Munich Council: To Hell With Linux, We're Going Full Windows in 2020 (theregister.co.uk) 544
The German city of Munich, which received much popularity back in the day when it first ditched Microsoft's services in favor of open-source software, has now agreed to stop using Linux and switch back to Windows. If the decision is ratified by the full council in two weeks, Windows 10 will start rolling out across the city in 2020. From a report: A coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives on the committee voted for the Windows migration last week, Social Democrat councillor Anne Hubner told The Register. Munich rose to fame in the open-source world for deciding to use Linux and LibreOffice to make the city independent from the claws of Microsoft. But the plan was never fully realised -- mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange -- and in February the city council formally voted to end Linux migration and go back to Microsoft. Hubner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds." Hubner added, "in the past 15 years, much of our efforts were put into becoming independent from Microsoft," including spending "a lot of money looking for workarounds" but "those efforts eventually failed." A full council vote on Windows 10 2020 migration is set for November 23, Hubner said. However, the Social Democrats and Conservatives have a majority in the council, and the outcome is expected to be the same as in committee.
Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:5, Insightful)
Roll the clock back six months, didn't I read about this before?
I give it 10 days for another article to come out saying "No, we're staying with Linux."
I am always suspicious of things like this because someone is probably getting paid by Microsoft (nothing as obvious as cash, more like items of tangible value) to do the switch.
Also, first post? :)
Re:Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and Microsoft wants to make sure it makes the front page of every news source, no doubt!
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Or they were sick and tired dealing with the constant compromises in getting Linux to work how they needed/wanted. And, believe it or not, more than just some of us like the OS, the platforms, the backward compatibility, the development environments.
Re: Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
They have lived with work-around for 15 years, half their applications won't run on Linux - their workers deserve a stable, robust work environment.
Re: Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:5, Insightful)
lived with work-around for 15 years, half their applications won't run on Linux
In 15 years, any _their_ (as in bespoke) applications could have been rewritten 3-5 times in their entirety. And any _someone_else's_ (as in licensed) ones definitely had been replaced 3-4 times at the least, by incompatible versions if not by different vendor's apps.
To keep a "won't run on Linux" state throughout the above, is plain impossible without deliberate sabotage.
On the other hand, to sabotage their own infrastructure for fun and profit is their inalienable right. The voting public decided to saddle themselves with these guys, they fully deserve the results.
According to TFS/TFA, they're doing it wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
> their workers deserve a stable, robust work environment.
Agreed.
> half their applications won't run on Linux
A common, and fatal, mistake. They're trying to keep using Microsoft Exchange and 300 other Windows programs, on Linux. That's certainly the wrong way to do it. It works about as well as trying to run all software made on and for Linux, but run it on Windows.
If you're going to run on Windows, run software developed for and on Windows - IIS, Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Edge, etc.
If you're going to run on Linux, run software developed for and on Linux - Apache httpd, Cyrus imapd, MySQL, Chrome or Firefox, etc.
You wouldn't say "I'm switching from Ford to Chevy" and then try to run a Ford alternator, water, headlights, etc in your Chevy truck. Yet that's what so many people try to do when they "switch" from Windows to Linux. They switch out the bare OS, not the whole thing.
My companies have been running purely on Linux since shortly after Windows 95 came out and it works beautifully, because we use Linux software in a Linux way, we don't try to run a Microsoft-centric network, doing things the Microsoft way, on a Linux kernel.
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Sure, but if they spent 15 years not having switched to the available alternative applications, it is a lie to claim they had switched to linux. They planned to switch, switched a few users, and didn't switch the rest. I call that not actually switching.
Most organizational systems work. But only if you use one of them. If you're using one system, and you decide to switch to a different system, and actually just use parts of both systems, then you can't expect to get to the benefits of either system. That is
Re: Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't Linux be easy?
I mean seriously, I think this illustrates very clearly why there has never been a "Year of Linux on the desktop" no matter how much we all want it.
Linux on phones ala Android is incredibly popular because it's *easy*, even if some security ground was given up to make it so.
There needs to be an enterprise friendly and home user friendly Linux that "just works" and has common business tools and home time wasters that regular folks use and want. Only then does it have a Hell's chance, and even then it's doubtful because of inertia.
Ubuntu very nearly has this licked, largely stable system, particularly LTS, easy repo installs including closed source blobs (even if you hate them, they increase usability, and thus potential market adoption), and widely available with broad platform support, but even with that it hasn't cracked the desktop.
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says the guy from last decade.
Pay attention pal, Microsoft is going a long to get along now and it is delivering fantastic stuff. They will probably be out of the consumer and corporate desktop OS market in the next decade at this rate.
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You have a corporation who's business model builds upon not playing nice with the competition.
You mean like how they have their applications on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and web-based platforms that make products like even their flagship Office 365 available on desktop Linux? There's mail clients like DavMail and Hiri that work on Linux and operate with Microsoft's Exchange email server. Even .Net Core is open source and supported on Linux allowing even more cross platform applications.
Re: Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:5, Insightful)
I concur. Linux should be easy.
"Linux" isn't hard. What becomes hard is when you're dealing with other agencies that use proprietary products. Or there a specialized task that you need done that is only solved by a proprietary product. If you're on Windows, you throw a little money at it to buy the product, and you're done. On Linux you're.... what, booting up a virtual environment to run Windows? Paying a contractor to write a replacement, which is expensive, time-consuming, may not work, and may not be legal? When all you need to do is write a report to send other people in the city... hey, no problem. But once you need niche solutions for niche problems, your options dry up.
Linux has a "the chicken or the egg" problem. Without a sizable desktop user pool in whatever industry you're trying to switch over, all these proprietary products won't be written for Linux. Without proprietary products, industry is handicapping themselves by moving to Linux. It's a tough problem to solve, and that's why it hasn't really been solved yet.
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Linux has a "the chicken or the egg" problem. Without a sizable desktop user pool in whatever industry you're trying to switch over, all these proprietary products won't be written for Linux. Without proprietary products, industry is handicapping themselves by moving to Linux. It's a tough problem to solve, and that's why it hasn't really been solved yet.
What you need is a reason for people to use Linux. The argument that it's cheap is a non-starter because you need to contribute resources to maintaining it and to developing the applications that you need that don't yet exist for it. The motivation for doing that would be some killer, disruptive feature like the way iOS and Android killed off Blackberry and Windows Mobile =6. Then of course Microsoft suffered the same problem that desktop Linux is having with Windows Phone, not actually a bad product but no
Re:Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:4, Interesting)
Visual Studio Code. Its pretty nice.
You can probably tell me a thousand reasons why it's bad. But I've been doing code work for about 30 years, and Visual Studio Code is as good as anything else I've used.
Re:Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am always suspicious of things like this because someone is probably getting paid by Microsoft
More likely the city is playing for a good price in the transition. It's not useful to deny the reality that the Windows ecosystem is easier, more complete and more familiar than the Linux one. Moving to Linux means limitations in software and hardware. Limitations mean that you cannot do your work as easily as in Windows.
A single city, even a behemoth like Munich, is not enough to change that reality. When (if ever) we get a big country committed to Linux we would see drivers being developed for all kind of peripherals if they wanted to enter into tenders, software being adapted (a replacement for Exchange, hopefully), schools teaching with it... But until then the advance is going to be a glacial one, and only major mistakes by Microsoft are going to change that.
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There's not a big chance of that ever happening because it's a business application and nerds only want to play with file systems, graphical user interfaces, image editors, etc. You'll have thousands of commercial-quality Linux-only games before you have a Linux-only version of something even closely similar to Microsoft Exchange.
Re:Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:5, Informative)
You'll have thousands of commercial-quality Linux-only games before you have a Linux-only version of something even closely similar to Microsoft Exchange.
Unless someone pays for it. That's what made the Munich experiment so exciting: once those major tools are developed, there's no reason governments can't become untethered from proprietary software. LibreOffice is a perfect example of this. I used to use OpenOffice out of principle and I dealt with its shortcomings (and I used Excel because OpenOffice just didn't cut it when it came to spreadsheets). Now I use LibreOffice because I prefer it as a word processor and Calc has become functional.
Someone just needs to get the ball rolling.
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yeah but now you need an office app with cloud services integrations to get anything done and libreoffice will never do that.
businesses and orgs dont want to run servers, they just want shit to work. Microsoft realizes that and is positioning their business to provide that service.
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Google G-Suite has a terrible SLA, no decent backup, and their ediscovery is an afterthought. They're not an enterprise solution, at best good for small shops.
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I've been at my current job about 3.5 years.
When I got here, every single thing was run via macro enabled spreadsheets, because their database system was so bad, and the users needed something.
Every month I chip away at the pile of spreadsheets. Bringing in the necessary pieces of information into the database. Giving people a method to upload their data in the current spreadsheets, etc. etc.
It's a battle I'm determined to win. I think I'm about 80% done, with all of the main spreadsheets retired. But
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If they do not want to use Linux after giving it 15 years it does not automatically mean bribery.
15 years is -as we say here- 'a fair suck of the sav*'.
* - saveloy, (a sausage).
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If they really wanted to Switch they should go with Nintendo.
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Should I mod this FUD up for Funny?
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Of course some one is being paid. The fact that Microsoft moved their German HQ to Munich have of course absolutely nothing to do with the current administrations decision... That and (quoting from https://lwn.net/Articles/73781... [lwn.net] which is paywalled):
by 2013, 15,000 computers had been migrated. In addition, 18,000 LibreOffice templates had been created for documents. Previously, each office had its own templates, but the new ones were shared across the city administration. The mayor who had started the project was "always supporting it", Kirschner said. He continuously backed the team behind Limux.
That all ended in 2014. The old mayor did not run for reelection, so a new mayor, Dieter Reiter, from the same party was elected. Reiter did not like Limux and was quoted in some articles as being a Microsoft fan. He ran partly on the idea of switching away from Limux.
From then on, Kirschner said, "Limux was the cause of all evil in Munich". For example, iPhones did not work with the city's infrastructure, which was blamed on Limux though it had nothing to do with the desktop client. A mail server outage was also unfairly blamed on Limux.
So the switch back to Microsoft is also a political one. It also appears that when performing the switch to Limux the city of Munich also rearranged their entire IT with centralized support etc so how many of the "complaints" that actually comes from Limux or
Costing them 90M to switch back to Windows (Score:3)
They've saved millions of euros only to now switch apparently just for political reasons, costing them 90M to switch to Windows: https://itsfoss.com/munich-lin... [itsfoss.com]
Re: Doesn't this continutally come up for Munich? (Score:5, Funny)
Ja, you are right. But, in Germany, vee coll it ze Schtart but'n.
Received much popularity (Score:2, Funny)
I don't know what "received much popularity" means, it's like something from a Japanese T-Shirt.
WWIII (Score:2)
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I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.
Microsoft hegemony (Score:5, Informative)
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MS Office is a good product. Much better than OpenOffice. But Microsoft's constant struggle to reinvent Office to sell a new product will eventually bust them.
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Re:Microsoft hegemony (Score:4, Insightful)
See, here's the thing (and I'm not the AC you're responding to, nor do I think the Linux desktop "sucks ass"); I have no problem with the Linux desktop. I have no problem using Libreoffice, although I think web applications (like Google Docs) cover the vast majority of the needs of most people. I use a web interface for email. So the thing is, if you're talking about a user where the vast majority of what they're doing is online - surfing, email, banking, facebook, whatever, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with the "Linux Desktop," or let's say the "Ubuntu" desktop, or "Cinnamon," or whatever people want to use.
In fact, there's nothing wrong with LibreOffice, or any of the other myriads of programs available for Linux at all... except when everyone else is using something that only runs on Windows. I get documents in Word that go crazy in LibreOffice. Yes, the idiot that wrote it formatted it like only a complete moron would, doing completely unnecessary formatting, undoing it, redoing a different way... nevertheless, I need to get those documents, read them, edit them and return them sometimes. I can't do that when using LibreOffice "breaks" the idiot formatting that was used.
I also have to write programs for Windows users. Period. That's what they're using - if I write something for them, I can't tell them they need to switch to Linux to use my software (as a result, I started doing a lot of web development for most programs that I thankfully don't need to do anymore). I can't tell photoshop users to use GIMP, I can't tell 3DS users to use Blender, I can't tell AfterEffects users to use... whatever the Linux equivalent is. Even if those tools were better than the Windows version, I can't tell a department of 30 people they need to switch so that I can write my software on Linux.
Munich could have, should have, been different - I can't imagine what they are using that requires Windows, let alone 800 programs, but I can understand when they say they have to jump through some hoops to get things running on Linux that otherwise would just run on Windows.
Re: Microsoft hegemony (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Microsoft hegemony (Score:2)
Pet Windows Programs (Score:5, Interesting)
mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange
WTH? E-mail is one of the easiest systems to NOT use any Windows-specific software with --- in fact, the more mature implementations of SMTP and IMAP servers run on Linux and much more robustly, than those pieces of shit called 'Exchange' and 'Outlook'.
"Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux
Seriously.... 800 "Needed" Windows programs? WTF. I call BS. How about supplying a list.
Part of migrating is CHANGING which business apps you will use, to focus more on Web-based solutions, and replace Windows client apps with substitutes that provide the necessary capabilities.
By the way, Linux or OS X should be EASY to adopt on 100% of endpoints, even with specialized software, even if some legacy apps are still required; thanks to Terminal Services or Citrix-based solutions, specialized published apps can execute from a more limited number of machines.
Re:Pet Windows Programs (Score:5, Informative)
Outlook and exchange are the tools of the managerial class. So if it's a choice between learning a brand new email/calendar application or blowing 100k-ish on an exchange/windows license. They'll cling to outlook.
Since now you have a AD controller, exchange server, and the boss running windows it's just a slow creep until you're back to Microsoft. It's interesting how much you can intuit about a company by how much microsoft they have running.
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Our company is successful, growing, progressive, and ethical. We use almost all Microsoft software. What's your point?
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Well use microsoft if you want. It's expensive but usually does the job with not a whole lot of fuss. If that's more important to you than the license costs then I guess it's fine. But if you believe that you couldn't do it cheaper and probably better with linux then you're probably wrong. If you're thinking you're better off not worrying about it and simply concentrating on your core business. Well you're probably correct.
It's something to keep in mind for the future though.
Re:Pet Windows Programs (Score:5, Insightful)
What's going on here is a failure of open source to provide the tools the customer wants. Companies and organizations (charities, government) want these sorts of email management tools. But open source coders are very individualist and generally aghast at the idea of a manager having that sort of power over "your" email. So they don't put any work into adding those sorts of capabilities even if that's what the customers want.
Meanwhile, the customers are so desperate for said tools that they're willing to pay good money for them. Microsoft steps up and says they'll gladly take your money in exchange for creating these tools. And the open source community sneers at the entire thing even though they've basically driven the organization to Microsoft by refusing to provide the tools the organization needed to operate.
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Re:Pet Windows Programs (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be stupid. Of course you can revoke email privileges while retaining the actual emails with most (if not all) open-source mail servers.
Email isn't what drives Exchange. Calendar integration is what drives it. That plus ignorant managers who think that Outlook IS email.
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e.g. revoking email privileges for a fired employee while retaining their emails for reference by their replacement
You what? Changing/revoking access tokens, passwords and so on is basically a standard feature of every email system ever, F/OSS or proprietary.
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This right here.
Most people don't want to dick around with 27 independent utilities to get something simple done. With Exchange+Outlook, you install the server, you install the clients, and you use the admin interface on the server to allow the clients to do their thing. What thing? Email, shared calendars, contact management, task lists, integration with other systems that need to send notifications to your users or that your users want to send notifications out to external addresses on their behalf, that
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People run micosoft software because the staffing is cheaper. You just named things normal admins can do with normal software and have done for ages, you don't know about it because you run microsoft software.
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Actually, there are more tools like you describe available for *nix mail servers than you can shake a stick at!
The problem is that users who don't have a clue, want to have credit for having a clue anyways. So somebody such as yourself repeats this total bullshit about some software not existing, not because you searched for it and couldn't find it, but simply because you don't know about it and so believe it doesn't exist.
For stupid people who don't want to learn anything, it is really a lot easier to choo
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Outlook and exchange are the tools of the managerial class. So if it's a choice between learning a brand new email/calendar application or blowing 100k-ish on an exchange/windows license. They'll cling to outlook.
What if the $100k-ish for an exchange/windows license allowing people "cling" to Outlook is more efficient/cost-effective than retraining the hundreds or thousands of "managerial class" [public or private] employees to use a different system? For many many people just altering an interface is enough to confuse and make them more inefficient even if the system capabilities are the exactly the same. This is particularly true for older generations who might be the more experienced workers with other valuable s
Re: Pet Windows Programs (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Pet Windows Programs (Score:2)
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WTH? E-mail is one of the easiest systems to NOT use any Windows-specific software with --- in fact, the more mature implementations of SMTP and IMAP servers run on Linux and much more robustly, than those pieces of shit called 'Exchange' and 'Outlook'.
Look next time just post: "I have no idea what I'm talking about". It would be easier on everyone.
Comparing IMAP/SMTP to an Outlook Exchange combination is like comparing chalk and a 5 course degustation de fromage. The two are so remotely different in capability and administration that it makes me wonder if you've ever administered an email server or have ever actually used outlook in a corporate environment.
Seriously.... 800 "Needed" Windows programs? WTF. I call BS.
And now you're showing just how little you know about the public sector.
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We initially decided to do this massive OS migration, but didn't think to check first as to whether or not many important apps were compatible or had replacements that our users would be willing to accept. And yeah, so what if there were hundreds of these critical oversights. The important part is that you can totally trust our planning this time as we devote more of your hard earned bucks into another migration. What could go wrong?
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Up until 5 years ago we used to use imap/smtp onsite on a cluster of Linux machines. The one thing we were missing was integrated calendaring support. We have about 800,000+ accounts.
We migrated to Google Apps for Enterprise - but it has integrated calendaring, tele-conference software, notekeeping docs for meetings, etc etc - its the kind of stuff you get with exchange/outlook.com.
With our Linux environment - there was stuff we could tack on to do that, but honestly it felt like a massive kludge - and most
Re:Pet Windows Programs (Score:5, Informative)
mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange
WTH? E-mail is one of the easiest systems to NOT use any Windows-specific software with --- in fact, the more mature implementations of SMTP and IMAP servers run on Linux and much more robustly, than those pieces of shit called 'Exchange' and 'Outlook'.
Let the church say "Amen" to that one. I work for a US based Fortune 500 company as a result of being hired by a company they bought out. They left us alone for several years and during that time we maintained our own email systems on Linux. It was so much easier than now when we are forced to use corporate Exchange servers with awful Outlook clients. I just despise Outlook and remain amazed that people actually like it. When we ran our own servers I could write procmail rules to handle my email and do what I wanted and I loved Thunderbird as a client. Outlook is much worse to using procmail + Thunderbird.
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mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange
WTH? E-mail is one of the easiest systems to NOT use any Windows-specific software with --- in fact, the more mature implementations of SMTP and IMAP servers run on Linux and much more robustly, than those pieces of shit called 'Exchange' and 'Outlook'.
I'd agree here, even with MS endpoints I can't understand how you couldn't have Linux mail servers.
"Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux
Seriously.... 800 "Needed" Windows programs? WTF. I call BS. How about supplying a list.
Part of migrating is CHANGING which business apps you will use, to focus more on Web-based solutions, and replace Windows client apps with substitutes that provide the necessary capabilities.
By the way, Linux or OS X should be EASY to adopt on 100% of endpoints, even with specialized software, even if some legacy apps are still required; thanks to Terminal Services or Citrix-based solutions, specialized published apps can execute from a more limited number of machines.
This part makes sense to me. A municipal government isn't just secretaries and managers writing up documents and exchanging emails. There's transport, project planning, engineering, etc. Each of those departments is going to have its own specialized software, and the industry standard software is going to predominantly be windows.
You might be able to find something on Linux with sufficient functionality, you m
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I'm sort of convinced if calendaring could have been hacked into the IMAP standard at some point in the late 1990s, it would have killed off a lot of the Outlook/Exchange momentum.
Re:Pet Windows Programs (Score:4, Informative)
the more mature implementations of SMTP and IMAP servers run on Linux and much more robustly
Exchange isn't just about transferring mail. It's a full groupware package, with email, calendars, contacts, and tasks. And then they may be using software that has Exchange integrations or Outlook plugins.
And just to be clear, I'm not arguing that they made the right choice. I'm just saying that throwing SMTP and IMAP onto a Linux box doesn't begin to replicate the full feature set of Exchange.
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"She estimated about half of the 800 or so"
You are right, she is not giving exact numbers, which means that no-one has even counted how many applications there are. Leaders of that organization are obviously to blame. If I were given a task to migrate everything to Linux, first thing would be to get a list of all applications that are needed, how many users each application has and is there an existing alternative that can be used on Linux and if not, how much is estimated that it would cost to write or order such application (preferably a web application so there won't be such problems in the future).
Alternately, they did exactly that, but she didn't give the exact number in the interview because "397 of the 804 applications" a) sounds weirdly pedantic and unrelatable, which is a bad look for a politician, b) she might be off if she forgets an exact number and now she's created a needless controversy where by saying something inaccurate, and c) 397/804 vs 423/798 is irrelevant and her audience is liable to forget figures that exact, "half of 800" on the other hand is really easy to remember.
That's what the Linux community never got. (Score:4, Insightful)
She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds."
Different scenario but the small (about 50 ppl) co I work for looked into and rejected Linux for the same reasons.
What the Linux community needs to understand is people need real world problems solved. They do not need yet another reskin of the login screen, or Desktop Environment #933. They need Photoshop (NOT gimp!). They need their real accounting package (NOT gnucash). They need the applcations which drive real work in the real world, not some inferior hard to use and not very capable substitutes.
THIS is what holds Linux back on the desktop. People ask, "But will it run the software I need?" and the answer often comes up "No". You want to drive Linux adoption? Fix the real problems people have, rather than forking yet another distro or DE and things people don't need or care about. I know that's harder. I know it's not as "fun". But that's what is needed if you want us to use this thing.
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The Linux community trying to "fix" the problem of adoption by fussing around with file systems and GUIs is like the Windows community trying to "fix" Windows by adding LED lighting to their computer cases.
to meny distros as well some apps only have repos (Score:2)
to many distros as well some apps only have repos for some of them and manual installs / updates can be a pain to do for some that don't have a repo or rpm for your distro.
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Accounting package? Who the hell runs an accounting package on their desktop in 2017 in a business with 50 people? Either outsource it and run it in a web browser or run it locally and access it in a web browser.
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You don't know what you're talking about. Accounting for a 50 person company can't be done well in a browser. It's the wrong tool for the job.
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Adobe publishes Photoshop, not the Linux folks.
Intuit publishes QuickBooks, and Sage publishes Peachtree and Sage Accounting.
Nobody else can just publish those for Linux. If you want those exact programs on another OS, you must convince the publishers it's a worthwhile market.
Year of the Windows desktop (Score:2)
balls (Score:2)
800 Custom windows only apps? Someone's lying (Score:2)
Workarounds are what kills you (Score:2)
End-user wise, most OSes today are fine for client devices because web browsers work well on all of them. The killer is the actual business applications...I imagine a city government builds up quite a large portfolio of applications over time, both current and legacy, packaged and home-grown. I work in a non-government but very similar vertical market, where there are really only 2 or 3 vendors supporting any particular system. Getting those entrenched vendors to adapt to anything is hard because they want
800 programs?! (Score:4, Informative)
> half of the 800 or so total programs needed
They have 800 programs they use?
Color me sceptical. Excluding games, I don't think I've run 800 different programs if I go back even to my Atari days.
I've worked in large public organizations before, and I recall maybe two dozen programs being used, a third of them being Office (MS Project is still out there) and the rest since replaced by web servers.
I do not get this (Score:3)
I work in the public sector on computers all day. The only applications that people use here are office-type applications (word processors, spreadsheets, etc.) and web database applications. Either of these can easily be run or accessed on any OS.
I really do not understand the "Windows ONLY" need at all.
Corruption, plain and simple. Trends is web apps (Score:3)
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 everythin
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Not Microsoft's fault (Score:2)
If KDE and GNOME had positioned themselves as full operating systems a la Android and "distros" were an exotic geek thing, desktop Linux might actually be a thing by now. Look at what OS X really is. Most of it is a DE like KDE or GNOME that runs on top of Darwin, but the same company manages both sides. If KDE or GNOME had done that, the results would probably be very similar. Heck, something like going from X.Org to Wayland would be completely invisible to ordinary users.
LiMux ... Bigest mistake of Munich (Score:5, Insightful)
And before I have to duck for cover, I'll have to say I favoured Munich move to FOSS, I used it as a case example advocating for similar moves (while also pointing out the errors, of course). I've been to Munich (Siemens Training OMC-S, great memories from Kunstpark-ost), and I love the city and its people.
If you are going from Closed source to open source, there are a few pitfalls to avoid.
First, for a project like Munich, the LAST thing you replace is the Desktop OS of Users. You first replace the apps. And DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER a rip and replace strategy.
You replace the apps it in waves, using your chosen crossplatform FOSS alternatives (I understand Munich did something along this lines).
And ALSO for each wave you have a SWAT/Crack team on the Helpdesk specificaly dedicated to help the users master that specific wave of the transition.
And ALSO adequate training for each and every wave to boot (and the training for each specific wave has to be done BEFORE the wave starts, and for Every employee)
Remember, for us techies, changing from IE11 to Firefox, or from word to Libreoffice writer may seem easy, but for a public servant who was trained as, say an administrator or lawyer, it may not come so naturaly.
First you start with the low hanging fruit of things like Your users' browsers (perhaps with a creative use of a plugin like "use IE here", prepopulated with suitable lists) and PDF viewers/generators.
Then along Comes Powerpoint (please notice that I said Powerpoint, not Office), with the trick of setting up PowerPoint Viewer as the default PowerPoint program and things like publisher.
Then comes the turn of Word. This will be a problem because all the damaged formats. Here Word Viewer and your SWAT transition team will prove invaluable...
Then comes a hard nut to crack. Excel. But by now, your users should have the perception that changes from Comercial SW to FOSS are not "that hard", and that the SWAT Team has their back.
Then, comes the boss fight: Exchange Server. Please remeber that exchange server is not only email, but also calendaring, and many of those functions are still unmatched by FOSS alternatives. Let alone migrating the historic data stores....
After all apps are more or less migrated (Including rewriting web apps to be crossbrowser, creative use of wine for some custom apps, directing user to web interfaces of certain packages instead of using custom clients), is the turn (finally) of the OS itself.
And here is were I explain why LiMux was a mistake. If you have limited resources, why on earth would you squander thoise resourses doing your own distro? And with NO commercial support to boot!
Instead they should have choosen a specific distro as prefered parthner, working with them on the distro (trying to steer them to a mutualy agreable middle ground) and then making a complementary package to further customize the distro. In the UE alone there are two well known players (Mandriva and Suse in alpha order). One of then (Suse) is even in your home country. Surely there are many more...
But nooo, for some reason, someone decided to re-implement the weel (without commercial support), henceforth LiMux.
Here in Venezuela, the same happened, instead of using an already created distro, they created something called Canaima (a distro to be used for both Desktops and Servers), with no commercial support, and is just a re-spinig of debian, squandering precious resources...
I am sad to see Munich retreat back to Windows. But I can also understand why they do it, and some of the mistakes they made along the way....
Re:LiMux ... Bigest mistake of Munich (Score:4, Insightful)
This was not even the reason to give throw it under the bus. Most of the specific use cases were already moved to linux, they had reimplements their forms systems to use libre office and some of the software that could only be used on windows was available over remote desktop, their own client was a modified Ubuntu LTS Version and they were on their way to implement a Linux Groupware Solution (Kolab, I think) to get exchange functionality, especially for the higher ups, as they wanted to have it on their smartphones.
Then MS started to move their Headquarters to Munich and the city council to lobby to replace linux. They asked Accenture (!!!) to check, if change was necessary and the non-public part of the report told that the IT Mismanagement was a much bigger factor than any hardware/OS/Tools Issue at hand.
The public part was used to make Limux scapegoat for everything and tasking Microsoft to create a single client solution, damn the cost.
The cost must be ridicules, because now their solution and the cost are "secret", but some people already estimated what the new hardware for windows 10 might cost (as they could use Limux on very very old machines) and that covers not even all the cost for new software licenses for stuff they had already build in Limux.
This is more politics and corruption than technical merit.
So, let's talk about what really happened. (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows 10 (Score:3, Insightful)
I can sort of see them going back to Windows 7, since that's an OS suitable for real work, but Windows 10?
It's hard to see how to get work done with all those annoying tiles moving around and vying for your attention and the flat white UI with thin borders which cause eye strain. I suppose IT can produce an OS image without all that crap, but will they get any support from Microsoft?
You went full Windows, man. (Score:2)
Never go full Windows.
To hell with Munich (Score:2)
LiMux was screwed up by incompetence. (Score:2)
LiMux was handled by idiots, plain and simple. Current decisions were brought on by people who know zilch about computers and couldn't tell a client from a server if their life depended on it. Breathtakingly dumb people with a stupid political and personal agenda, most certainly bribed by MS lobbyists. If you want to know how Projects like these get f*cked up by idiots that only know Windows and have zero concept of computers, look no further than the LiMux desaster.
Meanwhile SchwÃbisch Hall is doing j
mac os can work if they just open to more hardware (Score:2)
mac os can work if they just open to more hardware (not tied to there thin and looks ideas)
Where is the tough book laptops for apple?
Say a good $600-$1000 desktop (does not need to be a gamer system) not the very out of date and under powered mini.
A server system or the rights to run mac os server in a VM on any base hardware.
A system that some can pull the storage before sending it out for service?
They gave it 15 years... (Score:2)
And still they couldn't find/create the tools they need to do their jobs on Linux:
Hubner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds."
I fully expect Linux Zealots will rage about how "if they only gave it more time"...
Re:Just a racist stereotyping American (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't sound like installing Linux was the issue. It was converting all the applications they use to Linux. If all you do is email, write a document, and update a spreadsheet then sure, it is easy. But if you have hundreds of special written applications that use Windows languages and compilers -- not web sites -- that all need to be completely rewritten...that is hard.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Surely Java is the answer!
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If you want java, wait for your coffee break.
Get back to work!
Re: (Score:3)
What on earth are you saying? That software that was available 13 years ago doesn't exist today, having been developed, released and maintained during that time? That's an awfully stupid argument to make on /. of all places.
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From 2004 to 2013 they migrated 15000 staff to Linux. That means that today the Windows apps they used should be at least 13 years old (probably more, and maybe a lot more).
You miss the point here -- they are probably going to the city-management, traffic-management and building-management conventions and looking at the specialized software that all their peers are using, and saying "wow, that's cool, why can't we use it?" And the answer is -- those are only written for Windows, because that's what all the other cities use.
There's a whole world of small-market software packages for every industry. Each organization is too small to justify custom software, but their needs are c
Re:Social Democrats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Social Democrats... (Score:5, Funny)
Idiot, ignorant rethuglikkkans toss the "socialist" label on just anybody who happens to be around. They're so stupid, they actually call Barack Obama a socialist. If only they had even 1 functioning brain cell, they would know that Barack Obama was the best moderate republican president the U.S has had since Dwight D. Eisenhower. The U.S *has no* meaningful left wing, and even Bernie Sanders would be considered a poseur/moderate conservative by European/Scandinavian standards.
Anyway, in the U.S, the word "socialist" is so misused and not-understood (that's different from MISunderstood, mind you), that your question has no meaning.
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Are you genuinely asking a question or are you attempting to insinuate something? It's hardly shocking that a major German political party is socialist. Every first world country—including the U.S.—employs some socialist mechanisms. It's called the modern world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:I'm Shocked, Shocked I Tell You! (Score:4, Insightful)
You must be kidding. With everything moving to the cloud, the desktop OS becomes more irrelevant every year. You will start seeing other OS making inroads over Windows as this continues. This is more about some sales people bribing ("lobbying") the right people.
Save the Cloud thing, I've been hearing this for the past couple decades...
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We will see how that goes.
The cloud is great for new organizations that not already heavily invested in Windows.
The cloud is great for brand new applications that are written to run there from scratch.
I worked with a couple of different city governments here in America. They have a whole slew of applications that while not all that complex, are Windows only. Applications like permit systems and rec center scheduling tools.
The in house tools do not even scratch the surface of the challenges that come from
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Important applications are not moving to "the cloud" as you say.
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That's exactly what this was about. Microsoft is the "Comcast" of the software world. Microsoft clawing their turf back one city government at a time.
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Bah, in a place as big as Munich Administration you can infiltrate a spy any fucking time. Or bribe someone who already works there. Software has no power to prevent that.
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Apparently the new versions will run Android apps, which closes the biggest beef I had with the Chromebook: the inability to actually install software.
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I studied German in high school in the 1970's, and I understood your Germish perfectly! :-)
and you must license full cluster for each core (Score:2)
Windows Server licensing wants to you have an license for the full cluster for each core in it. Even if you don't need that many windows VM's.