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German State Plans To Migrate 13,000 Workstations From Linux to Windows (zdnet.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the government-shut-downs dept.

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.

8 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. No problem by TimothyHollins · · Score: 4, Funny

    This should be easy. The German state has become quite the expert on migration as of late. Let's just hope no-one gets raped in the process.

  2. Shame by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is a shame. Willingly paying for closed source malware and spyware isn't my idea of using money wisely.

    1. Re:Shame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That should tell you how much desktop Linux sucks ass.

    2. Re:Shame by superdude72 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Here's the value of Windows: When something breaks, you can blame it on those dumbasses at Microsoft and no one will hold you responsible because you're just using the same platform that 95 percent of the world uses. When something breaks in Linux, it's all your fault because you took a chance on a screwball operating system to save a few euros.

      Back when IBM ruled the industry they had a slogan: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." Well that's been the case with Microsoft since the '90s.

    3. Re:Shame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So you got a rude reply. Guess what happens in the commercial world? They write a compiler that doesn't manage to do a typedef correctly, you need to debug, provide a trivial test-case and quote them the spec that they are actually wrong (as they keep claiming there is no bug), months later and after a lot of time invested they acknowledge it. Yet another few months later they come back and say they are too busy, couldn't we do without it for a while longer.
      I've seen few companies where you'd get something better than the same reaction as you got from the "community", just with more politeness but minus the option to fix it yourself.
      Same company has a tool that would be very useful if it supported pipes. Unfortunately someone felt they needed to add a stat call to make sure the input is a file. They've not managed to remove that single line of useless check in about a year.
      They don't say "fuck off". But they're happy to leave you hoping until you die of old age (or at least retire). I still consider "fuck off" the reply I'd rather get.
      Even though I admit your frustration at the episode is justified. I just disagree on it being an argument FOR proprietary.

  3. Where tax payers should be concerned is... by mykepredko · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That this is being done *without* a cost-benefit analysis.

    There is a certain amount of politics here, but if I were a citizen/tax payer of Lower Saxony I'd be mostly concerned that this is being done before an analysis is available.

    I understand that Open Suse 12.2 and 12.3 are obsolete, but I would think that migrating to Leap 42 or Leap 15 would would be a lot cheaper than buying Windows 10 licenses. In TFA, they cite the issue that telephone support is now being done on Windows - but I would think that it would be more cost effective to move them to Linux.

    But, without any kind of analysis, the people who are going to pay for this won't know.

    --
    Mimetics Inc. Twitter
  4. POTUS declares EU as fiend by sanf780 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If EU is not a friend anymore according to Trump, why does the EU allow USA software in their administration?

  5. Re:LOL by Tough+Love · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the graph that should worry Microsoft.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.