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Munich Plans New Vote on Dumping Linux For Windows 10 (techrepublic.com)
An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic:
The city of Munich has suggested it will cost too much to carry on using Linux alongside Windows, despite having spent millions of euros switching PCs to open-source software... "Today, with a Linux client-centric environment, we are often confronted with major difficulties and additional costs when it comes to acquiring and operating professional application software," the city council told the German Federation of Taxpayers. Running Linux will ultimately prove unsustainable, suggests the council, due to the need to also keep a minority of Windows machines to run line-of-business software incompatible with Linux. "In the long term, this situation means that the operation of the non-uniform client landscape can no longer be made cost-efficient"... Since completing the multi-year move to LiMux, a custom-version of the Linux-based OS Ubuntu, the city always kept a smaller number of Windows machines to run incompatible software. As of last year it had about 4,163 Windows-based PCs, compared to about 20,000 Linux-based PCs.
The assessment is at odds with a wide-ranging review of the city's IT systems by Accenture last year, which found that most of the problems stem not from the use of open-source software, but from inefficiencies in how Munich co-ordinates the efforts of IT teams scattered throughout different departments. Dr. Florian Roth, leader of the Green Party at Munich City Council, said the review had also not recommended a wholesale shift to Windows. "The Accenture report suggested to run both systems because the complete 'rollback' to Windows and MS Office would mean a waste of experience, technology, work and money," he said... The city's administration is investigating how long it would take and how much it would cost to build a Windows 10 client for use by the city's employees. Once this work is complete, the council will vote again in November on whether this Windows client should replace LiMux across the authority from 2021.
A taxpayer's federation post urged "Penguin, adieu!" -- while also admitting that returning to Windows "will devour further tax money in the millions," according to TechRepublic.
"The federation's post also makes no mention of the licensing and other savings achieved by switching to LiMux, estimated to stand at about €10m."
The assessment is at odds with a wide-ranging review of the city's IT systems by Accenture last year, which found that most of the problems stem not from the use of open-source software, but from inefficiencies in how Munich co-ordinates the efforts of IT teams scattered throughout different departments. Dr. Florian Roth, leader of the Green Party at Munich City Council, said the review had also not recommended a wholesale shift to Windows. "The Accenture report suggested to run both systems because the complete 'rollback' to Windows and MS Office would mean a waste of experience, technology, work and money," he said... The city's administration is investigating how long it would take and how much it would cost to build a Windows 10 client for use by the city's employees. Once this work is complete, the council will vote again in November on whether this Windows client should replace LiMux across the authority from 2021.
A taxpayer's federation post urged "Penguin, adieu!" -- while also admitting that returning to Windows "will devour further tax money in the millions," according to TechRepublic.
"The federation's post also makes no mention of the licensing and other savings achieved by switching to LiMux, estimated to stand at about €10m."
...Afford! If selling out to Microsoft is cheaper, then so be it.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Microsoft put together a huge infrastructure in MS Learning to teach people to use and support their software. This meant that while you had to pay more to license their software, it was relatively easy to find people that could use and support their software. Because it's more challenging to "grow" people who can support open source software, their services have never come cheap. The most expensive part of any IT deployment is the geeks - reduce the cost of that (by prioritizing the creation of training material) and the cost of licensing your software really becomes a secondary concern.
It keeps changing and reconfiguring major pieces for no good reason other than to change, and supporting it requires it to stop changing.
I use Linux as my daily driver, but there's no way in hell that I'd recommend it for everyone.
Wonder if they can cut some type of privacy deal with MS to not slurp so much data from their machines. Even the LTSB version reports back to MS way too much info (even when you try to turn it all off!). Windows 10 has become a privacy nightmare for end users. Munich would be much better off sticking with Linux since they've already made the initial investment. The next step would be a plan to migrate from the legacy Windows apps over to open source based alternatives.
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer.
Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
Until something unified and stable can actually compete with the ease of setup of Microsoft's office suite, Linux has no hope here.
So it looks like we'll be stuck with Windows Server and it's regular RDS server dropouts, printer spooler issues, DFS shares disappearing, and random Windows hangs for a long time into the forseeable future until someone can do something about it.
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It can't help that modern Linux distros have become such a shitshow. By that I mean the Linux and open source software ecosystem undergoes totally unnecessary change very rapidly. Often this has made the user experience worse, and it makes it harder to use and support Linux.
Some good examples of this are GNOME 3, systemd, PulseAudio, NetworkManager, and Firefox. They are examples of change for the sake of change alone.
Debian is a good example of what happens at the distro level. For much of its existence it was a stable OS, even if somewhat slow-moving at times. What you learned today could often be applied next year, if not several years after that. When there was change, it was done gradually and in a way that avoided disruption.
But Debian has taken a turn for the worst over the last several years, with things like systemd and GNOME 3 disruptively forced into the distro very rapidly, and even against the wishes of the Debian user community. Problems with such software have effectively ruined Debian for many users, especially long-time Debian users who came to expect a very high level of stability and reliability.
While some people claim that moving to a niche distro like Devuan, or Slackware, or Gentoo is an option, the reality is that such distros don't really provide a better experience. It's much more effective to move to an OS like FreeBSD, where its developers and maintainers have shown that they won't make radically disruptive changes on a frequent basis.
I can't blame organizations from moving away from Linux today. Modern Linux distros are nothing like typical Linux distros were a decade ago. Stability and sensible change have been thrown out in favor of hipster-oriented fads involving radical and disruptive change without much, if any, benefit.
Cue the comments saying that LibreOffice is "as good as" MS Office and that Mozilla Thunderturd + IMAP is as good as Exchange.
Linux's problems are much more foundational than that. Linux still doesn't have a good desktop environment, even after two decades of trying.
GNOME 3 has been a colossal disaster. KDE is too bloated. Xfce has stagnated. The various niche environments and window managers provide a shoddy and woefully incomplete user experience.
Windows and macOS both present a far superior desktop environment for users to work within.
Linux not having any good productivity apps ends up being irrelevant when there isn't a viable desktop environment to run such apps within!
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer.
Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
Until something unified and stable can actually compete with the ease of setup of Microsoft's office suite, Linux has no hope here.
So it looks like we'll be stuck with Windows Server and it's regular RDS server dropouts, printer spooler issues, DFS shares disappearing, and random Windows hangs for a long time into the forseeable future until someone can do something about it.
I'd seriously consider switching dev to linux, if I knew I didn't need windows any more at work. That being said, I'd still need access to windows to do non dev work at work email/etc. That could be solved with virtual machines run out of the company cloud. You might need to improve windows RDP client a bit. I don't know, does it now handle the newer security model? It would be nice if they did some magic with nvidia cards or something and got opengl/directx accelerated as well.
Now do I see my company seriously supporting linux on the desktop? Nah. You might be able to setup email, but some things aren't going to work, and they aren't going to pay for everyone to learn new technologies, or to pay better admins to handle the deltas. It is, in short, the same decision munich has.
The problem is that everyone and every city/etc is making the decision on linux individually. If they could coordinate, and divided up the tasks, then it could all become quite cost effective. A step in that direction is to make as much new internal software such that it will run on both linux and windows. It would cost more short term, but allow more flexibility long term.
But then I just stopped using the "incompatible software."
For most of my needs, I found new software that was compatible with the new OS. For the rest, I either replaced it with my own software or just dumped the need. After a few years, I did eventually purchase another windows machine, but it was only to drive hardware that required interfacing with Windows. I rarely boot the Windows machine up now too... Since I have had it MS decided to move all their functions around between Windows 7, 8, and 10... it's just annoying.
Munich should take the same approach. If they keep the crutch (Windows) around, their staff will never be able to fully commit to the new OS. They should completely ditch Windows for 5 years and let the shit hit the fan. Then, after 5 years, then can bring it back in a limited capacity if they really need it.
In all likelyhood, they just need Windows to run some other clunky piece of accounting software written in VB that probably needs to be modernized anyway.
Wolfgang! I have new quote from the Americans for Windows Zhen. Price went up 40%. Warum?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
In addition to the licensing costs, there's also the costs of having viruses free to roam your network. People used to say that if more people used *nix it would get viruses too, but given the dominance of iOS/Android perhaps Windows is just insecure by (lack of) design?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint
The three most despised names in the enterprise. At best you will only find a handful of people adept at using maybe two of these. There's nothing 'unified' about it. Sure, they 'could' be unified, but in most work environments they are a shit show of stuff that never really works the way you need it when you need it. Different departments with different standards storing documents in weird and wonderful ways.
The only thing 'unified' about these is how the licensing deals can be neatly wrapped up. That's the reality of MicroSoft in the workplace. It's never been about how hard or easy it is on the users. It's only ever been about bean counters and marketing double talk.
Linux doesn't need an Office, Exchange, Sharepoint killer. It has had these for years. It needs a shift in attitude from the people who sign for software purchasing.
Been running Linux Mint last 5 years, I think the Mate version. Been very happy. Coming from Windows 7, modern Windows and Mac seems unusable to me, very cluttered and user-unfriendly.
To be fair, bloat is really only an issue when it has a discernible negative impact on productivity. KDE works just fine if you have enough RAM... typically 32G or more, but I will agree that it's definitely not for smaller systems.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Linux still doesn't have a good desktop environment, even after two decades of trying.
The problem is Linux doesn't have any central project leadership. (After all Linux is 'just' a kernel or so I'm told.) OSS by nature, is decentralized. Unfortunately that is its Achilles heel because instead of working to make one desktop environment work for everyone like MS and Apple -- because they have ONE product they are trying to sell to their customers -- what you end up with are 50,000 geeks all with completely different ideas of what a desktop environment should look like and going off and creating YADE (yet another desktop environment) instead of working together to make the one, true DE better and more usable.
Hell M$ used to do psychological studies ffs. They would put people in locked rooms with one-way glass while they clicked around a screen while psychologists observed them so they could figure out where best to locate buttons on the screen. (This doesn't explain the abomination that was the Windows 8 Start screen but in retrospect Win8 wasn't as bad of an OS as people made it out to be. It was rough around the edges but made some significant improvements e.g. the ribbon in the File Explorer which I now find to be a much better file manager than Finder on Mac and the 186 different file managers on Linux. I wish they improved it instead of some of the shit that became Win10.)
I'm sure Apple does the same usability studies but I dare someone to show me where this was ever done in KDE or GNOME. I'm guessing it wasn't, the buttons are where some cranky dev put them and there they'll stay because you're wrong. Take one look at the shit-show that is gedit and tell me more than one person thought this was a good idea.
Could you not use something like Citrix Xenapp (as an example) to stream the non compatible apps to the linux desktops, instead of changing the OS? This would kind of be the best of both worls as you can keep your free open source desktops, but run the business line apps you require that work on windows?
Translating from German: "The right people have been greased, this will not happen again"
The issue is when you have multiple office users and computers, and printers, and applications which only run on Windows.
That's when user and computer management and application support gets to be a real problem. You won't notice these issues as a home computer user.
Bag on Active Directory as much as you want, but there's nothing comparable in Linux. I've deployed OpenLDAP before - but holy shit I wouldn't want to have to manage that by hand on a daily basis.
Windows server is more manageable. That said, it is a flaky POS and I wish it would die.
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Linux and open source software ecosystem undergoes totally unnecessary change very rapidly. Often this has made the user experience worse, and it makes it harder to use and support Linux.
This is so spot on. There are some parts of Windows, especially on the server side e.g. the Service Control Manager or the RRAS admin console that look EXACTLY the same as they did in 1999. Why you ask? BECAUSE THEY DON'T NEED TO FUCKING CHANGE. They are "done" and the only changes are to fix bugs.
If this was Linux these dialogs would have changed 6 times by now, because OSS developers prefer to fuck with things to feed their creative brains rather than focusing their energy on fixing bugs. Why? Well you can consider OSS developers are not being paid and in many cases are volunteers. You can't criticize or fire them since they're doing it for free. New design is more fun than fixing bugs which everyone will agree is boring. QED. So what you have is a constant influx of new features / requirements creep and moving shit around in the UI for no good reason while legit bugs never get fixed. The best example of this is Firefox and we all know why.
In commercial (proprietary) software you're typically working to a list of requirements and churning through them. Going off and doing whatever you feel like? You're fired. There's a lot of guys in Bangalore right now working for Intel, MS, IBM, etc doing boring as fuck work fixing bugs and software maintenance. It's a job, it pays the bills, they go home after 40 hrs but bugs get fixed.
In the OSS world this model is completely inappropriate to their development philosophy. It's apples to oranges.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to restart Firefox because of the fucking memory leaks.
It's my own observation that when most people are asked about what features they *really* depend upon in Office that are simply not present in the most comparable alternatives for Linux, the #1 answer seems to be simple full compatibility with MS Office itself. While the free tools for Linux can open and edit MS Office documents, often subtle formatting differences get introduced that can rather radically change how the document ends up looking, and this is, understandably, undesirable in many cases.
Mind you, this isn't even an issue when you and all of the people you may need to share such documents with are both using the alternative software in the first place. Considering the software is free, there's no real reason why this could not be done.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've gotten used to Libre Office, and prefer it. However Ecxel wipes the floor with Calc.
Most likely they can use Virtualbox for Win64 apps, on their Linux machines.
Win10 is a black box that spews out unknown telemetry. Trust MS ?
Probably because desktop itself is on the decline and new entry in the competition does not make sense. Mobile friendly options such as Android and Android compatible ChromeOS support a larger variety of business apps than Windows, although fewer of older ones. Accidentally, these are also Linux distributions.
Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer.
Nobody knows what Sharepoint actually does, so there can't possibly ever be a Linux version of such system. On a more serious note, the line of business software, whatever that might be for Munich is clearly the problem. If their client variability is an issue now, lets see just how bad the situation becomes when they want to "mobilize" their workers. Their problems just don't disappear by standardizing the clients.
The issue is that LibreOffice doesn't have integration with Sharepoint.
In fact, LibreOffice doesn't have integration with any Linux variants of Sharepoint, like Atlassian Confluence or anything like that.
Also, there's no support for any of these applications. The reason why Microsoft gets money is because they exist as an entity to blame when something goes wrong (which it inevitably does)
Free Software has who exactly to support it? Unless you're dealing with vendors like RedHat or even Oracle (and it's excuse for support) - you're out of luck.
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KDE works just fine if you have enough RAM... typically 32G or more, but I will agree that it's definitely not for smaller systems.
Oh for fuck's sake are you really saying that requiring 32G of RAM to run A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT is any respect a legitimate requirement?
Windows 95 used to run in 4MB of RAM; OS/2 even less I believe and that was over 20 years ago. 4 MEGS and it provided 80% of the functionality.
Anyone authoring a desktop environment that requires 32G to be usable should never be allowed to author a single line of code ever again.
So Linux adds some dumb audio drivers, whereas Windows changes it's entire UI that makes even GNOME 3 look good. So you say, that Metro UI is for home users and not servers? Well, GNOME 3 and PulseAudio aren't for back office servers either. Your Red Hat server is going to run the same software from 10 years ago most likely, whereas Windows is bad at doing this.
You will often hear the Windows guru say "have you tried shutting it off and turning it back on?" Yes, sounds like a joke but it happens. But you don't hear that from the Linux guru.
Either they're being misquoted or their information is out of date by a decade or more. Plenty of large corporations are using Linux. Even Microsoft itself is supporting Linux in various ways (for example: on Azure, rolling its own flavour of the Linux kernel, even possibly creating its own distro. Without more details it's hard to say what's going on, but we are wayyy past the point of deciding whether Linux is a "serious" alternative to Windows. I use it every day at work and have for many years at large companies and at home.
Actually, the problem is really that these users are only ever trained on Windows-only software... if instead they were trained on software that could run on Linux, then that would not be an issue.
And in fact, especially for something like office work, there is *VERY* little you would often need to do with a windows desktop that you could not accomplish with Linux as well. The only difference is in how the user is initially trained. Linux alternatives usually only seems harder to learn to some people because they are only familiar with Windows, not because the Linux software is necessarily objectively more difficult or time consuming to learn in the first place.
Considering such software is often freely available, there is no actual reason why a person could not be initially trained to use such software unless a substantial percentage of their work involves sharing documents with people who were trained only on Windows, thereby causing a catch-22.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Over time most apps will become web-based. If they wait it out, enough will be web-based to not have to use Windows much.
Table-ized A.I.
The Company hated Munich going Linux and have strives to get them back. Now the article cites a politicians conclusion not based on an evidence based report. Well microsoft can feel proud of their achievement.
I've seen home inkjets that only run on Windows (though usually they are reverse engineered and open source drivers are made available quite quickly), but these aren't the sort of printers that businesses should be using. Business printers use standard network protocols and PDF (or at least PCL) for job submission, which has been well supported by Linux from the start. Printers that only run Windows are a straw man, as are computers that only run WIndows, which these days is basically confined to Surface tablets that won't run most x86 Windows apps that aren't designed for touch interfaces either.
Basically the reasons to run Windows for a business are Active Directory, Exchange and Office. These specific applications are where the Free Software community needs to direct their efforts if they really want Linux on the desktop as an end goal.
You're right, the Linux guru knows that systemd might keep the server from booting for some fuckall reason if he power cycles it, and it's on with the shoes and coat at 3am as you're off to the data center.
Next: Munich fell victim for new breed od ransomware after switching back to Windows :D
Never had a problem with KDE on 4GB of RAM. The entire Desktop Environment shouldn't even amount to 32GB, I doubt it would even be 16GB.
Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Present.
It's not about needed killer something. It's about good enough.
Sharepoint is an alternative file system, largely inspired by the web. Hyperlinks and embedded documents as opposed to "folders" and "files".
The biggest advantage of SharePoint in this regard is the ability to add additional "signage" or markups to assist the user in understanding the nature of the data in a particular file.
I have 32 GB RAM and I had to give up on KDE because it was too slow with network files.
KDE works just fine if you have enough RAM... typically 32G or more, but I will agree that it's definitely not for smaller systems.
Well, just tap that FUD keg and let the swill flow.
KDE works just fine on 4G or less. Often much less. 99% of Linux desktops have never even heard of 32G. Your statement is so bogus I seriously wonder what your purpose is posting it.
Oh, so because something required only 4 to 8 megs 20 years ago that should be acceptable now? 30 years ago things only required 640K.... 40 years ago, things didn't even require 64K.
The fact that memory requirements have only increased by not even an entire order of magnitude after nearly a quarter of a century is actually the very *OPPOSITE* of bloat.
And no, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for a desktop environment to need 32G to function well in today's world. It's 2017. Is it for everyone? No... but neither is an electric vehicle, for example... which typically comes with a sticker shock when you see that it's often double the price (and in some cases, even more) of an otherwise comparable ICE vehicle.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
15% client market share and falling, it's just getting to the point where it's just too much hassle to support because its endlessly creating compatibility issues.
There problem is they're using MIXED environments (Windows and Linux), and Microsoft inspired consultants are attaching the cost of transfers between those environments to Linux, but it reveals an underlying problem.
For a while you could use LibreOffice to avoid cross training people on Microsofts 'ribbon' bar, that joke of an interface. But at some point you have to ditch Microsoft completely to avoid those costs.
Most of the world is using tablets and phones and open source servers, and Windows client software needs to move with the times too.
I've was playing with KDE5 on an 8GB machine recently. I really felt the difference in peformance between that and what I normally use. I haven't ever tried it with just 16G though, so maybe that might be fine as well. I said 32G because I've used it at that size and find that it works well.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The office environment got along fine before sharepoint and I dare say that even when it's used today, it's often used clunkly by users who don't really understand how to use it.
You're blaming Linux for not integrating with Sharepoint. That's just mis-direction. You should have been asking yourself why you needed Sharepoint to begin with.
Graphics card drivers maybe? KDE is a hardware accelerated UI, don't think it performs well without proper drivers.
Not sure what performance issues you were noticing. Linux does a lot of caching, which offsets the performance of the hard drive. The more memory the more caching, so you may not stop noticing performance increases until your RAM capacity exceeds your disk capacity.
Noticing speed improvements with more RAM does not indicate slow performance on lower quantities of RAM.
What speed hard drives did the systems with different RAM capacities have?
Windows 8, windows 10... suffering. Change not just for change sake but also with more instrumentation to spy on you, to advertise to you. Ultimate goal is that we pay a monthly fee AND we have to put up with commercials to use our own computer.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Do you run a business or are an IT manager supervising the needs of many?
Or are you just "some dude" and since you like Linux to surf the net and -- cuz it works for you, "Linux and FireFox and Open Office and 640kb" ought to be enough for anybody?
The nice thing about being "some dude" is that you don't have to get results like a manager would. And your opinion doesn't generate any performance metrics because you aren't producing anything that could be measured.
We ad a sharepoint system at our work, a company with a few hundred employees. We had two microsoft engineers trying to actually get it to work over two years, finally it was ditch, because we could never get it to perform, even though no one was actively using it.
I've never seen a Sharepoint implementation that had better functionality than a share network drive.
The MS headquarter is in Munich. The new mayor of Munich is a great fan of MS who always wanted to end LiMux. While the LiMux made some mistakes by not including employees in their process, the Accountability Office determined that the move back would be a waste of money and time. Anyway, Schleswig-Holstein, the most northern state of Germany, us going for OSS.
Hello? Remote console. This is not 1995.
But yes Linux not rebooting for some dumbass reason isn't uncommon.
You're right, the Linux guru knows that systemd might keep the server from booting for some fuckall reason if he power cycles it, and it's on with the shoes and coat at 3am as you're off to the data center.
If you experience SERVER problems due to systemd, you can look at the documentation on their website at https://www.freedesktop.org/wi...
freedesktop... every time it makes me chuckle
lucm, indeed.
Exactly what software do you think you can replac exchange, AD, and office with?
And then everyone company will use that same software so once trained the employee can go to another job and have the same software?
Riiiiiiiight!
Oh, so because something required only 4 to 8 megs 20 years ago that should be acceptable now? 30 years ago things only required 640K.... 40 years ago, things didn't even require 64K.
Yes. Because the fundamental problem being solved hasn't changed. You have an application launcher, windowmanager, and associated utilities. Please explain what magical technological strides have been made to attack this problem differently in such novel ways that justify an 8,192 fold increase in RAM requirements to accomplish the exact same task that was being accomplished 20 years ago.
And no, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for a desktop environment to need 32G to function well in today's world
Let me guess. You drive a Tesla and make sure everyone you make an acquaintance of knows this. You think their iPad-as-a-speedo abortion is an example of "great design".
Thinking like this is a cancer unto the world of software engineering and I hope for my own sake you do not work on any product I will ever use or own.
"Running Linux will ultimately prove unsustainable, suggests the council, due to the need to also keep a minority of Windows machines to run line-of-business software incompatible with Linux."
The cost is the cost of keeping a few Windows machines running, which in turn are locked into their own ecosystem and need that Windows ecosystem to be maintained too.
Realistically, with Android taking over the world client side and Linux taking over server side, the future is not dominated by Windows. The few machines left running Windows need to be fazed out. It has no future.
Nobody will pay for Office when open source office suites are free. Nobody will develop using Visual Studio when the bulk of development work is done for Java on Android.
You're pretending Linux is the cost here, but its supporting these few Microsoft machines among an open system. With Microsoft interconnection being such a PITA, its an extra support cost.
Munich needs to move with the times, take the plunge and rid themselves of the last of Microsoft. Because if they lock themselves into Microsoft now, MS will have to get its profits from ever fewer locked in users, and that will be them.
Nobody copied that ribbon thing on Microsoft and LibreOffice works cross platform, something that is the cause of the cost on Windows now.
It's all the cost of cross training people to Windows that's the big overhead, and that cost needs to be loaded on the Windows side, since its a Windows cost.
PC sales continue to decline (7.3% yoy), its now selling less than 1/8th of Android device volumes sold. You can pretend that isn't important, but the world is moving to tablet devices and Microsoft isn't winning.
Can you imagine someone heavily invested in Microsoft IIS? What a joke they are now, Microsoft server share is nowhere.
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer
There are office competitors like LibreOffice "good enough" for general use. Microsoft Office is better across the board yet alternatives are viable and don't suck ass.
I never understood exchange. By that I mean every time I tried to get it to work with just a handful of users there would always be some BS you would end up having to deal with. Services randomly crashing, random shit hanging up queues requiring manual debugging to repair. I never understood how people can use Exchange in production without going completely insane. Maybe there is a secret to making it work, maybe my experience is not representative. Granted it's been about 10 years since I've touched with my first experience predating availability of SMTP bridge but my question is what do most businesses really need in groupware that Zimbra can't deliver?
As for SharePoint just say NO. Get a Wiki or write real software to manage whatever the heck your abusing sharepoint for. It's obvious why so many are attracted to the idea of sharepoint. The promise of anyone just throwing shit together without any thought given to design and have it sort of work is a compelling concept... too bad reality doesn't work that way.
Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
In the previous sentence you declared there are no comparable solutions. In the very next sentence you contradict yourself admitting there are comparable applications. Please make up your mind.
Zimbra actually has dependencies on libreoffice for composition features and libreoffice has wiki publishing features.
Until something unified and stable can actually compete with the ease of setup of Microsoft's office suite, Linux has no hope here.
Libreoffice is either bundled or available as add-on package across most distros. It's trivial to get. Zimbra FFS is as plug and play as it gets.. you can literally spin up a nicely packaged VM with it running in minutes and unlike exchange it is actually reliable.
Why would LibreOffice need integration with Confluence? Confluence is a wiki-type web application. You pull it up in any browser. You can put links to pages into any ODF document. You can attach ODF documents to Confluence pages, or link to them if they're stored on any Web server. Exactly what integration are you asking for?
We should always consider the TCO and not the sticker price.
At the office we pay roughly $2,500 per hypervisor per year to run RHEL virtual machines, plus a ton of extras (they like to licenses useful things separately, a la Oracle). VMWare license not included, of course.
Retail price for the Microsoft equivalent, Windows Server DataCenter, is a one-time $6,000 fee and that includes Hyper-V, which is nowadays more or less comparable to VMWare. And nobody in the enterprise world pays retail with Microsoft, there's always a huge discount for ELA.
Bottom line, if you want support, Windows is less expensive than RHEL.
I think Oracle Linux is slightly less expensive than RHEL but then you just get CentOS + Oracle drivers so it's not really the same product. Not sure about SLES but I doubt they're cheaper. Last time I checked Ubuntu was $1,500 / yr, but then who wants that in their data centers I wonder.
lucm, indeed.
If your organization fully adopts Windows 10 then you can boot up anywhere in the world that offers internet connectivity and securely be connected to your corporate 'mother ship' with absolutely zero end-user expertise. Sure, linux gurus can achieve the same functionality with minimal effort but once again Microsoft wins the usability wars, IMHO.
horseshit. Microsoft drastically changed the settings dialogs between w2k and xp. They re-grouped stuff, moved things around. Even settings for things like Windows Explorer moved around. Meanwhile, Gnome changed some settings, but a major re-grouping never happened at the same scale as Windows.
Easier for USA to spy on Germany when they use Windows 10 with all that built in spying
renegotiate a site license
Much like Windows, really.
GNOME 3 has been a colossal disaster.
I use Gnome 3 and it works pretty well. The only customization I did was to install Tweak tools so I could get min/max buttons on the windows and a taskbar on each screen. Other than that everything works well, at least on xorg (I've had a few issues with Java GUI on wayland because of my high resolution monitors).
I've used Cinnamon and KDE but came back to Gnome because it's more stable. I use Fedora, not sure if the Gnome on other distros is broken, but overall I really don't see why some people get their panties in a bunch about Gnome 3.
In any event, if that's what you call a colossal disaster I hope you never have to face actual challenges in your life because you don't seem to have a high threshold for problems.
lucm, indeed.
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer. Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
Pretty much, this is all about Linux on the client. Red Hat, creators of all things terrible according to /. trolls is on solid, stable revenue growth going from 1.5bn in FY 2015 to 2.1bn in FY 2017 and if the last quarters go as well as the first two then ~2.4bn in FY 2018. Even Microsoft says nearly one in three Azure VMs are Linux. As for the latter part, Linux proponents have tried for 20 years but essentially it boils down to two problems:
1) It's not MS Office/Photoshop etc.
2) Catch 22, no Linux users = no market = no Linux version
I know at least a few users who would never take anything other than Excel. And to be honest that's by itself is okay, the problem is that it's owned by Microsoft so there's no incentive to offer it on Linux.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
https://systemd-free.org/
There's openRC if you really hate systemd that much. And I would just stick with XFCE and ALSA since that's all you need basically https://sourceforge.net/projec... here's a base installer if you think you have to install then remove systemd.
Yes, it is. You barely dodged a grammar bullet today, son.
what you end up with are 50,000 geeks all with completely different ideas of what a desktop environment should look like and going off and creating YADE (yet another desktop environment) instead of working together to make the one, true DE better and more usable.
I think that's a strength, not a weakness. Look at Ubuntu; they had this horror called Unity that was basically the Apple philosophy on Linux, a one-size-fits-none GUI that "knew better" than its users and wanted to have a similar experience for everyone, and it has been a huge failure.
You don't succeed in life by adapting your model to be a clone of the competition. You succeed by embracing your identity and providing a real alternative, not a discount runner-up.
As long as people can install free software and customize it the way they want, the Linux desktop is a winner. Let Microsoft worry about market share, who cares.
lucm, indeed.
MS but huge efforts into wiping out all that office tools knowhow in the past decade and now it is debatable how much you can trust that they don't try to do it again.
the thing is, MS had good solid experts on refining the basic rules of interaction, double click to select a word in the early '90s, how the windows behaved and so forth, including what was interactable - even switch to having a taskbar and a button labeled as Start needed no new basic training. all the features of the text editor you knew where to find - the applications came with solid built in help tools - and the interaction remained the same for advanced users.
they have dialed it back a little bit with windows 10 compared to windows 8, which was so bad that it made necessary in the first time since 1990 to retrain office personnel for a new operating system in the companies that were too stupid to upgrade to it(it offering no benefits to any business users over windows 7).
currently microsoft throws still that out good research with windows 10 install procedure even - clearly separate paths are not marked as clearly separate paths but instead another is just a word and another is clearly marked as a button(the purpose is to increase the number of people creating new online ms accounts, which is not necessary to use windows 10 but they do make an effort to _not_ be clear about that).
add all the walking backs on having all the applications friendly for font size choosing and all that to the mix with metro apps, the dialed back enterprise control functionality, the options that are supposed to shut down call home, the random upgrades/updates that can do all kinds of breakage and well... the ms option has to be goddamned cheap to be cheaper actually and a lot less predictable in expenses. you cannot know when they decide to switch off support for old hardware and roll out the upgrade on exactly that hardware they no longer support.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Linux's design is optimized for single-purpose servers running popular server applications which are in the distro, or custom apps maintained internally by a team of programmers (i.e. google, FB). It runs Apache and database and the stuff I do at work fantastically well, but it's not so great on the desktop.
Servers are professionally managed by an IT team, with software rollouts being carefully planned and often a whole new OS+app image being created to change them.
Desktops have diverse software applications installed one by one over time as needs arise, and a total OS update is often too disruptive to do frequently. Because of Linux's dependency-centric software model, installing applications over time in an unplanned way can lead to system instability; installing libraries app B needs can break previously installed app A, and updates can break them both. In Windows, an application will basically keep running forever once you've installed it; its libraries come with it. Linux library sharing DLL-hell means every update can break something unless it's in the distro, and not everything's in the distro in office environments where people are doing actual (and often idiosyncratic) work; there are going to be commercial applications, old applications that aren't teh hotness any more and aren't getting maintained well, stuff written internally 5 years ago by a guy that left, and so on.
Sharing libraries makes sense for servers; it uses memory and cache efficiently. It's a disaster for desktops. The linux maintainers care about servers, that's where the money comes from. Desktop linux is always a secondary market for them (they all use Linux on their desktops, but only to run vi, gcc, and firefox). So don't expect DLL hell to ever get fixed, Linus probably thinks about this the same way he thinks about binary drivers ("if it's not open source and popular than fuck you don't use it"). When google adapted linux for phones and made Android, they basically said apps should be written in Java. I'm betting their whole reason for that was to sidestep Linux's DLL hell issue. Phones have limited uses, so I suppose that works okay there, but it's a crap answer for the desktop (a lot of light office apps probably could be written in Java or go, but someone has to do that).
Oh, and every. single. ubuntu. install I've ever done (running it as I type this) has been unable to reliably print to my networked laser printer. I sometimes get it working, and it stops a few weeks or months later (probably an update). Printing is a really basic function that is used in every single office environment. I've NEVER been unable to print from ANY windows machine in like 2 decades. You know how I solve my printing problems? Sure you do. Print that boarding pass from the Windows machine.
Not ready for prime time. Unfortunately, probably never will be. Unfortunate because Windows 10 could really use some competition (or, frankly, replacement).
The basic problem is that the design requirements for the desktop are different from those for the server, and they are *NOT* simpler. They're actually much more complex, because of the heterogeneous and time varying way that people use desktop machines. So saying "we've got this great server OS, let's get people to use it on the desktop too, it can run vi" just doesn't work.
Meh we've had endless discussions and none of the scenarios were really more cost-effective. There's too many packages and products licensed differently, we don't have just one type of workload.
Anyways both the RHEL and MSFT licenses are peanuts compared to the obscene Oracle and IBM licenses. When we get SQL Server on RHEL I will personally fly to wherever the fuck Oracle have their headquarters to take a piss on their logo.
lucm, indeed.
This story encapsulates, with startling economy and elegance, everything that is wrong with our alleged Western "civilization". (The thing that Gandhi, when asked, said he thought "would be a very good idea").
Apparently expensive software costs less than free software. That's the basic truth here. Of course it is all dressed up with frills and furbelows: maintenance costs, training costs, blah di blah di blah.
But the fundamental assertion is that expensive software costs less than free software. And people believe that! Not so surprising, perhaps, in a world dominated by marketing, advertising, and political campaigning.
In a world where the authorities can utter such a startling piece of imbecility, "experts" can be found to support it with an impressive array of "facts" and "figures", and credulous multitudes can be found to believe it... how can you ever hope to accomplish anything honest?
"Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
>> If they believe that Microsoft is their future then so be it.
If you believe Death is your future, so be it.
aaaaaaa
KDE works just fine if you have enough RAM... typically 32G or more
I call BS on that, have you ever run a Linux distribution with KDE?
I run a Linux desktop (Fedora 26 - KDE Spin) which has 16GB of DDR4 RAM and I am not overclocking. I have never once seen memory usage approach 8GB (the average is under 3GB) much less 16GB and I do run many different types of applications over multiple desktops.
In fact, most applications open in less than one second although there are some that do take five seconds (ie. The Gimp), SSD's are great. My system is coming up for its second year and I have the latest Fedora distribution with KDE and I have never had a performance issue.
In addition, I also have a ten-year-old HP Celeron laptop that I use for testing purposes. It has 4GB of memory and it also runs Fedora 26 - KDE spin. I have not noticed any performance issues with regard to KDE but have found that playback of H265 files (H264 is fine) is problematic but that has nothing to do with KDE.
BTW. I prefer KDE's graphical interface to Windows 10's graphical interface.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Windows not likely to run a software from 10 years ago? Are you from some kind of a parallel universe? Windows backwards compatibility is legendary. Windows 10 is able to run most software written for Windows 95, but it is often very difficult to get a package from Debian Jessie running in Debian Stretch.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And this attitude - why would user even need x - is exactly why Linux on desktop will never happen.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Windows 10 (32 bit) runs Word for Windows 6.0, which was written for Windows 3.x.
Claus
And I forgot to mention the ribbon bar interface change where some functionality was completely lost for 6 months before I figured out how to do it again because it had been so well hidden.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
to replace whatever it is you need Windows for. That way you're free from the American grasp for good, and the software could be used in other places in Germany. You're completely overestimating the cost and effort, and underestimating the value and savings you get as a result.
Saying that "Linux is unsustainable" tells me that you're being bribed or offered sweet deals to keep Microsoft tapping your coffers and sensitive information.
And this attitude - "how dare you ask why I need integration with Confluence?!" - is why you don't have integration with Confluence. As GP explained, it really isn't obvious what exactly you're even asking for. "Integration" is very vague - unless you can actually tell someone what you want from it you can't expect anyone to deliver.
nope, its pretty shit. :linux today. I can't run Deus Ex or Mac Payne (audio doesn't appear).
I can still run Rune on
Windows 10 runs on 8G just fine. The "general public" is just moving to 16G right now. So, yeah 32Gb JUST for the desktop is pretty unreasonable in 2017.
Donâ(TM)t adjust your speakers; that sound you hear is half the worldâ(TM)s law offices collectively sighing in relief.
IKR? Such simple things as a goddamn clipboard are broken and various programs can not consistently either copy or paste stuff from other programs. Another basic but bungled functionality is support of multiple displays: some programs shit themselves, throwing dialogs and opening drop down menus in wrong places when using more than 1 display.
But it is free. In other words: worth its money in a negative way.
When you figure Linux desktop has around 2% or less users. You have to figure most employees were still using Windows on their personal PC's. This made Linux more complex to understand and unfamiliar to most Munich employee's. Sure the argument can be made that Linux is a good desktop OS, but in reality that's were the problems begin. Not enough solid applications that replace the ones on Windows, and also the compatibility of making a app on Linux work with one that runs in Windows. In the end Munich learned that the two don't mix very well, and that their employee's could work better with a more familiar Windows system. This should not surprise anyone, and could have been predicted.
It takes courage to post a comment that appreciates Windows!
Because Microsoft never inflicted Windows Vista and Windows 8 on the world. They didn't destroy a stable Office interface with the disaster known as the "Ribbon". Windows is totally stable, and immune to the whims of GUI designers looking to make their mark. /sarc
Seriously, this is a disease that affects the entire software community. However, Linux gives you the tools to minimize the problems. Granted, you won't escape SystemD easily, but Gnome is actually easy: choose a more stable desktop, like xfce. I've been using Xubuntu for ages - any changes to the desktop have been minor. There are a few hiccups in getting things configured, but even those hiccups have been stable for a long time.
I think the mistake that Munich has made is allowing such a large set of Windows computers to exist. This means that they are essentially maintaining two complete infrastructures, requiring two sets of administrators, support personnel who have to cover both worlds, etc.. They haven't ever finished their migration, and that is the real problem.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
SoGo for exchange, Samba for AD, and LibreOffice with Evolution for Office on Gnome3 would be a starting point. I would note at this point that a Windows system could quite happily talk to both SoGO and Samba and not really know it was not talking to a real Microsoft setup from the users perspective.
Just because *YOU* don't know what is out there does not mean it does not exist.
It can't help that modern Linux distros have become such a shitshow. By that I mean the Linux and open source software ecosystem undergoes totally unnecessary change very rapidly. Often this has made the user experience worse, and it makes it harder to use and support Linux.
This is not the case here though since the City of Munich essentially made their own GNU/Linux distro which they control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
Yes, building your own distro is a lot of work. I don't know why they didn't just go with something like CentOS, even licensing RHEL would probably be cheaper than, again, building your own distro.
As simple as that. German taxpayers funding the US? Hell no.
Nice Windows 7 ad, but you have missed a few updates. Now we have Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and even Windows 8.2 aka 8+2 aka 10, where the desktop is half-assed, and most of the time you are stuck in a touch UI designed for small screens and large fingers.
If you want a nice modern desktop UI it's either Linux or OSX, Microsoft is retiring theirs.
In a sufficiently large company, AD itself is only the first step. You need AD with integrated DNS and group policies. Unless I am misinformed, Samba is nowhere near that level of functionality. Getting Samba itself up and running without those other things is kinda pointless.
The answer is easy: exclusively use Linux clients. For those cases where Windows is needed keep a handful of VMs around that run Windows. This case also shows that the common claim that for every Windows app there is an equal Linux counterpart is false. It further shows that the Windows ecosystem made it impossible to switch to alternatives because there are none.
If you have more fiddling (instalation, maintenance) for free than expansive software, more training, and are forced to use time to bypass idiosynchazie of free software, yes at some point your free software will be more expansive. See, the initial cost is the not the only one. "Of course it is all dressed up with frills and furbelows: maintenance costs, training costs, blah di blah di blah" and that is the plain truth OSS advocate are better off accepting than be in denial of. I love linux and despise windows probably as much as you do, but I do not blind myself to the problem open source software has.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Perhaps this will be the case one they finish implementing all the Office features in LibreOffice.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I spend more time per month fiddling with my Arch linux install at work, or even my own Ubuntu Install at home, than my windows install (on which I am admin) at work and at home. That time ALSO count the time spend on stack exchange, wiki, and linux forum to understand some dumb stuff not working, training myself etc... Count THAT too and accept that for that lost time tehre is price tag and you will quickly understand why free software can be more expansive than proprietary one.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Office? Excel + VBA make for a powerful data hacking tool that has no equivalent in the FOSS world, but for 99% of the stuff that goes on in a typical office, LibreOffice is perfectly adequate. Even if you regularly exchange documents with Office users.
Sharepoint? Dear god. There is no turnkey replacement for Sharepoint and there is a very good reason for that: Sharepoint tries to be a document management system, discussion forum, corporate Wiki, team site, CMS, and workflow application, and it sucks at all of these compared to dedication solutions, even some 10 year old software outperforms Sharepoint in terms of ease of use, functionality, support cost and effort, security, and management. What those dedicated solutions lack is integration amongst each other and with Office. But in practice, that integration is more trouble than it's worth. Sharepoint is a great little tool for small and medium enterprises, but it scales poorly unless you throw insane amounts of money at it (and then it still scales poorly).
What Sharepoint has on other solutions is how users cope and accept its shortcomings. It's a bit like the old "not getting fired for buying IBM"-adage; if you get something else and users get frustrated, they'll ask "why on earth did you choose this?". If you get SP, they might grumble but in general they will not question your decision for going with an industry standard MS solution.
I agree when it comes to Exchange / Outlook
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I notice that Cinnamon isn't mentioned - even though it is apparently No. 3 (just after Gnome3 and KDE). Not exactly a "niche" wm, and while it isn't perfect, it doesn't get in my way when I use it, and is a great deal better (for me) than No.1 or No.2 (both of which live up to the scatalogical double-entendre, IMHO).
It's not a strength in the business world. If a business has to change from Gnome 3 to KDE because people can't agree on how the WM should look, while it's nice that it can be changed, that's a big problem from a workflow perspective.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Simple. Use both. Linux-desktop, Windows via RDP.
That way, the hard Windows management stuff is centralized, but those Windows programs are available via a little effort, if anyone really needs them.
If managing Linux desktops is an issue, you have the wrong people.
Heck, I bet most of Munich-city govt would be better off with chromebooks. Really.
I love my chromebook - with ChromeOS wiped around day 3 after purchase. Battery life (10+ hrs) is fantastic! Core i3 CPU - which is more than enough for 99% of city-govt people. 1080p screen, 128G SSD and under 1 kg in weight.
Just be certain to get a USB3-to-Ethernet adapter. Wifi is a terrible idea.
Man, this has been done for decades, maybe even more.
How many grassroots associations are founded, funded, controlled by conglomerates? (even since before the software industry!)
Can they at least devise a new trick? We didn't like it already in the case of the ISO imbroglio...
Some good examples of this are GNOME 3, systemd, PulseAudio, NetworkManager, and Firefox. They are examples of change for the sake of change alone.
"Change I don't like" != "change for the sake of change alone"
This vote seems to come up every few months
https://www.google.ca/search?q...
Yet they still stick with Linux
Twinstiq, game news
t is often very difficult to get a package from Debian Jessie running in Debian Stretch.
But you don't have too. Debian is all open source - if you have Debian Stretch, then you have the Stretch version of whatever sw you're using.
Only closed sw need to run an old version - because they can't recompile someone else's proprietary sw.
Shops that successfully run Linux everywhere seem to be businesses that are actively engaged in creating technology. Their ranks are filled with engineers, and they have the talent in-house to develop and support anything they need. Linux is ideally suited to those environments due to it's legal flexibility.
It's pretty great to develop technology without having to ask for licensing or permission to do so.
Unfortunately for Linux - those types of shops are small in number compared with the myriad of other businesses that only use technology to conduct some other line of business. Those businesses generate outputs that are not technology (Finance, Education, Healthcare, Government, Construction....etc). These businesses make up a very large part of the economy. They want to buy commercial off the shelf software that will help them conduct their businesses.
TL:DR - Non tech businesses don't want to reinvent the wheel just to conduct their business - so they buy and use commercial off the shelf software and hardware.
The computer and associated software are tools meant to enhance the employee's productivity. Morale can take a big hit as well when your life is a constant struggle to accomplish what you need to accomplish. If you pay 10 million more for licenses and gain 20 million in productivity, that's a win.
Bah, ha ha ha. Ha ha HA! Ha ha. ....... HA!
Oh man. That's the best laugh I've had all morning. Christ on a crutch Dunkelfalke, I got software from Windows XP SP3 that won't install on Win 7! And don NOT tell me this is an anomaly because some of this is Adobe software. Supporting software at my job is like walking through a minefield because I NEVER know what I'll get with Windows. Linux is a breeze in comparison because I can control the libraries.
Maybe you are one of those techs who just pushes a button and hopes for the best. Good for you. I can't do that with Windows, not if I want to keep my job. Every day I need to take great pains in order to ensure my users can do what they did yesterday -- with the exception of the ten Linux users who never complain.
The city of Munich has suggested it will cost too much to carry on using Linux alongside Windows, despite having spent millions of euros switching PCs to open-source software... "
It's the typical problem in software regarding how to account for costs. It's the eternal battle between CAPEX vs OPEX. It is always cheaper to dump all windows licenses and install whatever happens to be the Linux distro of the day (CAPEX, sorta). It is quite another when it comes to the cost of operations, finding people who can use the software, training, familiarity, etc.
No matter what Linux distro you pick, it requires a lot of elbow grease to put it to a place where non-tech users can actually use it to get work done. You do not need that with Windows even when you factor out security risks, viruses, etc (And a lot of that get filtered out if you slap something like Citrix on front of it.)
I've done most of my development on Linux (and before that Solaris, HP and Irix, hell, even Vax in the day.) I prefer that (most of the time) over doing development in Windows. But for day-to-day non-programming work (or for media consumption or for, say, clerical/financial work). Sorry, Windows.
That's just the gist of it. The year of the Linux desktop never came, and (unless something radical happens), it never will.
Hey good news, SQL Server /is/ available on RHEL.
https://blogs.technet.microsof...
Read the goddamn Wikipedia article you linked to! It repeatedly points out that their "distro", as you wrongly call it, is "based on Ubuntu".
Making relatively minor organization-specific tweaks to a common Linux distro to create custom organization-specific installation media or images or VM templates isn't something unusual. It's quite common in any sizable organization.
And it sure as hell doesn't mean that the organization has "essentially made their own GNU/Linux distro", like you incorrectly claim.
Ubuntu plus a few tweaks isn't a new distro. It's just Ubuntu with a few tweaks!
As much as I am a vocal Linux supporter, the fact of the matter is that Linux has no comparable turnkey Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint killer.
Oh yes, there are comparable applications - but none of them work together in an easily managed way.
Until something unified and stable can actually compete with the ease of setup of Microsoft's office suite, Linux has no hope here.
So it looks like we'll be stuck with Windows Server and it's regular RDS server dropouts, printer spooler issues, DFS shares disappearing, and random Windows hangs for a long time into the forseeable future until someone can do something about it.
Very much depends on mindset. If you want things to work in the "Windows Way", then of course the Linux alternatives will not appear comparable.
But the simple fact is most people don't spend their time SETTING UP their office suite. People should be USING their office suite. I'm not even sure what setting up Linux office suites require. Just install them and go.
As for Sharepoint, I can't comment. We had a MS zealot come in at our place, and try and roll out Sharepoint company wide, and it was so dysfunctional most people ignored it until we were subsumed by another company (and all the MS stuff was thrown out in favour of Notes/Domino). But this was >10 years ago, it may be more functional now.
With the march towards web based applications (especially CRM and ERM), the specific client is becoming less and less critical. A functioning web browser can provide most applications people need for their jobs these days. Which is good.
Linux is a great operating system but lacks a usable office application suite. I have used various versions of the open source equivalent and found them lacking. Functions that are buggy and broken in the open source version.
I'm very glad there is not more software like Exchange/Office/Sharepoint out there. There are way better solutions out there to fill any sort of need you have, the thing is finding out what that is for your environment.
There are plenty of groupware, text editors and wiki's out there, the Microsoft suite is one of the most hated pieces in the repertoire where I work but to be able to give each department what they need requires a knowledgable (as in domain knowledge) staff person dedicated to that area and many other groups don't have that person, so they "officially" only have Microsoft, but plenty of shadow systems exist in Dropbox, Google and various other third party.
If you say Microsoft products are good enough for your company, you can be sure as hell that you don't have any control over what your users are ACTUALLY doing with your data.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
This, and more. In my experience the biggest problem with Linux is the desktop applications available to it, which range from bad to mediocre. Let's use my experience with GIMP as an example:
- The UI does not respect most of the main desktop patterns (in the KDE case, but also happens in Gnome);
- Some updates required updating critical parts of the distribution, with unforeseen consequences for other applications;
- Once the update I needed to do required that I have to install from the source code, with horrible results (I ended up getting it to work but only after much insistence and dead ends in obscure forums going after answers to the errors found);
- When I thought everything was working, an apparently unrelated upgrade of the distro made GIMP stop working, and if I wanted to revert the change I would have to uninstall most of the software that makes KDE work (the package system stupidly tries to remove in cascade anything that depends on the package you want to change or remove, even if it means destroying the desktop);
I ended up giving up and today I use Windows as a desktop (and still GIMP for not having a better free alternative), but updating Gimp does not "destroy" my desktop anymore if something goes wrong in the update. Now try to sell this (the Linux desktop experience) for a normal desktop user without programming knowledge, it is a disaster waiting to happen.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Let's call it a weakness and a strength. 3-4 competitors offering real alternatives is well and good vs a single monolith everyone has to use. 100 or even 1000 cooks in the kitchen not so much.
...despite having spent millions of euros switching PCs to open-source software... "
They already switched and trained, so in this case your argument is void. They are considering switching from free software to non-free software while incurring additional training and switching costs.
The problem is deeper. Take 5 different desktop systems to Linux, you will have 5 different ways of dealing with a printer. Most of them can not even agree on a common way to copy / paste between applications, even in the "Windows 10 disaster" you can copy / paste in a consistent way between applications.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
GNOME 3 has been a colossal disaster.
I use Gnome 3 and it works pretty well. The only customization I did was to install Tweak tools so I could get min/max buttons on the windows and a taskbar on each screen. Other than that everything works well, at least on xorg (I've had a few issues with Java GUI on wayland because of my high resolution monitors).
I've used Cinnamon and KDE but came back to Gnome because it's more stable. I use Fedora, not sure if the Gnome on other distros is broken, but overall I really don't see why some people get their panties in a bunch about Gnome 3.
In any event, if that's what you call a colossal disaster I hope you never have to face actual challenges in your life because you don't seem to have a high threshold for problems.
I had the same experience. We have a large set of Linux workstations in our company and we specifically moved to Fedora because we got sick of fiddling with broken stuff in other distros.
Well no.... in my case it's 32G for the desktop + whatever applications you wanted to run. The notion of a desktop that you don't even actually run any applications on is kind of pointless.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
20K linux + 4K windows? You should be running 500 windows PC's (server) at the most for legacy in an virtual machine environment. Possibly virtual terminals for workstations. You need programmers on your staff and not web developers.
How were those apps not moved to Windows terminal servers a decade ago?
Sure, there may be a handful of dedicated machines that run industrial control products, but those are in a separate support silo, just like the Ricoh photocopier doesn't count as FreeBSD desktop.
But this brings up one very good point - Linux doesn't have a lobbying arm and politicians on the take, so where politicians are involved it's not the best place to push for FLOSS solutions.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Never happen? Uh.... what is it that you suppose that people who believe they are using Linux are using then? Saying it will never happen just because it might not ever be popularly accepted is like telling some multi-millionaire that nobody else has ever heard of that they will never amount to anything just because they aren't famous.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What commercials? I run Windows 10 on my laptop and don't see any commercials.
Your Red Hat server is going to run the same software from 10 years ago most likely, whereas Windows is bad at doing this.
Uh, what? Windows is well known for its outstanding backwards compatibility. I can run many binaries from the Windows 95 days on a Windows 10 machine. You know, Windows has many issues, but backward compatibility really isn't one of them.
Honestly, I'm not sure why you're comparing Red Hat servers with Windows desktops, either. Windows is clearly dominant on the desktop, with Linux clearly dominant in the server and mobile spaces.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
We dropped AD for jumpcloud. It's pretty bad ass.
No... I think Teslas are overpriced for what you get.
32G of ram costs only about $350.... and is quite far from the most expensive component in a computer. A modern MB and CPU can each cost much more than that.
The computers *ARE* doing more today, however. *FAR* more. the fact that they apparently are doing it so well that you can't or won't even acknowledge it is irrelevant.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yeah, but Windows 10 is the name of the constant change. And if you recall that 8 also was product named Windows, you'll get one more useful picture to consider overall lanscape.
Servant of karma
Hell, you get people bitching at their phones sometimes after an OS update just because "things are different". They adapt in that case because they *have* to.... but given a choice, most people are going to want to stick with whatever it is that they know.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
1) MS has been attacking this from the start. Every Linux misstep is amplified and scrutinized with a double standard.
2) Massive multinationals have more power than most governments and outlast political careers.
3) Early adopters pay an additional price; even at a higher price, Open Source is a long term game. Commercial is a perpetual subscription to a 3rd party's short term game, on their terms.
4) THE TREND IS TO THE CLOUD even MS is going that way! Internal services (indoor cloud?) also.
5) When everything can run in the browser (and most government software should) it doesn't matter what OS you use. So why pay for the USA to copy all your data and raise your security threat?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
What support do you get with the Microsoft equivalent? If I understand things correctly, what you're paying for with Red Hat is the support?
The ribbon was introduced 10 years ago and has been a staple of Microsoft's UI every since. Any time I look at software now with nothing but nested menus it makes my eyes roll back in my head. You're fighting the wrong battle on this one. Stick with the metro argument.
That person's statement might be exaggerated for comedic effect, but there is truth in it:
I had to upgrade my Noteboook's distro for EOL reasons and the new one came with kde5 or plasma or whatever it is called now.
Suddenly my notebook's 8GB of RAM weren't enough anymore to do my work.
Granted, it is somewhat memory intensive Java development (tomcat with 120+ webapps), but before the upgrade I didn't have any issues when spinning up an additional app server or throwing another GB of heap at a JVM.
Under kde5, doing the same things as before, I sometimes had to wait for swapping when doing basic stuff like switching between Eclipse and the web browser or when right-clicking on something.
After upgading to 16GB, I can work again.
Well, sort of. ..actually, working under Linux currently reminds me a lot of working on pre [2000|XP] versions of Windows; except with kde5 I don't (yet?) have to keep a floppy for auto-flashing the graphic card's BIOS(*) in the drive when another plasmoid manages to crash the system to a reboot.
Now I sometimes have to kill akonadi to do a google search if kmail+akonadi's imap resource manage to saturate my downlink bandwidth again.
But on the plus side, I could remove the "killall plasmashell; plasmashell&" shortcut for when a tray icon's never-ending animation would create 100% load on a CPU core. Well. I didn't need it anymore and with the current version it kills the entire X server anyway.
(*)
Under Win98 I had a 50:50 chance that a freezing Hauppauge TV app would f*ck up the Matrox card to black screen and POST codes after a reset. Linux hasn't come that far, but it feels like someone is trying.
In my country a Linux migration was more a talk then walk. When Germans reported about success I though: "Said and Done. True nation." But now all this talking about back-forth switching... May be it's already enough? An IT infrastructure is not something you change every season.
For what it's worth, Munich's LiMux is running an ancient linux desktop - which is part of the problem and part of why (some) users don't like it. A more modern desktop like Linux Mint would probably be better received. And systemd has fuck-all to do with it, haters. As noted above, the servers are probably running RedHat. And, in fact, Munich's desktop is probably so outdated that it doesn't run systemd either.
That said, the fact that Munich had to decide on a desktop to use - and that desktop is now more or less orphaned software now isn't a good thing. If Munich's needs required a frozen, non-standard Linux desktop in order for everyone to run the same apps, that's gotta be a point against it. Then again, these folks were early adopters, and endured a long, painful learning curve. If they weren't facing political opposition (and bribes) to switch to Windows, they could probably migrate to a newer generation Linux desktop that works much better than what they're using now.
But ultimately, the sad state of affairs is that, unless an organization has bitten the bullet and learned how to live without Windows desktop applications - i.e., they have gone with web-based apps for almost everything, Linux is not going to fit the bill for them. That said, there is a lot they can do to move in that direction. And tying themselves to the full suite of Microsoft stuff isn't it. So, switch to Windows on the desktop if you must - for those few 3rd party Windows apps you're still dependent on. But use LibreOffice - or if you must, Office 365 or Google web stuff. And use PDF for distributing documents. Or bite the bullet and make plans to migrate to a full web infrastructure with Chromebooks on the desktop. And if you can't do any of that, well, all is lost. But bear in mind that new organizations don't have the lock in that you do. Fine if you're a government that isn't in a competitive situation, then it's just a waste of money - but that's nothing new for governments. Businesses need to remain competitive, and new ones don't have to drag along a ton of Microsoft baggage.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
As someone who had to get more than 8GB after a distro upgrade: Do you use any of the kmail/kontact/akondai/semantics-related stuff?
Yes, I do it all the time.
As I said elsewhere, I've tried using KDE on a modern system with only 8G, and really felt the difference in performance. I haven't used it with 16G, so that might be okay too.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
These ideas are straight from Microsoft.
I am a Debian user since 2005. All I know, is that I was delighted when ALSA came along. I could get my sound up and running in less than half an hour with some reading of instructions and alsaconf. When PulseAudio came out, I stopped thinking about getting sound working, because it always works now.
I don't use Gnome, because you can pick your own desktop and why Gnome? Haven't noticed anything majorly different with Firefox except that the version numbers go up like the national debt. And they don't have to call it IceWeasel anymore. I think my WiFi icon is different sometimes? ...but there's a menu of networks to access when you click on it, and then you click on the one you want. I think it's always been that way since I stopped having to use iwconfig.
In short, I totally disagree. I have never had any problems with Debian stability, or much change at all for that matter. Debian Stable. Like a rock. Solid like a rock, old like a rock, boring like a rock.
whereas Windows changes it's entire UI
Huh? *looks to the start button in the bottom left that has existed since Windows 95*
*looks to the task bar which still shows running apps as it has since windows 95*
*looks to the top right, yep still the same three buttons on every windows since windows 95*.
What the hell are you doing on your computer that requires you to use more than 3 three UI features when interacting with a program?
It can't help that modern Linux distros have become such a shitshow. By that I mean the Linux and open source software ecosystem undergoes totally unnecessary change very rapidly. Often this has made the user experience worse, and it makes it harder to use and support Linux.
Funny stuff. Didn't MS just roll out an update that removes Mediaplayer from your system? You get a forced reboot, go to use mediaplayer and it's magically gone no notice or warning. You can (for now at least) reinstall it without paying, but why remove it where it is already installed without at LEAST asking? Rapid unnecessary change is all through Windows 10. With Linux at least updates are your choice and spyware is not part of the OS.
Sorry but I can't help but disagree. An office scenario where a PC dynamically changes state is the perfect use case *FOR* things like systemd, networkmanager and pulse audio.
Switching between wireless and docked networks, constantly changing hardware attached in meeting rooms, VPNs, headphones, headsets etc dynamically selected for video / audio calls. About the only use case for a pre-these-three-things linux, is a fixed desktop.
Ummm...why aren't you already running Postgres then? There are plenty of companies that offer support if your organization's suits need someone to point the finger at when things go wrong.
Governments hate saving money. Governments love giving money to corporations in the form of subsidies or 'service contracts'
same old corruption. What else is new?
Xfce has stagnated.
Good. Or maybe they should change it for the sake of change? The answer, is no.
KDE is too bloated.
Too bloated for what? They aren't running this on a Raspberry Pi.
GNOME 3 has been a colossal disaster.
*Crickets*
I look at if from the point of view of the article that somehow is missed here. There are a lot of MS and third party applications that people need to use that are not supported in Linux. This a major problem, and nobody addressing it here, while still looking at the major ideological debate that usually takes place. Yes, you do not have to reboot Linux, that often, to solve a problem. I have worked with Linux since 1994 and for as much as I love using it to try to replace my Windows or now Mac system, it is still not there. The community focuses on making changes to the FS, the UX, and even really details that make no much difference to a normal user (systemd for example, works great when it does, but it s a significant burden for somebody to just wants to use the darn computer).
Minor complaint, for the uninitiated: XFCE Mixer, is not compatible now, due to gstreamer reliance. Security issue. So much for volume control in my app bar...
Guess I should get off my ass and do something about it, since I don't plan on moving away from XFCE any time soon..
it comes in sauerkraut flavour..
Look at Ubuntu; they had this horror called Unity that was basically the Apple philosophy on Linux, a one-size-fits-none GUI that "knew better" than its users and wanted to have a similar experience for everyone, and it has been a huge failure.
Except it wasn't a failure because it was an Apple-style one-size-fits-none GUI. It was a failure because it wasn't very good. It was a cargo-cult copy.
Compounding this is, since everything is changing all the time anyways, why bother fixing bugs? The code you are fixing is probably going to be re-written in the next version, anyways, so why bother?
The open source model's greatest asset - it's flexibility and ability to change rapidly, is also it's greatest weakness in that you don't have a stable platform anymore.
IMHO The following needs to take place: ...
1. Some level of standardization. How about three UI toolkits instead of a dozen? Qt, gtk, and one lightweight framework (wx, FLTK, whatever)
2. Splitting of low level stuff into three focused areas: server, desktop and embedded. The Linux kernel is a bit of a nightmare because, from the same codebase, it supports PCMCIA devices and NUMA huge-memory systems and exotic ultra-high-speed networking fabrics and embedded real-time clock chips and the MacBook Pro's touchpad and the Veritas filesystem and running virtualized kernels
How about splitting development and support into three branches:
1. Server - slow, predictable and methodical support for existing server hardware and, maybe, a generation or two back. Doesn't need PCMCIA support, doesn't need sound or DRM or support for every input device under the sun
2. Desktop - faster development, more hardware support, more legacy support. Doesn't need support for NUMA, or Infiniband, or network adapter teaming or X.25...
3. Embedded - Focus on efficiency, size, simplicity.
Just a thought, anyways.
We all are probably due more respect than we're willing to give others, especially online.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Some people have 20 years experience, others have 2 years of experience repeated 10 times. If you have a fetish for sysvinit you're in the latter category. Also, if you hate on systemd but are fine with OpenRC, then you are probably unaware as to how many of your systemd objections are equally applicable there.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
> You can't criticize or fire them since they're doing it for free.
That's not true. They DON'T get a free pass just because they are "working for free." Imagine someone giving out free food at a public venue -- if they don't follow health codes and makes everyone sick they don't get a free pass just because they are doing it "for free."
The cost is independent of quality. If someone has a shitty design and/or implementation their bullshit needs to be called out. The "silent majority" giving tacit consent is precisely the problem.
> Firefox because of the fucking memory leaks.
We've been bitching about that for YEARS ...
--
Check out Nox Archaist" -- an old-school 8-bit RPG for Apple II, PC, Mac !
Gnome 3, systemd, Pulse, KDE Plasma or whatever new fad they are going after etc... All things I have COMPLETELY ignored for the past 10 years. I'm not sure why you call out Network Manager it's actually been pretty solid.
Firefox is undergoing NECESSARY changes to update it's codebase from mid 90's standards to something modern. So while it has been subject to some UI and addon compatibility churn in the past few years it really isn't all that bad. Also most addons are being ported to web extensions and the ones that aren't are because the developers were too lazy to do it which basically means we weren't really maintaining this software just along for the ride..
And to be fair... Windows 8-10 are absolutely terrible in comparison to even Windows 7 from both user experience and support standpoints. Good luck when you push out an update and half your machines get stuck in the PC equivalent of a boot loop. And hard drives.. don't even think about using those with Windows 10.
As a long-time Apple user who fled from Unity in horror - no, it most definitely was not the Apple philosophy on Unix. I'm not sure where people keep getting the "knows better" thing from the Mac. It's designed to abstract technical complexity, not "know better". If you ask it to do a thing, it still does it. And should you choose (I do), you can drop down into the command line and play.
Linux is not an OS, it's a development paradigm. One can assemble open-source software into a commercial product, but that doesn't happen naturally. It's a build-an-OS kit, and the good news is that if you don't like a component, you can change it! The bad news is that you're forced to: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If you're signing up for being a part of the ecosystem, you have to accept that at some point an upstream maintainer is going to do something you don't like, and you won't have much recourse. I'm not completely clear on the difference between that situation and Microsoft forcing businesses to buy new versions of its products every few years, but if that's a sticking point then, well, no one ever got fired for buying M$, and I for one do not particularly care if Linux achieves wide penetration in the desktop market. It's adequate for my purposes there, and dominant in the market segments related to my employment, so I don't personally see much need for change.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Gnome 3 works, Gnome Flashback works, MATE works, Cinnamon works, XFCE works, LXDE and LXQt are clunky but work. Gnome plus CairoDock is a bit flaky. KDE I'd like to love but from 4 onwards I just haven't understood it. Unity works too - even my mother can use it.
People seemed to hate the move from win 7 to 8, so I'm not sure that XFCE stagnation us bad.
What is missing is something that had good HCI, is slick and pretty, but I'm not sure Windows or Mac have that fully worked out either.
Heh, I found this graph hilarious... https://in.waw.pl/systemd-github-state/systemd-issues.svg
I mean seriously... all those bug reports wouldn't exist if the problems were divided up to proper unix KISS utilities and complexity kept to a minimum. That is some *serious* bug churn. Perhaps even a systemd like utility has a place... but this is the wrong way to do it.
Um. Sharepoint is the network service. Why would a desktop application need to be compatible with that?? That's backwards. There should be a generic Linux endpoint for Sharepoint--a container or something--or the whole thing done as a web app--created as a Sharepoint module and client-app by MS. Or a third party can create something using a public API. Why are so many MS service backwards with how they model cient-server relations?? You'd be better off sometimes running like bittorrent to share files.
But can't run Visual Studio 7.1
I can't blame organizations from moving away from Linux today. Modern Linux distros are nothing like typical Linux distros were a decade ago. Stability and sensible change have been thrown out in favor of hipster-oriented fads involving radical and disruptive change without much, if any, benefit.
Shall we talk about Windows 8 ? How is it better ? The "Linux City of Munich Distribution" can be as stable as they want to be.
Yes, sounds like a joke but it happens. But you don't hear that from the Linux guru.
You should far more often. I've seen this absurdity so many times where an admin spends 2 days hunting for the perfect fix when a 1am reboot would cause nearly no disruption.
Yeah .... remote console .... on a server that won't boot.
Your level of intelligence is very high (roll eyes).
I just finished 30 years working for a municipality (Calgary) with about 12,000 desktops.
We were mixed DOS/Mac at first and when the IT department finally admitted that they were not toys, and that their beloved mainframe was dying at last, they took over PC IT from the departments, and immediately insisted on getting rid of Macs because of "one environment".
It was always about "support costs" and "total cost of ownership", a number they never actually had to calculate. They also never had to prove it was cheaper to do everything their way - but as a gross measure, our costs never went down. Not even on a per-PC basis.
We always had Unix, from when you had to have a workstation to run drafting software. Because IT clung to the mainframe to the bitter end, it was the engineering department Unix server room that took over running servers (this was happening around 1996, with the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China imminent, when the joke was "will it actually be Hong Kong that takes over China" was big - in our shop, it really was a bunch of drafting-support staff that took over the server room!) We also ran all the E-mail servers on Solaris because 'e-mail' was "an Internet thing" and all corporate E-mail until then had been IBM PROFS. Finally a few Windows servers were allowed to provide Outlook, but only after Windows 2000 Server got decent. Everything else is still Unix.
Unix support staff were NOT hard to find for a large server room. Windows server staff that could support a LARGE installation were rarer! MS courses turn out lots of guys that can run a dentist's office but very few that can run a city.
After all support went to IT...there was no actual support, except re-installs. They re-install the software, they re-install your whole machine, but they. will. NOT. come to your machine and help you with your difficult spreadsheet. None of the alleged "support" staff understand any of our software except for basic MS-Office apps they themselves have to use (and, as mentioned, the won't come help with that, either). But for any special office software of the type that the article speaks of, departments have to drum up their own local "power users" for support, who by the way are discouraged from it by IT and certainly given no passwords or special access.
And for that matter, what does the client even matter to IT? They hate clients. All business software that can possibly be moved to web apps for easier admin, has been. It would run on Android just as well.
So I just don't see what the big deal is. Here's an experiment: Offer, gasp TWO alternatives with internal costs that match the actual support costs of each choice, then let your customers choose which desktop they want.
Even with the Windows 10 UI misadventures, compatibility with the win32 and win64 API is preserved. Which means that any investment on software made in the last 10 or even 15 years is safe (with the exception of SecuROM videogames, but it's a minor loss). Which means that software vendors have an interest in investing in a platform like Windows that isn't a quicksand pit like Desktop Linux, because it means fewer patches for old versions of the software. Did the article say something about important line-of-business software not being available on Desktop Linux?
"KDE works just fine if you have enough RAM... typically 32G or more"
KDE works just perfect on 4GB RAM.
I know: that's what my desktop has. And it also runs quite a bunch of services without problems.
Windows not likely to run a software from 10 years ago? Are you from some kind of a parallel universe? Windows backwards compatibility is legendary. .
Not really. I am having to get rid of a perfectly serviceable printer because the software was never properly updated to Win 7 and onwards.
Sure, a highend graphics driver I would expect to have OS dependencies hanging out of the whatever, but an ordinary USB printer driver?
Windows 10 (32 bit) runs Word for Windows 6.0, which was written for Windows 3.x.
That's great for the four people running 32-bit Windows 10. Almost everybody has a 64-bit install these days.
You are misinformed, you can actually set up Samba 4 as a leaf/trust of an AD domain or vice versa. There are actually companies out there that use Samba as an AD drop-in replacement with which you can actually do an AD-takeover.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I remember being excited when I read the announcement circa 2005 that they were switching to Linux.. Random AC predicting that they would switch back.. maybe a few "year of Linux on the Desktop" memes..
This is nonsense. Microsoft Windows is terrible when it comes to support and running old applications because near EVERYTHING is proprietary. From trying to get Quick Books 2003 running on Microsoft Windows 8 to proprietary drivers that manufacturers refused to update because products are discontinued hindering support for hardware bought just six months prior. You just don't see these issues on GNU/Linux because with free software the applications can be recompiled for the newer releases. And hardware that doesn't have free drivers isn't properly supported and should be banned from your companies list for adoption. There are places to buy properly supported hardware (like ThinkPenguin.com) and there is no equivalent for Microsoft Windows.
I supported Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux for years. As much as GNU/Linux has f'c things up Microsoft has been far worse. Whether we are talking about hiding frequently used menu items back in the days of XP (if I'm not mistaken) or turning simple tasks like single window network configuration into a nightmarishly long 10 screen wizard. Then they did metro office and did we already forget Microsoft Windows 8? Christ.
We have to stop taking our dislike for where developers haven taken GNU/Linux and acting as though somehow some other operating system is magically better. It's not. I also support other operating systems like OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Each has its share of problems.
The reality is despite the annoyances and issues Ubuntu and Linux Mint are some of the easiest distributions to support. And that is with the frustrating problems such as Mint's lack of a sane upgrade path in the recent path, or Ubuntu's adoption of the nightmarishly frustrating Unity. I've supported users on these operating systems. I've also dealt with Debian on the desktop. God help me. It's better on the server, but even there it's taken a turn for the worse. In any event I'm still not going to move myself or recommend Microsoft Windows. It's still far worse than any GNU/Linux distribution. I think after Ubuntu/Linux Mint I'd probably take a more serious look at OpenBSD. FreeBSD has got some seriously incompetent developers and security issues. I won't even touch it personally even though I'm to one degree or another forced to support it. OpenBSD I've found is easier to support and more secure. I'm not going to suggest it's got the level of community or commercial support that Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu/Linux Mint have though and that's it's primary issue.
nothing wring with xfce you should see mint or manjaros versions of it.
You didn't notice the whole start button controversy in Windows 8? It still doesn't have a real start button back. Never mind the dramatic changes it had in each major release since XP (Vista doesn't count). But the point was, using an argument of Linux UI changes as a reason to not use Linux would also apply at least as well to Windows.
I keep around Windows XP and 7 vmware images so that I can run some important tools and debuggers that won't work on newer Windows versions. Some of of this software of course may have updated versions but they cost money to upgrade. Sure, the problem is often because of drivers but that always feels like a bigger hassle on Windows than on Linux.
I like it when any applications can output audio, period.
When it works it works OK, sort of. When it doesn't work, well, it just doesn't work. I have one of each.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...Germans are very smart people...
Just because a blanket statement is positive, doesn't mean that it is not racist. For instance, substitute Germans with another gender, religious, race, or ethnic group: Italians, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, Women etc. Then substitute smart with any other adjective: crafty, lazy, gregarious, generous, creepy, dishonest.
The bottom line is that blanket statements ignore individual characteristics in favor of race, gender, or creed.
Gnome is a shit show because it's trying to be a jack of all trades UI, it's fallen into the Trap Microsoft fell into. Completely useless to anyone running 2-3 screens which is most desktop/power users these days. Converged UI is the dumbest idea of the 2000s. Apple wisely avoided it. Microsoft rushed into it so they could force developers into writing for .NET and it's been a complete disaster. Linux stupidly threw out over $200 million in UI research produced by Sun and gifted to the community in a mad quest to conquer the tablet/mobile market, which it failed to make any meaningful inways into. They need to start on Gnome 4 and begin by going back to the Gnome 2 UI and extending it and following the UI guidelines from Sun. Once that's implemented they need to make more apps for creative content producers. This is where Linux is really lacking. Pulseaudio/Systemd/Network-Manager for better or worse are working well enough for daily use now and efforts need to be refocused elsewhere.
Open X-Change anyone? OpenOffice or Libre Office anyone? There is almost no reason for me to use Windows any longer. I don't need the vsphere client any longer. Still wish there were better tools for managing KVM and BTRFS snapshots, though
It's glorified webdav with a few extra bells and whistles.
You didn't notice the whole start button controversy in Windows 8?
You didn't notice the quick backtrack, and the lack of market share of Windows 8?
Never mind the dramatic changes it had in each major release since XP (Vista doesn't count)
Nope didn't notice that. Because there weren't any. Not for standard productive use of a computer. Everything is still in the same place it has been since Windows XP. Wifi still in the bottom right, start menu still in bottom left, applications in the middle. Everything else is not relevant to me using the OS.
But the point was, using an argument of Linux UI changes as a reason to not use Linux would also apply at least as well to Windows.
Yes and no. Just like you referenced a Windows 8 interface that was immediately backtracked Linux had errrrr GNOME 3 which is still being forced down our throats? errrr. Unity which is still being forced down our throats?
For better or for worse, MS has responded to the controversy far better than the OSS community has.
one of the richest city in the world cannot fucking dump m$ windoze lol... that's why you should never ever use closed source software. You will be locked into it like the dumb bitch you are.
I HAD the Apple ui experience on Linux. It was gnome 2, compiz, emerald, and AWN. Emerald and awn are both dead now. Also the correct theme engines to put the same theme on both qt and gtk apps ... You can go either way. Dunno why those projects were abandoned. Probably unity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
32G of ram costs only about $350.... and is quite far from the most expensive component in a computer. A modern MB and CPU can each cost much more than that.
You are comparing apples to oranges here. I bet you build your own rigs. To people like us, we don't look at $350 for 32G as a unnecessary expense. We consider it a wise investment because our personal rigs are going do so much more than a typical office workers machine.
A typical office workers machine is going to be reproduced hundreds if not thousands of times across a corporate or municipality environment. That $350 will add up to be a ass load in that environment. That is why most of these machines only meet the bare specs required to run the OS and get work done. Usually 4 to 8 GB.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
> If you get SP, they might grumble but in general they will not question your decision for going with an industry standard MS solution.
Another way to look at this is that it's an acknowledgement that all software sucks to some degree, so you might as well pick the software that your people know, or that you can put in a job posting and actually get viable candidates.
Have you seen someone use it in production? So far all I've heard about is prototypes in docker.
lucm, indeed.
Let's call it a weakness and a strength. 3-4 competitors offering real alternatives is well and good vs a single monolith everyone has to use. 100 or even 1000 cooks in the kitchen not so much.
Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate -> that's easily 80% of the linux desktops. We're not talking about 100.
lucm, indeed.
What support do you get with the Microsoft equivalent? If I understand things correctly, what you're paying for with Red Hat is the support?
Yes it's the same level of support. Open a ticket, etc. And they're both pretty good. Microsoft support will often call to follow-up on a ticket, RHEL is mostly by email but they reply really quick with the correct information.
At the other end of the spectrum there's Oracle and IBM, who basically tell you to either read the documentation or to wait for the next patch.
lucm, indeed.
Have you worked in the enterprise world? It's never about pointing fingers, it's usually about senior management wanting to align their IT portfolio with Gartner's magic quadrants.
Also at the moment Postgres is almost never in the support matrix of big vendors, it's always Oracle/SQL Server/DB2. So even if the app you buy for a gazillion bucks use JDBC and could technically run on Postgres or even Paradox, the solution wouldn't be certified by the vendor.
It's not a lost cause, though. Many big data platforms use Postgres by default (ex: Ambari) and vendor like Hortonworks make it more acceptable for the suits. Red Hat also helps, since they support it. But those are still minor players in the big chess game of enterprise database rackets.
lucm, indeed.
I'm not sure where people keep getting the "knows better" thing from the Mac. It's designed to abstract technical complexity, not "know better". If you ask it to do a thing, it still does it.
so it will let you:
- have the menu on each window, as opposed to being a unified big thing on the top of the screen?
- have min/max buttons (on whatever side of the window you choose) that actually make the window take the whole screen when maximized, not some ratio it decides for you?
- have a full-width taskbar (dock) on each monitor that shows only the apps open in each specific monitor?
- use a click on the mousewheel to close tabs in file managers and browsers?
those are all things I can do in Gnome without having to go in the command-line or having to create keyboard shortcuts.
lucm, indeed.
I didn't realize anyone liked the ribbons. I know I'm not anyone's demographic. I actually like gnome 3, win10 (enterprise anyway), and unity, but I mostly use windowing systems to separate my terminals from my graphics. Buttons and menus are icky. Is it the speed of recognition that the ribbon helps with? I don't use applications that way, just keyboard shortcuts which ms helpfully hasn't changed since long ago.
man I miss awn
See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/quickstart-install-connect-red-hat
Try installing an old Borland Delphi/Java/C++Builder CD. You'll get nothing but errors.
I've had more problems copying and pasting in iOS than I ever had in Linux.
Windows 10 collects some incredibly disturbing data forcibly. Sure they reigned it in, but it's there and can be switched on any time. The German Govt needs to be prepared for private info to be transmitted to Microsoft without their permission or ability to turn it off.
On top of a horrible interface, Microsoft has created a user-hostile, UN-trustable version of Windows.
>> it will cost too much to carry on using Linux alongside Windows,
Then finish what you already started and totally dump Windows.
A functioning web browser can provide most applications people need for their jobs these days. Which is good.
Except it's not good. It's inner-platform effect, making the browser a complete implementation of an OS. The web as cross-platform is good, but the browser as the web's OS UI is not. Until web apps can use browser libraries without being a tab/window of the browser itself, task switching is severely crippled. I just have one Chrome icon at the bottom of my screen and that's every program.
Wow, lobbyists are working hard...
http://twitter.com/bash_history
Well, if you one of the chosen few that might have a 32bit Windows 10. Just like a lot of Linux nerds, everyone is moving to 64bit Windows 10 and that won't run your Word for Windows 6.0 anymore. And a lot of other software, I have to deal with this at my clients pretty much every week.
Oh, this is entire Bullshit.
Network Manager, Bluez, Pulse Audio, and systemd gave modern GNU/Linux systems feature parity with windows, and developed GNU/Linux into a world class OS.
Now, you have distros that "just work".
Yes, they've changed a lot in 10 years, because they used to really suck, and lack features from other OSes.
Also, read the article, the reason that they moved away from Linux was entirely political, i.e. microsoft bribes. All studies have shown linux to be working
captcha: theology
linux btfo forever
Windows not likely to run a software from 10 years ago? Are you from some kind of a parallel universe? Windows backwards compatibility is legendary. Windows 10 is able to run most software written for Windows 95, but it is often very difficult to get a package from Debian Jessie running in Debian Stretch.
HMM well I have a copy of Solid Edge Origin (CAD) which runs quite happily on Win XP but which reports that Win 10 is an "Unknown Operating System".
Drivers are somewhat different. Better than with Linux, though, where there is no stable ABI at all, so the drivers have to be recompiled for each new kernel version, which seriously sucks if there is no source available.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap