'll be able to just use it. Hell, most of them even know how to save their own bookmarks to the desktop *in any OS* because chrome / firefox / safari already do that from within the browser. That is the fundamental reason why MS pushed the new user interface with win 8 and 10, and has been trying to push the surface. If they can get the users used to an interface that is fundamentally incompatible with other OS's, then the value proposition for switching away from windows is far less attractive. The problem they have is that they screwed the pooch, and the majority of users have seen IOS and android, and they don't like windows 8 or 10. That means that the entire employee base has already grown up knowing how to use alternative operating systems and have no fundamental love of windows like Gen Y did. It's over now, and all that is left is watching Microsoft die by inches the way IBM has been doing for the last 30 years.

Re: I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember, oh, around 1995, when people were proclaiming "Linux is ready for the desktop" ! I was a full-time user myself and was in full disagreement with that idea too. Yes, some users can adapt and would do okay, but not the business world, average office workers, and so on.

All Microsoft has to do is start enforcing licenses and businesses will migrate. I had a client that I dropped about 8 months ago. Over the course of 10 years they continually refused to upgrade their Exchange mail server, and even bastardized their mail infrastructure by setting up a Linux mail server for 'normal' users while keeping their 'advanced' users in Exchange using Outlook. They purchased 20 licenses for Exchange and then proceeded to load 120 users on the system. Exchange 2007 is EoL and they are freaking out that it will cost them $20k to upgrade and become compliant. That doesn't even cover all the copies of Outlook that aren't licensed. Or that need to be upgraded because Outlook 20whatever isn't compatible with Exchange 2007. To become compliant in their infrastructure they need to spend nearly $60k. Or they could just switch to Linux. The cost of me moving ~120 mailboxes from Exchange to Linux would be ~$500.

...but they *NEEEEED* Exchange because it has a calendar....but they don't use any of the shared calendaring features...and they don't want to pay the licenses... FML

My business went Linux, then back to Windows

[SpaceDave]

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.

Re: I predict

[Zemran]

This discussion is like talking about socialism or religion. Logic has no place in the discussion. Yes, those that have done it know that Linux is far more stable and reliable for the average user but those that shout the loudest will convince people that they cannot live without Windows. Why? Just like you ask the average person about socialism and they will shout about Stalin and not let you discuss Scandinavia or Germany or explain that the best economies in the world are socialist. Try and talk about Muslims and people will focus on the 0.05% that are a problem and ignore the fact that that does not represent the truth. I have set up Linux workstations for people that need reliability and they work for years without attention. That is the main thing that most people want. When I was not around, one client was talked into returning to Windows but after 6 months ended up switching to Apple because having got used to Linux, Windows is terrible. I cannot stay around to support people but I have not had anyone who spends long enough to actually get used to Linux choose to return to Windows.