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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.
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.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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.
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!
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.
Translating from German: "The right people have been greased, this will not happen again"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The next step would be a plan to migrate from the legacy Windows apps over to open source based alternatives.
This is another case where what appears to be common sense doesn't survive contact with reality.
You live in a fantasy if you seriously believe that there's open source alternatives to everything that runs on Windows. Either that, or you're thinking in terms of "checkbox alternative", such as saying that Gnucash is an alternative to Great Plains or Accpacc, discarding the shitload of missing features or the fact that there's complex integrations and a large ecosystem of plugins required to communicate with vendors, partners or other systems.
Here's an example. Many big suppliers won't allow B2B automation unless orders are pushed via AS2 or EDI, and many requires a full-blown GDSN connection. This means that if the city wants to JIT their toilet paper orders instead of paying a fortune in warehousing, they must be able to have their accounting system approve and transmit orders. This requires specialized plugins in products like Sage or Dynamics. You won't find anything to fork on github to deal with that, and even if you were, it would be a terrible idea because the second the protocols or headers change in the B2B schema, you're fucked since dude420@github is not going to give you a clear roadmap in lockstep with what the big suppliers or vendors request.
In an ideal world it would all be web-based and browser-neutral and maybe even SaaS, but given the level of customization required for a large organization, it's still a pipe dream.
lucm, indeed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure Windows 10 won't need any retraining of any users.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
You are not correct:
libreoffice is written in C++. There are some JAVA plugins, but they do not relate to the GUI. I find libreoffice quit snappy, but format conversion to word is lossy and some features (e.g. track changes) are not as mature as in MS word. MS Word on the other hand is a nightmare that everyone has gotten accustomed to.
Moritz
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
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...
This too. I've been running it on my home workstation, my surface pro, and my workstation at work. I have yet to see it stand up and try to sell me something. Windows XP far more likely to do that than windows 10 has been.
I find that people that bitch about windows 10 are not the ones that are actually using it. Most of them are simply spouting off some rumor they read on some back ally website.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Have you ever TRIED openoffice or libreoffice?
Yes, I have. I've been using both since the started out. What you say was true back in the early days, and I believe they where java applications then. At least openoffice was.
Simply not true of libreoffice 5+. I actually prefer to use Microsoft office but there have been many times that I've had to resort to using libreoffice. Once I adjusted to the different look and feel, I find that libreoffice is perfectly applicable replacement for 95% of what people would do with MS Office.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.