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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.
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.
linux is not for the general public, it is for the computer literate.
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??
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.
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.
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.
Stephan
I mean, that's just an assumption about what Linux users do with their systems. Microsoft has great data on what their users use their systems for- timestamps of executable programs, all data typed by keyboard, which ads are most likely to lead to sales, etc. Until someone starts tracking everything done by Linux users in the same manner Microsoft tracks all Windows users, I'm afraid your assertion is likely to remain unproven...
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
Anal ventriloquism; impressive. I've switched over hundreds of my clients [who are casual users] from Winblows to Mint over the past six years or so and the less technically adept they are, the more likely they are to benefit.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
If you're in IT, linux is whatever you make it. If you have end-user desktop needs, you manipulate it in a way that's friendly to the end-user on the surface.
If you can't do that, then you have no business in IT in that particular organization.
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.
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 ....
Unless, highly unlikely, Adobe were to release the source code for Photoshop, that is not possible for the Linux community to "figure out". Only Adobe could do that.
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?
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.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I write this on Android, which is Linux.
Bleh.
IOS [] is FreeBSD.
I wish people would stop spreading this nonsense.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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
"but windows and mac can work for everybody very easily"
Until they don't. And then Linux saved my sanity.
Don't step on the baby.
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
Let's all take a moment to remember (and laugh at) Microsoft's attempts to foist upon the world a smartphone that ran Windows.
To Microsoft's credit, it did usually start on the third pull.
Agreed. Word is a horrible product to use for a thesis. Use the right tool for the job, and MS Office is almost never that tool. Instead it is the "barely good enough" choice that people stick with because they don't know of anything else. On the office people use it because they're addicted to Exchange Server, which means you get Word and Excel as a mere byproduct. Office does not meet good user design guidelines, it's somewhat hostile to the entire notion. Office doesn't even bother with compatibility, in fact it's barely even compatible with itself (since they want the entire world to ugprade in unison, the idea of being compatible with older versions is anathema to Microsoft).
Office is somewhat adequate for writing office memorandums. If that's what someone is writing, then go ahead. If someone is writing something *important*, like a thesis or journal paper, then for heaven's sake use something professional instead of the toy that Microsoft is selling.
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.
That's a fact. Word shits itself with large documents. I've seen it too many times. Be prepared for your computer to freeze while scrolling, tables to break, and formatting to spontaneously mess itself up. Worst of all, keep multiple running backups so you have a recent usable document to revert to when Word saves random garbage to your thesis. People have asked me if I can recover their fucked-up Word thesis. They had to revert to an old copy they emailed or put on a USB dongle two weeks before. If you are using Endnote to manage references, expect your problems to double.
If you must use a GUI, and want to power of LaTeX, try Lyx. It saves as plaintext, but outputs via LaTeX. You can also export TeX files periodically to be safe.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
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/
If you are working for the Government, then you probably want to choose LibreOffice, because it complies with standards and is not controlled by an overseas commercial interest which you cannot influence.
Or, you might be American.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
This is why the millions of people using Raspberry Pis cannot possibly use it, it's too difficult for them, when we see them using it, we are dreaming or deceived by Descarte's evil demon.
Sarcasm apart, I've used it as a desktop for about 10 years, it's become steadily easier over that period. We started a project for a housing estate (that's a 'project' for Americans, but it may be nicer) with about 20 older machines that we repurposed. Older people (therefore without some of these prejudices) used Linux, without really realising that they were not using the market standard.
I can see that a lot of commentary here will be Microsoft astro-turfing, so I won't both to reply to each one, but the above statement is nearly nonsense. Incidentally, I'm not a fanatic either, I keep a Windows laptop for music, because I still use Pro Tools. I must say, in terms of random problems (and I'm very careful about virus protection etc.) it is much more of a pain than my vintage 2006 tower running Linux Mint, usually due to driver problems and resultant BSOD episodes.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Anal ventriloquism; impressive. I've switched over hundreds of my clients [who are casual users] from Winblows to Mint over the past six years or so and the less technically adept they are, the more likely they are to benefit.
How, by being tied to you for paid support?
I've run Linux farms, and won't go anywhere else for most application servers, because they can configured perfectly for the task at hand. But user machines need to be prioritised to UI, device compatibility, and familiarity and Linux is horrible by comparison.
I don't expect much agreement in here, but I've worked in several places that allow techy staff (non-MS techies) their own machines (laptop/desktop), and most of them choose Mac or Windows. I know of precisely zero non-techy staff that have even heard of Linux.
There is a reason that the Linux desktop has failed outside a few fringe experiments (like Munich) because it simply doesn't stack up.
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.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
"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."
Te Awamutu Space Centre. www.spacecentre.nz
As someone who has used Linux as their main operating system for many, many years and who has built Linux systems for many others (non-Linux users) I can only say that you're wrong. Accept that in many if not most cases proprietary software like Microsoft Office is simply better than free alternatives because the company has vastly more resources to dedicate towards its development and also more resources to ensure that it is stable. The idea of the free software model is some magical formula that is automatically better than everything - that idea breaks down very quickly in the desktop application world. The fact is it is not the best model in some cases. I'm don't necesarily like this fact but it is a reality that system integrators have to accept if they are going to provide the best solutions to their customers, and not simply force their dogma onto them at the expense of usability, functionality, and compatibility.
I'm not sure how to tell you this, but quite a few casual users I've dealt with have walked off with Linux live disks taken from my emergency stack because of Microsoft's UI decisions from Win8 on--and most seem to be pretty happy with the move.
Admittedly, the flavors in my stack of Linux live disks are deliberately picked to be luser-friendly--it exists so I don't have to be bothered by others' needing data off a hosed OS, or who can't even tell if it's a software or hardware problem.
Microsoft shills have become the next generation of denialists. They experience cognitive dissonance when faced with the truth. My wife has less problems with her Minty laptop than I do with my brand New W10 Envy. I run my database and spreadsheet on my iMac on AO that I take from the Mac to AO on Linux, and AO on My new machine. 100 percent compatible. On Windows Office, it isn't even compatible from Windows to MacOS, and nothing on Linux. Well, except that I can open Microsoft Office files.
My guess, outside of the paid shills, is people who maybe tried Linux in early days and went through dependency hell, people who tried to impose Windows on Linux, and maybe people who only run server farms. Certainly for some of my more exotic work, I need to use the terminal, and make, compile and install my own applications, but my Wife who uses Linux exclusively (Mint) maintains her own computer, and doesn't even know what the terminal is. She uses the typical emsil Browsing and AO office suite.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.