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German State Plans To Migrate 13,000 Workstations From Linux to Windows (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:
The German state of Lower Saxony is set to follow Munich in migrating thousands of official computers away from Linux to Microsoft's Windows. As initially reported by Heise, the state's tax authority has 13,000 workstations running OpenSuse -- which it adopted in 2006 in a well-received migration from Solaris -- that it now wants to migrate to a "current version" of Windows, presumably Windows 10.
The authority reasons that many of its field workers and telephone support services already use Windows, so standardisation makes sense. An upgrade of some kind would in any case be necessary soon, as the PCs are running OpenSuse versions 12.2 and 13.2, neither of which is supported anymore.
According to the Lower Saxony's draft budget, €5.9m is set aside for the migration in the coming year, with a further €7m annually over the following years; it's not yet clear how many years the migration would take... Munich's shift away from LiMux -- the city's own Ubuntu-based distribution -- is expected to cost more than €50m overall, involving the deployment of around 29,000 Windows-based computers.
The authority reasons that many of its field workers and telephone support services already use Windows, so standardisation makes sense. An upgrade of some kind would in any case be necessary soon, as the PCs are running OpenSuse versions 12.2 and 13.2, neither of which is supported anymore.
According to the Lower Saxony's draft budget, €5.9m is set aside for the migration in the coming year, with a further €7m annually over the following years; it's not yet clear how many years the migration would take... Munich's shift away from LiMux -- the city's own Ubuntu-based distribution -- is expected to cost more than €50m overall, involving the deployment of around 29,000 Windows-based computers.
Try this anecdotal evidence:
Open LibreOffice Calc 6.0.2.1, rotate text 180 and add borders. Things look, print and export with huge black lines.
Open random docx your friend or colleague sent you, it looks different or even terrible (yes, they are bad at formatting, yes, it would look slightly better if you had Microsoft fonts installed).
Print a document to an USB printer, unplug it during printing. Now google how to "Enable" your cups printer.
Open Firefox on your touchscreen laptop, try finger scrolling. It selects text instead. It luckily works in Chromium.
Sad but true - it's your fault.
A few years ago I was porting an application to Linux and had a recurring problem with one particular workstation which would loose keyboard functionality and freeze after a reboot. It turned out that Linux became confused about which keyboard was active during system boot if the workstation was connected to a network with an active VPN session between other workstations. That resulted in corruption of a critical configuration file which then needed to be reinstalled before the next reboot or the keyboard would disappear. It was terribly irritating and I wanted to make sure my code wasn't messing things up. I am not a "member of the community" but took a few hours to document how to reproduce the bug at will (it was weird but not that hard and definitely not related to my code), document the corruption in the configuration file, and submit a bug report. I stupidly thought someone would appreciate the effort I went to documenting the situation that exposed the problem. Nope. Instead, I was told that I should fix the bug myself. When I tried to explain that I was working on a project for my employer and had neither the time nor Linux OS skill to do such work, I got a nasty reply basically saying that if I didn't want to support "the community" by fixing the bug then "the community" could not help me because "that's how the community works." . I finished my port and documented the malfunctioning configuration for "my community" so my users could avoid it. The experience soured me on "the Linux community" for a long, long time.