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Linux Pioneer Munich Confirms Switch To Windows 10 (techrepublic.com)
The German city of Munich, once seen as a open-source pioneer, has decided to return to Windows. Windows 10 will be rolled out to about 29,000 PCs at the city council, a major shift for an authority that has been running Linux for more than a decade. From a report: Back in 2003 the council decided to to switch to a Linux-based desktop, which came to be known as LiMux, and other open-source software, despite heavy lobbying by Microsoft. But now Munich will begin rolling out a Windows 10 client from 2020, at a cost of about Euro 50m ($59.6m), with a view to Windows replacing LiMux across the council by early 2023. Politicians who supported the move at a meeting of the full council today say using Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS, and will also reduce costs associated with running Windows and LiMux PCs side-by-side.
The did about the most dumb thing possible: They blamed Linux for their dysfunctional organization. They will have pretty much the same problems after the move with some new ones on top. And the only sane alternative, moving everything to web-apps, was not even considered.
What happened here is that the ones in charge let themselves be bought by MS.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I suspect someone got paid off big time.
Seems to me that is the only way that spending $59.6 Million on windows could be seen as a method of reducing costs.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Microsoft and the intels of the world congratulate you! Happy stolen data, Munich!
This is something that often gets lost on Slashdot. People are so busy complaining about privacy (which the average user can't give a crap about), or lost work because you haven't saved your work for the night and ignore the notifications that an update is pending (which the average user can't give a crap about), and all the talk about start menus and control panels (which the average user can't give a crap about) to realise what has actually changed under the hood.
In the mean time we have an OS that in its current iteration is incredibly stable (no, not things like the on screen keyboard not popping up, but rather no reboot forcing crashes), relatively well protected (very few attacks go directly for the Windows OS now because of it) and even has similar active protective features to SELinux.
Under the hood it's faster than the previous versions, more capable out of the box, actually works as a tablet OS (not that I imagine most people here will care), and in general end users don't really care much about it, neither for nor against.
Shame about the privacy aspects.
They've been doing it for 10 years now, I'm pretty confident any bumps were long ironed out and everything works pretty decently.
You've never worked in a government have you? In many cases 10 years is just the time it takes to finally get a project cancelled. I'm not saying that's what happened, by all accounts I'm sure the new MS headquarters in Munich, and the new head of the department being a happy MS user in the past had a big hand in it. But assuming that just because something has been in place for 10 years it has had it's bugs ironed out is laughable enough in a large private corporation, in a government such a statement is outright ludicrous.
XP had a viable replacement in Windows 7. Windows 7 does not have a viable replacement.
Also, Linux has improved considerably. At the time Vista came out Linux wasn't a viable operating system for most people. Now it's perfectly viable for the majority of people, but unfortunately most people just use what comes with their PC.
Mrs Hog, married to a Slashdot nerd
FTFY.
Nerds whining that 'my wife', 'my grandma', 'my son's third grandfather's cousin three times removed to the second power' is utterly meaningless.
There's a reason Linux has shit for market share outside the server realm. (In before zealots claim Android is some sort of victory for LEENUCKZ ON TEH DESKTOP.)
But are they? When support for XP finished I switched over the living room to CentOS with gnome 2. Mrs Hog, not the most tech savvy person on the planet, didn't notice the difference.
That's cute. You are browsing the web just like I am on Ubuntu right now.
I decided drunk last night to give Linux a shot again on my PC as a native OS and not a VM. I plan to do fedora Mate 27 next.
Now, for the non-nerds can your Linux install (outside of your living room TV in the workplace) do Free/Busy on Exchange/Outlook for the PHBs? Can they schedule Skype meetings in Evolution or Thunderbird? Can they run SAP? How about the senior directors run WebEX for those in the federal German Government? Can Linux run ancient IE 6 and 7 sites written last decade before web standards took off? Can the smartcam just work for the above scenarios?
Can LibreCalc run the megaStat add-on for Excel? Can it do all of the Excel functions? Can the I.T. department managing 3,000 PCs with some off, some on, some in different configurations on Active Directory? Can the I.T. department create a Group Policy to lock down some clients with sensitive information? Can NFS support ACL (access control lists) with nested groups easily for permissions? Can the I.T. department automate a MASS installation whether computers are on or off?
Yes, what I wrote sounds like dauntte's inferno for nerds reading this who get to be sys admins and programmers at .coms. But, in my world doing corporate I.T. my job depends on these things and it is the real world. Management NEEDS THESE DONE. They do not care if I have 2,000 PCs when they get a certificate error in a browser due to a critical website being upgraded. It needs to be fixed NOW!
Linux doesn't cut it and I would be fired if I installed it. If all you do is browse the web and use NetFlix then a tablet or Roku is the best fit. An enterprise environment is a different beast and is underestimated how complex it is.
http://saveie6.com/
Even then. There is still after 20 years no opensource solution for Outlook/Exchange. PHBs want meeting invites. They also want to see free/busy on all the recipients for their day.
I supposed in the last 4 years Office 365 has enabled some of the functionality on the web version now for Linux users, but it highlights in business there is no solutions.
MS may have made crappy OSes in the past, but their business software is certainly top of the line with Outlook and Excel. Before anyone goes on how Calc is good enough I have to say it is not for EVERY scenario. Even a city organization has financial anaylsts gurus and statisticians. These guys use add ons for Excel and proprietary software. Some who do not use advanced macros that LibreCalc can't do.
R and Python is now just started to hit some of these but these guys are not professional programmers. They knew macros and mathematics. Linux has no solution for these 2 scenarios.
http://saveie6.com/