36 ms·

Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

140 points by lsh123 10y ago

jimnotgym 10y ago
I am deeply suspicious of the motives here... Yes I'm sure people moan about IT. They moan about Windows where I work. They probably moaned about the quality of the quills 100 years ago. Libre office is perfectly capable for most users, and is very compatible with MS Office. It is easy for users to transition too. I doubt any of this has anything to do with any of those points.
- mistermann 10y ago
  Microsoft Office is better, for not very much more $ per desktop.
  - jimnotgym 10y ago
    Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple lists in Excel. I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big news for a developer. 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users
    - qeternity 10y ago
      > 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users It's really not. Office is the single MS product that is actually better than the competition (Libre, Apple, etc) and it's also THE core business software. Most businesses might have huge ERP systems, but the war is won in the Excel trenches. If you're an organization of 1,000+ users, $100kpa is nothing.
      - mistermann 10y ago
        No one pays $99/user/year anyways.
    - JoshTriplett 10y ago
      > Better at what? Mostly, better at interoperating with Microsoft Office. LibreOffice works really well, but if you need perfect metric-compatibility, or macros, then it doesn't quite suffice. Likewise for Google Docs (and additionally, Google Slides lacks numerous features desirable for building good presentations).
    - taspeotis 10y ago
      > 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. And at $150/yr it includes Exchange/SharePoint/Skype/Teams. The latter three aren't particularly exciting but not having to worry about email/calendaring is a big win.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        Despite the quirkiness of eventually consistent email patterns, the calendar integration with exchange/outlook even on web is pretty damned nice. I'm getting used to the office gmail/docs/calendar, but the integration still isn't nearly as nice as outlook. The mail in gmail is much better though (as long as you stick to the web interface, go imap and prepare to be f'd up).
    - sbuttgereit 10y ago
      I only write simple letters and, while I do actual accounting work in Excel which is just a little more than simple lists, I'm not using Excel as a database either... as I use databases for that (i.e. don't ask me how to do a VLOOKUP). Even in these simple tasks, MS Office is simply superior in terms of function and productivity if you are performing those simple tasks frequently enough. Could I get by with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, yeah, and did so for a couple years straight and off/on before and after that time. I use to be annoyed to no end by the bloat and heaviness of MS Office... and then after prolonged use of LibreOffice/OpenOffice (yes, both), I came to greatly appreciate MS Office. The only part of office which I use regularly which I'm not very happy with is Outlook (OK, really only use Word, Excel, and Outlook... can't comment on the other parts of the suite as it's been more than a decade since I regularly used things like Access). I'm also disappointed by the Office 365 cloud integration/features: feels very much like a philosophical approach to technology that has lots of Microsoft servers in your enterprise's data center and the outside world is kept at bay rather than collaborated with... Google does that much better... LibreOffice not at all. The number of quirks that caused something to not be quite right or the performance differences I experienced (noticeable in spreadsheets) makes free LibreOffice look very expensive and $99/yr MS Office look cheap. Much more productive in MS Office overall. Having managed IT operations in the corporate world, same experience there: the only place I would (and did) deploy OpenOffice (LibreOffice didn't exist yet) was to the field and the field being to retail chain store personnel. In the chain in question they only wrote simple letters and used spreadsheets for simple lists, generally had very little/no computer experience, and they didn't do office suite work with any regular frequency at all. In that case, the productivity hit was drowned out by the noise of overall lack of computer literacy and they didn't do those tasks with any real frequency, so the Office licenses really didn't make for good investment... but I can tell you that I deployed MS Office to all of the HQ staff and middle managers and glad to have done so. In the past few years, I would probably rank the desktop office suites (meaning available for use on the desktop) as MS Office, G Suite, LIbreOffice. I have Office 365, but tend not to use the online versions of the apps so won't comment on them.
      - jimnotgym 10y ago
        I actually agree that my accounts team would be more productive with Excel. But for the other 99% of users?
    - jasonlotito 10y ago
      > Better at what? Style support for documents. LibreOffice doesn't have complete style support. This is the one thing right now keeping me from even considering it.
      - jimnotgym 10y ago
        I'm using styles in Writer in the same way as I do in Word.
      - kiwijamo 10y ago
        What is it missing? Styles is something I think OO/LO do reasonably well already, and have done so since the StarOffice days. I am specifically talking about paragraph styles so I wonder if there is some other type of styles OO/LO is indeed missing.
    - milesrout 10y ago
      $99 per year is pretty tiny per user. Remember that each of these users is being paid tens of thousands of dollars per year, which means that they will be generating (roughly, on average) 2-3x that in value for a company. $99 to make someone you're paying $30k more efficient is pretty good value.
      - jimnotgym 10y ago
        It depends. I would give technically skilled users whatever they are productive in. I see plenty of users who would never get past sorting and filtering. Libre office calc is at least as four as excel for that
  - DrScump 10y ago
    As opposed to OpenOffice or Libreoffice for free?
    - sunflowerfly 10y ago
      You are only considering the up front ccst. Support and maintenance costs are not free.
      - DrScump 10y ago
        Support applies to both. Maintenance cost for these two alternatives is zero, since updates are free.
        cwyers 10y ago
        Office 365 comes with paid support. As far as maintenance being zero for OpenOffice... that's not how doing IT works at all. Things will break, or users won't be able to figure out how to do things, and they WILL ask for maintenance.
        hobofan 10y ago
        It doesn't come with support for the Windows workstations you need for running it though.
        wiz21c 10y ago
        my experienc eis different. When a user has a problem he goes to the colleagues he knows and then, if he's a little pro-active, he looks on the web. Pas that, in a big company, they'll just leave it there "too complicated". I don't think people ever bother to reach the person who k nows the support contact at microsoft... And fact is, Excel or Word, are quit known everywhere so you don't need much of support. So no, I don't think there's much of a need for support...
        jimnotgym 10y ago
        And they have in-house IT who are familiar with open office already
- dllthomas 10y ago
  > They probably moaned about the quality of the quills 100 years ago. My understanding has quill usage declining more like 200 years ago.
- luca_ing 10y ago
  > I am deeply suspicious of the motives here... Munich native here. Not even the mayor's office denies that the entire public service organisation is woefully understaffed. While I've heard disconcerting things about the quality of especially their bespoke applications, it feels like they are looking for scapegoats.
massysett 10y ago
I'm surprised the elected officials are so involved in deciding what desktop software is in use. I'm not sure whether to be impressed that they are this deep into details, or skeptical that politicians rather than professionals are making these decisions. Both I guess. I just can't imagine the council in any US jurisdiction meddling in what desktop OS is chosen throughout the jurisdiction.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I would imagine that the cost difference is enough to get their attention
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Reportedly, they haven't even looked at the costs of moving back to Windows yet, nor is there any indication of this actually saving money in the long run.
massysett 10y ago
They suggest that virtual desktops make the client OS irrelevant. My employer (US government agency) went to completely virtual desktops and I was surprised they stuck with Windows 7 for the client laptops. Seemed a perfect place to put Red Hat or some other Linux. I wondered if Windows is priced so there is no advantage to using anything else, or if even dumb clients still need enough management that they would rather use a familiar OS.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  Windows is pretty inexpensive, and if you want something supported for more than a year or two, the options do tend to be somewhat costly. RedHat, for example, is $50/year for the equivalent of Windows Update. There are also a number of other advantages for windows in terms of things like remote management which RedHat doesn't have equivalents for.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    Redhat has a vast array of remote management tools: Asible, puppet, cobbler, ssh etc. Most all of them are superior to Microsoft's offerings. It would make perfect sense to have a Linux host on machines if most applications are web based.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      But then you have to maintain ansible/puppet etc scripts to keep things in order... and when one machine doesn't work right, you have to figure it all out, often searching through stack exchange sites/answers... let alone getting answers for other distros, or even other versions of your distro than no longer apply. That doesn't even consider hardware variations and compatibility issues with drivers.
      - yellowapple 10y ago
        You'd have to maintain Active Directory / Group Policy /etc. settings under Windows anyway. It ain't like Windows automagically sets you up with a perfect management solution for your organization. When one Windows machine doesn't work right, you're still often the one searching through Stack Exchange, Microsoft's support forums, etc. If you're going with something popular in the enterprise like RHEL or SUSE, you're pretty much on equal footing when it comes to support availability and troubleshooting (if not in a much better situation due to the easier time - IMO - in actually creating/maintaining/deploying system configurations). Driver issues are indeed significant, however. It's a lot better than it was when I first started using Linux, but printing and scanning is still a major pain point. Enterprise environments have a much easier time here than home users due to being able to constrain driver problems to a select few print/scan servers running CUPS/SANE instead of having to deal with this on a workstation-by-workstation basis, but it's still far from ideal, and very few businesses are truly "paperless".
gigatexal 10y ago
Don't be surprised if Microsoft made the windows licenses free or nearly so so that they could sell them office 365 licenses.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I'm half surprised they didn't try switching to o365 for their users, while keeping the linux desktop distro, and allowing for exceptions for specific use cases.
  - luca_ing 10y ago
    They require lots of very specific applications. From what one hears (Munich native here), many of them are pretty bad. Now, being bespoke apps, they'd probably just as horrible if they if they were Windows apps, but it just gets rolled into the Linux blame.
throwaway2048 10y ago
this "news" keeps being reposted every few years, and it hasn't been correct yet.
- sgift 10y ago
  There's a real chance that it will happen this time as there's no a 'supporting' consultation by Accenture that says going back to Windows would be a good idea (see another sub-thread for the quality of an Accenture consultation). As if my tax money couldn't be spend on something more useful.
  - buovjaga 10y ago
    The Accenture study is not saying that. The LiMux folks were quite happy with the study. Here it is, 10MB PDF with 450 pages: https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277724.pdf https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...
Merem 10y ago
Hm.. "At the time the report was released, the FSFE questioned why Accenture was commissioned to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software, when the consultancy runs a joint venture with Microsoft called Avanade, which helps businesses implement Microsoft technologies. For its part, Accenture said it has an "independent view of the technology landscape". "At the time Munich began the move to LiMux in 2004 it was one of the largest organizations to reject Windows, and Microsoft took the city's leaving so seriously that then CEO Steve Ballmer flew to Munich to meet the mayor. More recently, Microsoft last year moved its German company headquarters to Munich." Everything else that is written there points towards it making no sense to switch back to Windows.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  Lol. Microsoft is utterly terrified of Linux making the jump from servers to the workplace. It's arguably a much bigger threat than home users switching since businesses could switch many thousands of machines at once
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    For MS, home users have been a "total cost of ownership" element in their b2b sales pitch. With home users familiar with basic MS software usage from home, MS can argue that businesses do not have to sped as much on training new employees if said businesses use MS products.
    - yuhong 10y ago
      But I think they make relatively little in eg Windows revenue compared to corporate sales, which shows even today.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        I think this is especially true today, given the reduced desktop/laptop sales in the home space, and MS's free upgrades from v7+ to win10. I think that offset was in favor of getting a smaller support base as well as the advertising channel for office365 (which annoys me, not the product, the win10 ads), same for edge browser.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
The mention of “Windows Basic Client” jumps out to me. Is that a reference to the thin client version of Windows? If so, what's the point of switching away from Linux?
shmerl 10y ago
So, no real reason? Or may be MS paid someone in charge? It doesn't make any sense really.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  Funnily enough, after 2004, MS moved their German HQ to Münich.
  - sveme 10y ago
    Indeed, they moved five kilometers from Unterschleißheim, a Munich suburb, to the city itself.
    - welterde 10y ago
      Actually it's 12km. But that's beside the point. Unterschleißheim is not part of Munich itself, so in regards to the corporate tax it does make a difference to both cities where it is paid (and we are talking about millions of euros here).
    - fhackenberger 10y ago
      Well exactly that makes all the difference. Local taxes now go to Munich instead of Unter...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
alistproducer2 10y ago
I'd love to see the financials that justify the move.
jernfrost 10y ago
Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows? It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously. To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing with anti-virus software, clicking links they shouldn't, malware etc. If I were to speculate a key problem is that so many people treat MS Word as the standard format for exchanging written documents. Computer illiterate people very frequently send emails with their main info written in MS Word. They seem to have no idea that you can format your emails from a regular email client. Or how many people bundle images by pasting them into powerpoint rather than just zipping them? It would be interesting to know whether these are the sort of problems causing a desire for a switch back to Windows or whether there are real legitimate reasons.
- BrailleHunting 10y ago
  Perhaps specialties in large urban govt bureacracies (like GIS, facilities maintenance, etc.) often require many Windows-only apps and drivers from vendors whom can't justify Linux development (Mac would probably be first). Having IT supported a similar type heterogenous mix of departments in big name Ivy academia, it's typically workable productivity/interop to have each group of users to standardize on the same OS... usually either Window or Mac but not both (because of app compatibility, even between same vendor isn't always 100%: filename character set, fonts, so on.)
- jstewartmobile 10y ago
  I've moved places from 0% Linux to around 70% Linux, but the obstacles on the road to 100% in non-tech companies are tough: - Office VBA: OpenOffice is good enough for people who just make docs and spreadsheets, but some of the more savvy folk (usually in finance and engineering) use MS Office VBA as a development platform. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it for them. - Old stuff: Critical sensors, HVAC systems, fuel management systems, etc. that have proprietary windows-only clients. Some work well enough in Wine, others don't. - 3rd-party support contracts: A lot of places rent their copiers, and even though those copiers have Linux print drivers, the support that is bundled into the contract is windows-only, so you're on your own with Linux. - AD / Group Policy Deployment: Samba4 is closer, but without windows desktops on the client-end, it's still no substitute for the one-ring-to-control-them-all nature of a bunch of windows boxes under AD, and I'm not just talking SSO. I think the key-problem with windows is that most users--even in a lot of AD-controlled corporate settings--are full administrators. If you can drop everyone down to limited-user status, it greatly improves things. Not to Linux levels, but still a lot better.
BrailleHunting 10y ago
Note the report on which the recommendation was based was authored by a derivative of the Big5 firm which helped Enron. (Arthur Anderson -> Accenture) Technology consultants inventing expensive "customer need" projects is nothing new.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  Let's hit the real point. When MS moved it's headquarters there, they hired a whole bunch of Munich voters.
  - pas 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627525
lucb1e 10y ago
I was afraid this would happen when I saw they made a custom distro called LiMux. Maybe it was good in the beginning, though I doubt it given the reports I heard, but by now it must be horribly outdated. (Going to the "project site" as linked by wikipedia, I just get a blank page.) Additionally, almost no workers will be using anything other than Windows or OS X at home. Having to find explorer or the "add column" button in libreoffice will be annoying at first, so users probably need more help to get started. It's a sad state of popular systems remaining popular... Personally I use Linux both for ideological and practical reasons, and I recommend it to other power users and computer-related professionals (software or security people), but for users... until there are real advantages, I'm not sure I should recommend it for fear of them going "everything is wrong" when really it's functionally equivalent and they just have to re-learn where stuff is (the cost of change..). There are exceptions, old computers mainly, but generally I recommend users stick with what they want in the desktop space. I'll just keep making remarks about privacy and modifying scripts in my OS to change whatever I want. If that doesn't trigger anything, they don't want to anyway.
- buovjaga 10y ago
  I don't know what's up with the project page being gone, but the distro is not outdated. They are working on a version with KDE Plasma 5. Maybe some people don't realize, how much they have contributed upstream. For the past couple of years I have worked with them as a volunteer in LibreOffice. They regularly host hackfests for Debian & LibreOffice. There are certain parts of LibreOffice like the KDE UI backend and mail merge that they practically maintain by themselves. Recently they posted three job openings for full-time LibreOffice developers. They already have several inhouse + contractors (for LibO alone).
  - wiz21c 10y ago
    I think they should report extensively on that to fight against the Accenture report. Not that the report is wrong, but if we want to switch to Linux everywhere, we'll have to fight on other grounds that practicality, robustness,etc. Could you ask these people to explain why they think investing in LibreOffice is worth it (and well, just remain silent if their experience is bad :-))
ksk 10y ago
It's sad that we won't actually get a list of problems that devs can tackle. Even so, I can entertain the thought of there being no ulterior motives, and that maybe Linux isn't actually an OS that everyone likes or wants to use.
- pas 10y ago
  Most of the problems are .. well, systemic, not much the devs can really tackle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452
jpliska 10y ago
I wish some good designers would lend LibreOffice a hand. Even without reworking UX they could win over more users by being less ugly (compare MS Office start page)
hogrammer 10y ago
Our company devolops for Linux and BSD only. We all run Windows 10 on the desktop and Linux in VMs. Linux sucks as a desktop environment.

140 points by lsh123 10y ago

I am deeply suspicious of the motives here... Yes I'm sure people moan about IT. They moan about Windows where I work. They probably moaned about the quality of the quills 100 years ago. Libre office is perfectly capable for most users, and is very compatible with MS Office. It is easy for users to transition too. I doubt any of this has anything to do with any of those points.

mistermann 10y ago
Microsoft Office is better, for not very much more $ per desktop.
- jimnotgym 10y ago
  Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple lists in Excel. I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big news for a developer. 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users
  - qeternity 10y ago
    > 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users It's really not. Office is the single MS product that is actually better than the competition (Libre, Apple, etc) and it's also THE core business software. Most businesses might have huge ERP systems, but the war is won in the Excel trenches. If you're an organization of 1,000+ users, $100kpa is nothing.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      No one pays $99/user/year anyways.
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago
    > Better at what? Mostly, better at interoperating with Microsoft Office. LibreOffice works really well, but if you need perfect metric-compatibility, or macros, then it doesn't quite suffice. Likewise for Google Docs (and additionally, Google Slides lacks numerous features desirable for building good presentations).
  - taspeotis 10y ago
    > 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. And at $150/yr it includes Exchange/SharePoint/Skype/Teams. The latter three aren't particularly exciting but not having to worry about email/calendaring is a big win.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      Despite the quirkiness of eventually consistent email patterns, the calendar integration with exchange/outlook even on web is pretty damned nice. I'm getting used to the office gmail/docs/calendar, but the integration still isn't nearly as nice as outlook. The mail in gmail is much better though (as long as you stick to the web interface, go imap and prepare to be f'd up).
  - sbuttgereit 10y ago
    I only write simple letters and, while I do actual accounting work in Excel which is just a little more than simple lists, I'm not using Excel as a database either... as I use databases for that (i.e. don't ask me how to do a VLOOKUP). Even in these simple tasks, MS Office is simply superior in terms of function and productivity if you are performing those simple tasks frequently enough. Could I get by with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, yeah, and did so for a couple years straight and off/on before and after that time. I use to be annoyed to no end by the bloat and heaviness of MS Office... and then after prolonged use of LibreOffice/OpenOffice (yes, both), I came to greatly appreciate MS Office. The only part of office which I use regularly which I'm not very happy with is Outlook (OK, really only use Word, Excel, and Outlook... can't comment on the other parts of the suite as it's been more than a decade since I regularly used things like Access). I'm also disappointed by the Office 365 cloud integration/features: feels very much like a philosophical approach to technology that has lots of Microsoft servers in your enterprise's data center and the outside world is kept at bay rather than collaborated with... Google does that much better... LibreOffice not at all. The number of quirks that caused something to not be quite right or the performance differences I experienced (noticeable in spreadsheets) makes free LibreOffice look very expensive and $99/yr MS Office look cheap. Much more productive in MS Office overall. Having managed IT operations in the corporate world, same experience there: the only place I would (and did) deploy OpenOffice (LibreOffice didn't exist yet) was to the field and the field being to retail chain store personnel. In the chain in question they only wrote simple letters and used spreadsheets for simple lists, generally had very little/no computer experience, and they didn't do office suite work with any regular frequency at all. In that case, the productivity hit was drowned out by the noise of overall lack of computer literacy and they didn't do those tasks with any real frequency, so the Office licenses really didn't make for good investment... but I can tell you that I deployed MS Office to all of the HQ staff and middle managers and glad to have done so. In the past few years, I would probably rank the desktop office suites (meaning available for use on the desktop) as MS Office, G Suite, LIbreOffice. I have Office 365, but tend not to use the online versions of the apps so won't comment on them.
    - jimnotgym 10y ago
      I actually agree that my accounts team would be more productive with Excel. But for the other 99% of users?
  - jasonlotito 10y ago
    > Better at what? Style support for documents. LibreOffice doesn't have complete style support. This is the one thing right now keeping me from even considering it.
    - jimnotgym 10y ago
      I'm using styles in Writer in the same way as I do in Word.
    - kiwijamo 10y ago
      What is it missing? Styles is something I think OO/LO do reasonably well already, and have done so since the StarOffice days. I am specifically talking about paragraph styles so I wonder if there is some other type of styles OO/LO is indeed missing.
  - milesrout 10y ago
    $99 per year is pretty tiny per user. Remember that each of these users is being paid tens of thousands of dollars per year, which means that they will be generating (roughly, on average) 2-3x that in value for a company. $99 to make someone you're paying $30k more efficient is pretty good value.
    - jimnotgym 10y ago
      It depends. I would give technically skilled users whatever they are productive in. I see plenty of users who would never get past sorting and filtering. Libre office calc is at least as four as excel for that
- DrScump 10y ago
  As opposed to OpenOffice or Libreoffice for free?
  - sunflowerfly 10y ago
    You are only considering the up front ccst. Support and maintenance costs are not free.
    - DrScump 10y ago
      Support applies to both. Maintenance cost for these two alternatives is zero, since updates are free.
      - cwyers 10y ago
        Office 365 comes with paid support. As far as maintenance being zero for OpenOffice... that's not how doing IT works at all. Things will break, or users won't be able to figure out how to do things, and they WILL ask for maintenance.
        hobofan 10y ago
        It doesn't come with support for the Windows workstations you need for running it though.
        wiz21c 10y ago
        my experienc eis different. When a user has a problem he goes to the colleagues he knows and then, if he's a little pro-active, he looks on the web. Pas that, in a big company, they'll just leave it there "too complicated". I don't think people ever bother to reach the person who k nows the support contact at microsoft... And fact is, Excel or Word, are quit known everywhere so you don't need much of support. So no, I don't think there's much of a need for support...
        jimnotgym 10y ago
        And they have in-house IT who are familiar with open office already
dllthomas 10y ago
> They probably moaned about the quality of the quills 100 years ago. My understanding has quill usage declining more like 200 years ago.
luca_ing 10y ago
> I am deeply suspicious of the motives here... Munich native here. Not even the mayor's office denies that the entire public service organisation is woefully understaffed. While I've heard disconcerting things about the quality of especially their bespoke applications, it feels like they are looking for scapegoats.

massysett 10y ago

I'm surprised the elected officials are so involved in deciding what desktop software is in use. I'm not sure whether to be impressed that they are this deep into details, or skeptical that politicians rather than professionals are making these decisions. Both I guess. I just can't imagine the council in any US jurisdiction meddling in what desktop OS is chosen throughout the jurisdiction.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I would imagine that the cost difference is enough to get their attention
- Sylos 10y ago
  Reportedly, they haven't even looked at the costs of moving back to Windows yet, nor is there any indication of this actually saving money in the long run.

massysett 10y ago

They suggest that virtual desktops make the client OS irrelevant. My employer (US government agency) went to completely virtual desktops and I was surprised they stuck with Windows 7 for the client laptops. Seemed a perfect place to put Red Hat or some other Linux. I wondered if Windows is priced so there is no advantage to using anything else, or if even dumb clients still need enough management that they would rather use a familiar OS.

Sanddancer 10y ago
Windows is pretty inexpensive, and if you want something supported for more than a year or two, the options do tend to be somewhat costly. RedHat, for example, is $50/year for the equivalent of Windows Update. There are also a number of other advantages for windows in terms of things like remote management which RedHat doesn't have equivalents for.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Redhat has a vast array of remote management tools: Asible, puppet, cobbler, ssh etc. Most all of them are superior to Microsoft's offerings. It would make perfect sense to have a Linux host on machines if most applications are web based.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    But then you have to maintain ansible/puppet etc scripts to keep things in order... and when one machine doesn't work right, you have to figure it all out, often searching through stack exchange sites/answers... let alone getting answers for other distros, or even other versions of your distro than no longer apply. That doesn't even consider hardware variations and compatibility issues with drivers.
    - yellowapple 10y ago
      You'd have to maintain Active Directory / Group Policy /etc. settings under Windows anyway. It ain't like Windows automagically sets you up with a perfect management solution for your organization. When one Windows machine doesn't work right, you're still often the one searching through Stack Exchange, Microsoft's support forums, etc. If you're going with something popular in the enterprise like RHEL or SUSE, you're pretty much on equal footing when it comes to support availability and troubleshooting (if not in a much better situation due to the easier time - IMO - in actually creating/maintaining/deploying system configurations). Driver issues are indeed significant, however. It's a lot better than it was when I first started using Linux, but printing and scanning is still a major pain point. Enterprise environments have a much easier time here than home users due to being able to constrain driver problems to a select few print/scan servers running CUPS/SANE instead of having to deal with this on a workstation-by-workstation basis, but it's still far from ideal, and very few businesses are truly "paperless".

gigatexal 10y ago

Don't be surprised if Microsoft made the windows licenses free or nearly so so that they could sell them office 365 licenses.

tracker1 10y ago
I'm half surprised they didn't try switching to o365 for their users, while keeping the linux desktop distro, and allowing for exceptions for specific use cases.
- luca_ing 10y ago
  They require lots of very specific applications. From what one hears (Munich native here), many of them are pretty bad. Now, being bespoke apps, they'd probably just as horrible if they if they were Windows apps, but it just gets rolled into the Linux blame.

throwaway2048 10y ago

this "news" keeps being reposted every few years, and it hasn't been correct yet.

sgift 10y ago
There's a real chance that it will happen this time as there's no a 'supporting' consultation by Accenture that says going back to Windows would be a good idea (see another sub-thread for the quality of an Accenture consultation). As if my tax money couldn't be spend on something more useful.
- buovjaga 10y ago
  The Accenture study is not saying that. The LiMux folks were quite happy with the study. Here it is, 10MB PDF with 450 pages: https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277724.pdf https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...

Merem 10y ago

Hm.. "At the time the report was released, the FSFE questioned why Accenture was commissioned to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software, when the consultancy runs a joint venture with Microsoft called Avanade, which helps businesses implement Microsoft technologies. For its part, Accenture said it has an "independent view of the technology landscape". "At the time Munich began the move to LiMux in 2004 it was one of the largest organizations to reject Windows, and Microsoft took the city's leaving so seriously that then CEO Steve Ballmer flew to Munich to meet the mayor. More recently, Microsoft last year moved its German company headquarters to Munich." Everything else that is written there points towards it making no sense to switch back to Windows.

throwawaydbfif 10y ago
Lol. Microsoft is utterly terrified of Linux making the jump from servers to the workplace. It's arguably a much bigger threat than home users switching since businesses could switch many thousands of machines at once
- digi_owl 10y ago
  For MS, home users have been a "total cost of ownership" element in their b2b sales pitch. With home users familiar with basic MS software usage from home, MS can argue that businesses do not have to sped as much on training new employees if said businesses use MS products.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    But I think they make relatively little in eg Windows revenue compared to corporate sales, which shows even today.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      I think this is especially true today, given the reduced desktop/laptop sales in the home space, and MS's free upgrades from v7+ to win10. I think that offset was in favor of getting a smaller support base as well as the advertising channel for office365 (which annoys me, not the product, the win10 ads), same for edge browser.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

The mention of “Windows Basic Client” jumps out to me. Is that a reference to the thin client version of Windows? If so, what's the point of switching away from Linux?

shmerl 10y ago

So, no real reason? Or may be MS paid someone in charge? It doesn't make any sense really.

microcolonel 10y ago
Funnily enough, after 2004, MS moved their German HQ to Münich.
- sveme 10y ago
  Indeed, they moved five kilometers from Unterschleißheim, a Munich suburb, to the city itself.
  - welterde 10y ago
    Actually it's 12km. But that's beside the point. Unterschleißheim is not part of Munich itself, so in regards to the corporate tax it does make a difference to both cities where it is paid (and we are talking about millions of euros here).
  - fhackenberger 10y ago
    Well exactly that makes all the difference. Local taxes now go to Munich instead of Unter...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

alistproducer2 10y ago

I'd love to see the financials that justify the move.

jernfrost 10y ago

Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows? It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously. To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing with anti-virus software, clicking links they shouldn't, malware etc. If I were to speculate a key problem is that so many people treat MS Word as the standard format for exchanging written documents. Computer illiterate people very frequently send emails with their main info written in MS Word. They seem to have no idea that you can format your emails from a regular email client. Or how many people bundle images by pasting them into powerpoint rather than just zipping them? It would be interesting to know whether these are the sort of problems causing a desire for a switch back to Windows or whether there are real legitimate reasons.

BrailleHunting 10y ago
Perhaps specialties in large urban govt bureacracies (like GIS, facilities maintenance, etc.) often require many Windows-only apps and drivers from vendors whom can't justify Linux development (Mac would probably be first). Having IT supported a similar type heterogenous mix of departments in big name Ivy academia, it's typically workable productivity/interop to have each group of users to standardize on the same OS... usually either Window or Mac but not both (because of app compatibility, even between same vendor isn't always 100%: filename character set, fonts, so on.)
jstewartmobile 10y ago
I've moved places from 0% Linux to around 70% Linux, but the obstacles on the road to 100% in non-tech companies are tough: - Office VBA: OpenOffice is good enough for people who just make docs and spreadsheets, but some of the more savvy folk (usually in finance and engineering) use MS Office VBA as a development platform. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it for them. - Old stuff: Critical sensors, HVAC systems, fuel management systems, etc. that have proprietary windows-only clients. Some work well enough in Wine, others don't. - 3rd-party support contracts: A lot of places rent their copiers, and even though those copiers have Linux print drivers, the support that is bundled into the contract is windows-only, so you're on your own with Linux. - AD / Group Policy Deployment: Samba4 is closer, but without windows desktops on the client-end, it's still no substitute for the one-ring-to-control-them-all nature of a bunch of windows boxes under AD, and I'm not just talking SSO. I think the key-problem with windows is that most users--even in a lot of AD-controlled corporate settings--are full administrators. If you can drop everyone down to limited-user status, it greatly improves things. Not to Linux levels, but still a lot better.

BrailleHunting 10y ago

Note the report on which the recommendation was based was authored by a derivative of the Big5 firm which helped Enron. (Arthur Anderson -> Accenture) Technology consultants inventing expensive "customer need" projects is nothing new.

lallysingh 10y ago
Let's hit the real point. When MS moved it's headquarters there, they hired a whole bunch of Munich voters.
- pas 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627525

lucb1e 10y ago

I was afraid this would happen when I saw they made a custom distro called LiMux. Maybe it was good in the beginning, though I doubt it given the reports I heard, but by now it must be horribly outdated. (Going to the "project site" as linked by wikipedia, I just get a blank page.) Additionally, almost no workers will be using anything other than Windows or OS X at home. Having to find explorer or the "add column" button in libreoffice will be annoying at first, so users probably need more help to get started. It's a sad state of popular systems remaining popular... Personally I use Linux both for ideological and practical reasons, and I recommend it to other power users and computer-related professionals (software or security people), but for users... until there are real advantages, I'm not sure I should recommend it for fear of them going "everything is wrong" when really it's functionally equivalent and they just have to re-learn where stuff is (the cost of change..). There are exceptions, old computers mainly, but generally I recommend users stick with what they want in the desktop space. I'll just keep making remarks about privacy and modifying scripts in my OS to change whatever I want. If that doesn't trigger anything, they don't want to anyway.

buovjaga 10y ago
I don't know what's up with the project page being gone, but the distro is not outdated. They are working on a version with KDE Plasma 5. Maybe some people don't realize, how much they have contributed upstream. For the past couple of years I have worked with them as a volunteer in LibreOffice. They regularly host hackfests for Debian & LibreOffice. There are certain parts of LibreOffice like the KDE UI backend and mail merge that they practically maintain by themselves. Recently they posted three job openings for full-time LibreOffice developers. They already have several inhouse + contractors (for LibO alone).
- wiz21c 10y ago
  I think they should report extensively on that to fight against the Accenture report. Not that the report is wrong, but if we want to switch to Linux everywhere, we'll have to fight on other grounds that practicality, robustness,etc. Could you ask these people to explain why they think investing in LibreOffice is worth it (and well, just remain silent if their experience is bad :-))

ksk 10y ago

It's sad that we won't actually get a list of problems that devs can tackle. Even so, I can entertain the thought of there being no ulterior motives, and that maybe Linux isn't actually an OS that everyone likes or wants to use.

pas 10y ago
Most of the problems are .. well, systemic, not much the devs can really tackle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452

jpliska 10y ago

I wish some good designers would lend LibreOffice a hand. Even without reworking UX they could win over more users by being less ugly (compare MS Office start page)

hogrammer 10y ago

Our company devolops for Linux and BSD only. We all run Windows 10 on the desktop and Linux in VMs. Linux sucks as a desktop environment.