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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."
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!
There are many Microsoft "engineers" simply due to Windows being easier to use, but many of those people couldn't script themselves out of a paper-bag.
When Windows decides to break (which is all too often), the most common fix is to reboot the server or restart the service.
Windows Server is a black box which nobody really understands... but people manage to live with it somehow, and "trick" it into working.
This is unlike Linux engineers who can generally fix problems due to source code or good scripting skills. ...but mostly what tips people over to Windows are the apps that businesses need to use. They're just not available on Linux.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I work with both Windows (various versions) and Linux on a daily basis. As a long time user of Linux and a former UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX and AIX) sysadmin, I don't like to say this but the reality is that Windows is far more stable and reliable than Linux these days.
Despite dealing with far more Windows systems than Linux systems, I haven't had to deal with a Windows booting problem in ages. On the other hand, I've had to deal with numerous incidents where Linux systems wouldn't boot properly due to various problems with systemd. Some of these problems have been truly idiotic.
It's not 1995 any longer. Recent versions of Windows have been remarkably stable.
It's also not 2005 any longer. Recent versions of Linux have been disturbingly unstable.
While Windows has gotten better than it was in the past, I'm sad to say that Linux has gotten worse than it was in the past. Linux used to be all about stability and reliability and robustness. Now Linux is all about frivolous changes and software like systemd, GNOME 3 and PulseAudio that I've found to be crap.
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.
Because MS created this service, it expends a ton of marketing resources trying to convince everyone that it's the only way to go. I have no doubt that his desire to change to only have Windows is due to this marketing; I see so many generic IT people who always without fail will recommend Microsoft products. The people who can easily find who know Microsoft products are not necessarily the best people for the job; their credentials are often nothing more than taking an MS class and paying for the certificate. Cheaper cost, sure, but also cheaper quality.
This is not just a Microsoft practice. Municipal governments get the hard sell from all sides, armies of sales people descend on elected leaders and convince them that they need some new software, or overpriced routers, or that investing all the money in hedge fund is a good idea, or that a new company will bring in tons of jobs as long as they get a tax discount. And since these elected leaders have literally zero knowledge about technology, finance, management, and so forth, they will believe it all.
A lot of what you write resonates with me. I'll add another variable that I don't see mentioned yet: Linux support of notebook computers. Its another layer of problems (power management, nvidia optimus, even wifi drivers) that really put me over the edge. Many of the 'client' machines out there in 2017 are laptops, and poor support on those makes things difficult beyond the "interoperability" issues.
Things are clearly constantly changing, including my own ability to keep up (generally decreasing over time). Makes it hard to get a handle on comparisons between MS Windows, Linux; but my view is that when I started using Linux in 2001 it was clearly superior to the Microsoft offering. By the time I moved off of Linux for as a primary client computing platform (2015) it was much less clear. Today, as I have dabbled around, the tables seem to have turned, at least on notebooks. I'd be interested to read what others think on this aspect.
I don't even think this is a "Microsoft bribe" situation. If you do a quick search about the Accenture report you'll see that the whole thing is a n-ring circus. They didn't simply switch to Linux, they decided to centralize IT at the same time.
IT centralization is always a fuckfest, and now of course they blame Linux for that.
Peter Ganten, a board member of the Open Source Business Alliance, told ZDNet that the organizational problems date back to around 2003, when Munich took the decision to switch to Linux. In parallel with that migration, the council also tried to centralize its IT support structure, getting rid of a system where each department had its own IT team.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/l...
Switching back to Microsoft won't solve this problem, unless they go full cloud with something like Office 365 which would take a big chunk of the infrastructure away from the hands of those incompetents.
lucm, indeed.
Or Microsoft is applying pressure at the right points continuously so they can claim a victory now or down the road.
Which they are wont to do both on general principles and because there's a "tech centre" of theirs in Munich. They've already bought at least two of the mayors (of which Munich has a handful, curiously), so this will continue to simmer, of course.
Every computer rollout will have been issues.
The linux rollout had quite a bunch of issues, which were quite enlightening to read about. Most glaring was that the previous windows install was organically grown and contained huge chunks of additional software that had "worked" only in the "don't touch this or it'll break" fashion.
Undocumented, not fully licensed, hap-snap macrosets, custom software with the maker long gone and no source in sight, and so on, and so forth. It helped stretch the roll-out into going well over projected times, but it does mean they now have a well-documented software catalogue that enables things like disaster recovery that were completely unpracticable previously.
Previously they didn't really know what they were running, now they do, in detail, with source, and with people who can fix things in-house instead of having to procure and write tenders and specs and all that, which we know works so well.
(The reports "proving" otherwise invariably have a direct or indirect funding link to redmond, this way or another. Very curious, that.)
You probably could do some of those things with windows to some degree, now that Munich blazed the trail using FOSS, and re-doing the doable-with-proprietary software parts will be cheaper too, again now that they know what the trail looks like.
But I suspect that if you try that the whole thing will go to shit in a hurry. It's not strange to need some serious nerds (not geeks) for an operation like this. windows is not optimised for keeping such people in your organisation.
Besides, if they do decide to go proprietary, they'd be better off going mac all the way, for even IBM has noticed the lifetime cost of mac on the desktop is lower than windows, mainly due to fewer support calls.
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.
"There are many Microsoft "engineers" simply due to Windows being easier to use, but many of those people couldn't script themselves out of a paper-bag."
Windows' *own* scripts often fail. I had the pleasure of migrating a SBS2003 system to SBS2011. I had to intervene and do some of the migration scripts' jobs manually, bcause they kept falling over. The logs told me the failure point (e.g. line 118), but not *why*.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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.
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.
Windows IT groups are more responsive. Reboot, reinstall and hand you over to the next tech who repeats this process. Windows IT is the best!
I work in a company that has roughly 300,000 windows desktop users. IT has told us that they can't support our 300 odd Linux development machines. We are greatful about that.
Well all I know is that it feels as clumsy as hell when I open a large spreadsheet. Macros usually don't work. I guess I made the assumption it was java based because I've never seen a native application that slow.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
They didn't destroy a stable Office interface with the disaster known as the "Ribbon".
That disaster isn't, and wasn't. What it was was and endless complaint by professional users who spent years learning an archaic old interface which relied heavily on the memory of symbols, shortcuts, and nested menus which were irrelevant to 90% of what was being done at the time.
There's a reason that interface has been widely adopted, and more generally that menus have been eliminated and context dependent UIs have replaced them. Presenting all options to all users at all times is frankly a disaster when learning a new system.