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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 best chance Linux has of taking of is when support for Windows 7 ends in 2020.
But it won’t just like it didn't when XP support ended or when Vista bombed out. But, hey, this time it’s gotta work, right?
You have to understand users, whatever is easy - and whatever gets them trough the every day life - is what they will chose.
I'm a Linux user since 1998. I still use the Linux platform (Mint 18.1 right now, but I was a slacker...slackware for most of the time, I just grew old and didn't want to spend endless time finetuning everything), but I use windows 10 for my gaming pleasures, and at work we use windows 10 too (I work at a HUGE worldwide company now), and it doesn't suck. In fact, I'd wager that after 1 year...windows 10 actually kinda rule. It's easy to use, it's not ugly, it's functional, it's not breaking down every second day, it's fairly well protected and it actually just work. I'm a fan already, but it was a long road, because at home - I'm one of those 50+ something that still is a gaming freak, I have the latest hardware as always (1080Ti graphics card, and the latest i7 generation motherboard and processor), and on windows 10 it just doesn't suck. Not even at work, where we have MUCH less hardware, we're using vanilla Dell laptops with i5 processors, SSD storage devices, and D6000 Dell docking stations with 3 screens connected, works like a charm every day.
So yeah, I totally get it - if it works perfectly, if it runs smooth every day, if I don't have to concentrate on my freaking setup every day...but can concentrate just on my job - then I'm all for it!
Good job MS, for once!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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.
To do a quick financial audit of the officials making this decision.
Lobbying is really just another term for paid bribes.
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.
While no one but the actual deciders know for sure, but I'd be more than willing to step out on the limb and say: This has absolutely nothing to do with Linux or Windows fitness for the job. They've been doing it for 10 years now, I'm pretty confident any bumps were long ironed out and everything works pretty decently.
Just as TFA said, Microsoft had been lobbying heavily. Never said they stopped. Obviously they kept at it, and finally got their foot in the door. Greed seems to be on a helluv a winning streak in our society.
MS moved its base in Germany to Munich. Subsequently, Munich had a new election for the city council. Surprisingly, the new major decided that Linux does not work and that there are too many security restrictions with Linux. This is what effective lobbying can do for you. Still other cities and towns go in the the other direction.
Linux in the server room, Windows on the desktop.
In the past decade Linux on desktop/laptop use has gone from 0.8% to ~2%. At this rate it'll only take about 900 more years to totally replace Windows on the desktop.
Yeah, nerds don't want to admit that Microsoft have actually improved their products in the last 20 years. Meanwhile, on the Linux side of things, we got Ubuntu. *shudder*
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
That's a bone headed comment. Linux desktop use has more than doubled in the past ten years. Android is the worlds most used OS, running a Linux kernel.
In the case of gnope, every release either breaks something, or takes away some functionality that distributions have to excessively patch in order to give some consistency to their userbase. And kde has never been more buggy. Just when a version starts to get stable, they ditch it and start over. The whole Linux mantra of "release early and release often" just doesn't work for desktops (or phones for that matter). Users want consistency and stability, which neither gnome or kde give them.
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.
Okay, working with a few groups that have to keep confidential data and medical data secure I can say that Windows 10 sends out data routinely that you cannot shut off that people working with such data can't afford to have leaving the organizations part of whose mandate is to protect that data. Moving to windows will probably introduce problems, is unlikely to fix any, and with Windows 10 (they can get Windows 7) they are sending out citizen data to a foreign power. (The USA loves this). This was recognized by China who told Microsoft point blank they were required to make a special China version of Windows 10 that would not send data to a foreign power. Microsoft of course said "yes" to this. If it got out that private public data was being sent directly to a foreign power, the German people would be up in arms. Germany's privacy laws are more strict than most countries. If they insist on this experiment (which will be a death march, just watch), they should at least use Widows 7.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
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.
All Operating Systems sucks, trademarked words in it does not make it suck less. :-)
I've only had a couple of thousands desktop Linux and Windows clients under my control back in the day, and it really is no difference at least moneywise, it is easier to do hires for Windows as long as you pay the senior guy enough to keep him. Happily I've heard that out sourcing is working pretty well on the Windows side so it's going to be a lot cheaper than Linux soon.
Linux might not be for you and your environment, but that doesn't mean it sucks more than your prefered variant.
I think the point is they're easier for users. For actual IT departments, my experience is Windows is at best no easier than *nix, and in some ways a great deal worse (I much prefer plain text readable config files to registry files, though sadly XML is invading the *nix config world too). The one thing I've always loved about working in *nix environments is that if I want to do some significant configuration changes to the OS or a daemon, I can literally go "cp whatever.conf whatever.conf.bak" try out my changes and if they don't work I can quickly restore original functionality. It's possible to do the same thing in Windows by saving keys, but it's a pain in the rear, requiring the regedit application as an intermediary.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Generally they are, but Lennart Poettering pulls the average down quite a bit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Some people have argued that Linux does not work out for bureaucracies, civil servants or "large organizations". That made me laugh.
The French Gendarmerie (miltarized police) switched to Linux. But the organization was different. For example in lieu of bitching about non microsoft word processors not being compatible enough with whatever version of microsoft word, they dropped the proprietary formats and went to the .odt format. So, microsoft incompatibilities are not their problem anymore.
Because they made choices. And it worked out for them. A wikipedia summary here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
P.S. I sense an army of astroturfers on this topic, you guys aren't good at what you are doing.
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/
Really, it's just easier to run and maintain Windows on the desktop for the vast majority of people..
1. The computer park on my workplace consists of 1 Windows-98 computer, 1 FreeBSD 6.1 computer, 6 computers with last versions of FreeBSD and one Windows XP computer. The only computer that requires maintenance is a Windows XP computer. All other computers just work.
2. The said Windows XP computer could be a FreeBSD one but some 10 years ago there was a management decision to use Windows XP because it's a development system for the client which performs the similar tasks. It appeared that the client just needs no such system: they use their own Windows programs and my FreeBSD programs.
3. 'Vast majority of people". I've written some Fortran program that produces some general scientific calculations. Then it was given to the specialist who should independently evaluate the results. And it appeared that she is not able to perform the following tasks, and I was to write every step on paper:
- to redirect the output of the program to some file with ">"
- to use Windows "find.exe" to extract some specific output lines from the loooooooong listing
- again to redirect the output of "find.exe"
- to load the results to Excel.
And she's NOT the only such specialist here. They all behave similarly, and they all have experience with Unix in 1980-th years and MS-DOS in 1990-s. But they all spent 22 years from 1995 (Windows-95) to today in Windows and as a result they degraded totally.
Don't like Ubuntu? You have lots of other distros to choose from.
An there is part of the problem. How many distributions of Linux are there now? An which version do you want to run? In a business environment this is a nightmare. Then you have the software that you need that won't run on your distribution, or isn't supported.
You simply don't see this in a windows or mac desktop environment.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
LibreOffice is a no go as it doesn't do free/busy calandar functions for the executives for meetings that they waste time in all day which is a must have for their jobs.
We had a MS meeting scedule and room booking system in our company. I don't know what it was (Outlook? You tell me), but no-one used it because if you tried you found that all the meeting rooms and managers were booked solid for the next six months "just in case they were needed".
To get a meeting room or find a chairman manager you had to go to one of the senior manager's secretaries the previous day who kept the real booking system, which was an unofficial paper diary.
There's a lot of "if" coming off that statement. Perhaps Microsoft really improved Windows with version 10. At my employer I have a Windows 7 laptop which I use mostly for compiling software (my main desktop is Linux, thankfully). The Windows interface may be familiar to most people, but as a regular Linux user I find it fairly basic. There's no way to pin a window on top, for example, or even to have multiple virtual desktops. It doesn't even have symlink support!
On my Windows system, it's a rare day that it runs perfectly, or smoothly, or I don't have to concentrate on its setup. When something is wrong, the errors are often meaningless or misleading. For example, if a DLL needed by an EXE doesn't have execute permissions, you might get an error indicating that some other DLL couldn't be found. Or the system might skip that DLL and load a different one from later in that PATH. I waste much more of my time trying to keep the Windows build working than I do on Linux. And I mostly know what I'm doing -- I have no idea how average people fare. I gather they just ignore the problems as "that's Windows".
But worst of all, it is slow. Extremely slow. Mind bogglingly slow. The software I compile on it takes about 4 hours to completely build and test on Linux. And that's pulling all the data over the network (NFS and ClearCase). On Windows, it takes a minimum of 24 hours to build, and another 24 hours to test. And that's with everything copied to the local disk -- it takes twice as long if running over the network. I do daily builds on Linux, but only weekly builds on Windows. It's so slow it hinders my ability to use it.
Part of that slowness is likely related to all the dumb "security" software my employer installs on Windows. Lately, this software has made it so that about 2 out of 3 processes fail to start. You can imagine how much this would affect a build done using 'make'. I can't even get rsync to reliably start to copy the latest copy of the software from the network to the local drive.
This sort of dumbness is what the users of the Munich network can look forward to when they start getting their Windows clients. "Security" people (not real security people, but people who follow checklists and think that more security software always makes things better) will ruin whatever system shows up in Munich. They users will be longing for their Linux clients :)
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Verizon ditched office for Google for business. Even their email is handled by google and employees can use Linux or Mac as their OS.
Just use Ubuntu, you dumb twat.
Wow, master of wit are you? Nobody in a business environment uses Ubuntu for anything. Well not if they know what they are doing. They use Redhat Enterprise because they can get some kind of support for it.
Now who is the dumb twat, you dumb twat?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Actually, I've worked in multiple business environments that used Ubuntu.
Well I did say "if they know what they are doing." Over the years I've seen and deployed thousands of Linux installs. I've been in datacenters with hundreds of Linux systems. Almost everyone of them is some version of Redhat or Centos.
You will always have the naive goober try some variation of Ubuntu. As long as they don't cause trouble and don't expect support they usually get to keep it. But most of the time their vanity Linux goes off the rails or they fail the security screening because their OS isn't up to corporate standards.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Its a Surface Pro 4. Customizability pretty much depends on Microsoft attachments.
I have a surface pro 4 too. I've not noticed any strange things with it. When running it in desktop mode it seems to be just another portable computer to me.
Now I won't give windows 10 any good marks as a tablet OS. It pretty much fails miserably there. It is usable but any android launcher will beat it with out working up a sweat.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I still miss my Amiga 3000. I love the look of that machine; and the feel of the keyboard. The freaking control key was in the right spot! To this day I still hit the caps lock key when I mean control.
I had lots of computer before my Amiga 3000. A C-64, C-128, and even an A500. But the Amiga 3000 was what I consider to be my real workstation computer.
I had one of the first A3000's too. With the kickstart on the HD. I never got around to buying a proper ROM kickstart for it. Didn't see the need.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I didn't ignore your point you idiot, but it's clear from your responses you have never installed or managed a enterprise level environment. You may have installed your precious Ubuntu on desktops in a small shop. Here let me spell it out for you.
Most distributions are binary compatible. Which simply means what can run on one can be made to run on another. What is not compatible is support. There is that word again, support. It is all the rage in big business shops. I would suggest you learn what it means.
Lets give an example, Oracle. With some know how I imagine any decent sysadmin, that leaves you out, could make it run on Ubuntu. But for argument let say you get it to run on your pet Ubuntu, and all is good for awhile.
Then one day your Oracle goes down and management give you the order to call support. So you call support only to be told that your OS isn't a supported OS. Ubuntu isn't a supported under Oracle.
An there you are. Your company is losing thousands of dollars every minute and you have to tell management that you won't be getting any support. When they ask why this is they then find out you installed there multi thousand dollar database on a unsupported OS, which leads to you getting your dumb ass fired. An rightly so.
You and people like you are part of the problem. You insist that your little linux disturbutions are all the same when they are not. Companies don't support every brand of linux out there. There are way to many disubutions for them too. An that is the problem I pointed out.
But yet here fools like you go, picking your pet linux distro and damn the rest of us who actually know what we are doing. Do you know how many times as a contracter I have walked into a shop and been told to rip out all the linux boxes and convert them to windows because some idiot like you screwed the pooch?
Most managers don't know ubuntu from fedora, and really don't care. When they hear Microsoft Windows they nod and smile because they know that name. Now we are at the point where we can sell a known distro like Redhat Enterprise. But when you try to sell them some weird ass distro, then it just gives all of Linux a bad name.
Stop being part of the problem.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Actually, I'm going to dial down the enthusiasm I've had in these posts and kind of agree with you. I installed the latest update to windows 10 and now my external BR drive won't work.
So yeah. I see your point now.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I think we are done here. I've explained to you the problem as simple as I can with out actually insulting other peoples intelligence. You simply refuse the see the problem.
Again, stop being part of the problem.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
You have to understand users, whatever is easy - and whatever gets them trough the every day life - is what they will chose.
Nice fiction. This decision was made by greased palms, not by users.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.