11 ms·

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 j

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.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > Critical sensors, HVAC systems, fuel management systems, etc. that have proprietary windows-only clients. Some work well enough in Wine, others don't. No joke. Around mid 2000's worked at a scientific lab part time. We still had Windows 3.1 machines in there because measurement equipment (sensors) had older DOS based drivers. So would run the experiments then had to use floppies to shuffle results around.
  - ramy_d 10y ago
    wow, is emulation not an option at that stage?
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      It talked to real hardware so it wasn't. There was also an effect of professors doing the same thing for many, many years and after a while they simply stop following the latest and most current things in technology.
  - emidln 10y ago
    When I was on contract at the Illinois EPA around 2008, there was exactly one computer that could program the dataloggers used to monitor air quality around the state. It was the slowest computer at the IEPA, and it was still too fast to reliably program our dataloggers. It took about 3 minutes to send the configuration to the datalogger (over a serial port), and running the software had roughly a 60% chance of corrupting the transfer. The first Windows-based software I ever shipped was for programming ESC dataloggers. Last I heard, it was still in use by the IEPA Bureau of Air.
  - gambiting 10y ago
    McLaren P1 requires an ancient Compaq laptop to service, because nothing else will connect to the car. http://jalopnik.com/this-ancient-laptop-is-the-only-key-to-the-most-valuabl-1773662267 http://jalopnik.com/this-ancient-laptop-is-the-only-key-to-t...
    - 10y ago
barrkel 10y ago
I have never had a good experience docking Linux laptops to a dock with multiple monitors attached. The behaviour changes from only lighting up one monitor to hard lockups on docking or suspending or something else, depending on kernel version and whim. Randomly the keyboard attached to the dock doesn't initialize and I need to unplug and replug. Unreliable docking is IMO an excellent reason not to use Linux on laptops. And most people use laptops these days because of work from home optionality. This is with a mix of Dell and Lenovo laptops with Intel display chipsets, fwiw.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  ThinkPads too?
  - dopeboy 10y ago
    Thinkpad x250 user here. When I dock with one monitor, my screen will occasionally freeze forcing me to reboot.
    - srazzaque 10y ago
      What OS are you using? I'm on an x260, I had issues on Ubuntu 14 and 16, but since moving to Fedora Workstation 25 I've had an extremely pleasant experience from a hardware/docking point of view.
      - mnadkvlb 10y ago
        Fedora has changed the game for me as well. I am a very happy user so far. Although sometimes i see some notifications about a software crash somewhere. I really enjoy my time on Gnome3, there are very few annoyances as compared to windows/osx. Although i feel osx is way more polished in terms of gestures/ui etc. windows had been an absolute nightmare since windows8.
    - karlmdavis 10y ago
      I used to have this problem a TON, and it drove me absolutely batty. One thing I've found that's drastically cut down on the frequency (possibly eliminated it? not sure) is this: Always wait ten seconds between display state changes. Waking the computer up from sleep? Wait ten seconds before you dock it or connect an external monitor. Undocking it? Wait ten seconds before putting it to sleep. Also: never make more than one state change at a time. For example, don't put the computer to sleep while docked, then undock it. Undock it first, wait ten seconds, then put it to sleep. YMMV, but like I said: I think this has eliminated this problem for me. I've been using this process for some months now, and I'm doing much better at the uptime game (28 days since my last restart, right now).
arca_vorago 10y ago
Honestly as a sysadmin who has been trying to push FOSS in the workplace, I can say the number one barrier is simply lack of neuralplasticity in older people and an unwillingness to learn new things. Combined with a lack of backing from management, it's a recipe for an overworked IT team that is probably already getting crapped on politcally and budgetarily, which is what I suspect has happened in Munich. While I think in most cases technically Linux can meet the needs of the workplace, it's the cultural grip of Windows that is the most difficult to break.
- madez 10y ago
  This is why I see the dominance of Windows as a problem that should be dealt with on the political level. My hope for Europe is lost in this regard, but I think Russia or China could come up with something interesting.
  - milesrout 10y ago
    The thing that astounds me the most is that it's the single clearest example of a monopoly in history. There really is no better example of a monopoly in any industry ever. Microsoft had >95% of desktops running Windows, and the many various government organisations all over the world tasked with preventing and dealing with these sorts of monopolies did nothing.
    - bayesian_horse 10y ago
      In all fairness, there is hardly anything to be done about it. You just can't come up with a full MS Office replacement fast enough to be relevant. Short of completely dismantling Microsoft, or even seizing their assets by governments (two options I don't approve of), I don't see a way to break that monopoly as long as this kind of Office Software is relevant.
      - dukeluke 10y ago
        Exactly. An industry with a high barrier to entry is prone to becoming a monopoly.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jasonlotito 10y ago
I purchased a Dell laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed on it. It's been a painful experience. The hardware is what I wanted, but Ubuntu is a constant problem. There are constant errors popping up alerts about various issues. Fully utilizing my keyboard is an issue (super key is not usable at the moment). But the biggest issue currently is not being able to use an external monitor with it because of DPI issues. The resolution of my laptop is 4k, but the monitors I want to attach don't have the same high DPI. This means the resolution gets all wanky bewteen the two, making it problematic to use. I remember setting up a 3-head system back in the day custom coding my own XFree86 Config file by hand. That was about 15 years ago. Frankly, it doesn't feel like things have improved much. And I have less desire to hand code things that, frankly, should be sorted out by now for a desktop OS.
- afashglaksnhb 10y ago
  The Dell comes with a package to prevent the windows key working. Don't know why. A search and one command and you'll be using the the windows key properly.
Eridrus 10y ago
I have an Ubuntu dev box for GPGPU computing, the UI sometimes completely freezes. Maybe it's NVIDIA's drivers. I've also noticed that some software that has automatic updates doesn't automatically update by default (Chrome? Firefox? I can't remember right now). In 2014, dual monitors didn't work by default and I had to find some command to put in my startup scripts. Maybe this is better now, but that wasn't that long ago. Package managers seem to be trying to straddle the world of library management for C/++ development and app stores at the same time, doing a subpar job at both IMO. I get the impression that needing to fiddle with the system is seen as normal in Linux-land, when it's really not.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  I'm guessing you went with the open source drivers that have transitioned from horrible to merely inferior without much help from nvidia. The official drivers from nvidia, which you would install as a matter of course with windows, both work better and come with a gui to configure your settings and multiple monitors.
  - danieldk 10y ago
    If (s)he uses the box for GPGPU computing, you can be pretty sure that they are using nVidias drivers. (CUDA doesn't work when the Nouveau drivers are loaded.)
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    Fwiw, I used the Nvidia drivers. But the fact that users are presented with a choice and have the opportunity to screw things up sort of shows the misalignment between Linux and the general public. The general public wants and needs a computer they can't screw up, not something endlessly configurable. For most people, if things don't work out of the box, they might as well not work at all. Many people don't even know drivers exist because they've never had to manually install them.
- ensiferum 10y ago
  If you do GPU computing you can obviously expect your UI to freeze. Consumer level GPU's don't have (generally) interruptible behaviour, so the scheduling is between command buffer submissions and the same GPU is used to run your desktop and display server. So if you have a cuda kernel that runs for a long time for example everything else is blocked. Even worse if you have an infinite loop in your kernel ;)
nisa 10y ago
What you can read about the topic in Germany is that the switch had a lot of ideology behind it and after more than 13 years people are still unhappy. You have to consider this is an administration of one of the largest cities in Germany with lot's of custom processes and tools. Also workers there vary from their IT background and I guess most are not power users. Their approach was basically eliminate Windows everywhere and tell everyone Linux is better. They even gave everyone notebooks with with their own flavor of Ubuntu and KDE4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) and more or less forced them to use this. They were using Kolab - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab and while I appreciate the effort if they really forced all users to use KDE Kontact with KDE4 I can understand that frustration was there. In my experience it's a UI nightmare and source of endless bugs. There is a difference between using out of personal interest or depending on it for work. Their OpenOffice addons called WollMux was written in Java and at least judging from the screenshots is also an UI nightmare. There was also criticism that the project was badly managed in parts and incompetence in the IT could have played a role. These are all rumours, but it's believable. Add to this that basically everyone else uses Outlook and MS Office and consider the difficulties when opening .docx stuff in LibreOffice and you can guess where the frustration might come from. Another aspect is that Microsoft has quite a good story and technology with .NET and Active Directory / Group Policy and Powershell as well as .NET Integration to Office. Everything is accessible and .NET devs are plenty. Linux is more or less a wild garden of different solutions of different quality. This might contribute to the problems as more effort is needed to bring the software up to scratch. It's not something that is nice to hear but I can imagine that in the reality of public administration this stuff matters. These might be reasons besides the political aspect of it. The polical stuff has some conspiracy touch to it and while I can image that a successful Linux toolkit for public administration that works well enough and can be deployed would easily kill Microsoft in that sector it's also likely that the opensource software is just lacking in some key aspects. Maybe it's a mixture of both.
- buovjaga 10y ago
  Regarding the problems: http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-flagship-munichs-u-turn-install-windows-10-everywhere-by-end-of-2020/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-flagship-munichs-u-turn-i... "According to Kirschner, Munich's IT problems are not so much down to the use of free software as they are the result of poor management and organizational structure, a view backed up by Accenture's study." Here is the full study (10MB PDF): https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277724.pdf https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...
Sylos 10y ago
This is mostly a political thing, rather than them having any real problems.
mschuster91 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? I worked there. The biggest problems back a few years ago: 1) So-called "Fachverfahren", basically software for stuff like managing drivers' licenses or other bureaucratic procedures, is written and supplied for Windows only. Often enough that meant Munich had to pay a boatload of money for a Linux port. Or the software HAD a Linux port, but for RHEL or other "enterprise linux" crap distros - which meant using stuff like "alien" or, worse, manual repackaging to make them compatible with Ubuntu. Yay for version hell - statically linked programs were an exception. 2) DRIVERS. There's a lot of custom hardware - special printers for printing on documents like ID cards, fingerprint readers for the new national ID cards, RFID readers with support for said ID cards... you won't believe how much stuff there is. And all of this needs to have Linux drivers and tooling. 3) Employee training. Back in my days KDE was used (and I believe it still is), but it's different enough from Windows that people need training. And there's 35k of employees, most of which don't have any IT experience outside from their Windows computer at home. 4) The computers themselves. Let's just say that the computers in any public agency are almost always horribly outdated. Many users complain(ed) about the speed of LiMux, which mostly was caused by old or underpowered (esp. RAM, given that OpenOffice and Firefox are really really memory hungry) systems. 5) Networking. Depends on the building and agency, of course, but e.g. my school was connected via a 16 mbit uplink, over which the entire Internet traffic went... I believe the biggest problem LiMux had and still has is a lack of proper funding - especially for hardware.
- sveme 10y ago
  Adding to that, a couple of months ago they had to close the KVR, the office where you have to register yourself, your car and basically have all your contacts with German bureaucracy down for a couple of days due to IT issues. As far as I know, your points 1) and 2) are the main issues. Having to work myself with software talking to Windows hardware drivers from MacOS via Parallels, I can understand the problems of this additional complexity.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
johannes1234321 10y ago
Random example, aside from the Microsoft Office-incompatibilites: For producing a passport they have to use software by the federal agency which talks to a fingerprint reader. The municipality has no choice what is used there.
xtiansimon 10y ago
When I read the quote, "highest possible compatibility", I recalled the problems I had in my Microsoft-dominant office after I shared some files I edited at home using libre-office. No one was ever prevented from working on the files I saved, but my xls exports from libre-office were annoyingly affected. I wonder if it's not just the sort of annecdote between techies and non-techies which makes the difference. I think a non-techie will ascribe too much weight to their user-experience (a file doesn't display the same when sharing files) and conclude the file is somehow corrupt or unreliable. At best, I suspect office workers, whose work is absolutely and entirely within the realm of email, text docs and spreadsheets, don't have the patience to deal with these irreularities. Or, at worst, in a hard-driving efficiency oriented workplace minor inconveniences add up. I tend to favor CSV to xls to begin with, but this clearly adds additional steps when I utilize functions which can only be saved natively. For myself, I'm inured to these inconveniences from web and software development and ignore the efficency costs in some office-task-contexts (txt, csv, email) because I'm already committed to working with specific workflows.

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.

rdtsc 10y ago
> Critical sensors, HVAC systems, fuel management systems, etc. that have proprietary windows-only clients. Some work well enough in Wine, others don't. No joke. Around mid 2000's worked at a scientific lab part time. We still had Windows 3.1 machines in there because measurement equipment (sensors) had older DOS based drivers. So would run the experiments then had to use floppies to shuffle results around.
- ramy_d 10y ago
  wow, is emulation not an option at that stage?
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    It talked to real hardware so it wasn't. There was also an effect of professors doing the same thing for many, many years and after a while they simply stop following the latest and most current things in technology.
- emidln 10y ago
  When I was on contract at the Illinois EPA around 2008, there was exactly one computer that could program the dataloggers used to monitor air quality around the state. It was the slowest computer at the IEPA, and it was still too fast to reliably program our dataloggers. It took about 3 minutes to send the configuration to the datalogger (over a serial port), and running the software had roughly a 60% chance of corrupting the transfer. The first Windows-based software I ever shipped was for programming ESC dataloggers. Last I heard, it was still in use by the IEPA Bureau of Air.
- gambiting 10y ago
  McLaren P1 requires an ancient Compaq laptop to service, because nothing else will connect to the car. http://jalopnik.com/this-ancient-laptop-is-the-only-key-to-the-most-valuabl-1773662267 http://jalopnik.com/this-ancient-laptop-is-the-only-key-to-t...
  - 10y ago

barrkel 10y ago

I have never had a good experience docking Linux laptops to a dock with multiple monitors attached. The behaviour changes from only lighting up one monitor to hard lockups on docking or suspending or something else, depending on kernel version and whim. Randomly the keyboard attached to the dock doesn't initialize and I need to unplug and replug. Unreliable docking is IMO an excellent reason not to use Linux on laptops. And most people use laptops these days because of work from home optionality. This is with a mix of Dell and Lenovo laptops with Intel display chipsets, fwiw.

lallysingh 10y ago
ThinkPads too?
- dopeboy 10y ago
  Thinkpad x250 user here. When I dock with one monitor, my screen will occasionally freeze forcing me to reboot.
  - srazzaque 10y ago
    What OS are you using? I'm on an x260, I had issues on Ubuntu 14 and 16, but since moving to Fedora Workstation 25 I've had an extremely pleasant experience from a hardware/docking point of view.
    - mnadkvlb 10y ago
      Fedora has changed the game for me as well. I am a very happy user so far. Although sometimes i see some notifications about a software crash somewhere. I really enjoy my time on Gnome3, there are very few annoyances as compared to windows/osx. Although i feel osx is way more polished in terms of gestures/ui etc. windows had been an absolute nightmare since windows8.
  - karlmdavis 10y ago
    I used to have this problem a TON, and it drove me absolutely batty. One thing I've found that's drastically cut down on the frequency (possibly eliminated it? not sure) is this: Always wait ten seconds between display state changes. Waking the computer up from sleep? Wait ten seconds before you dock it or connect an external monitor. Undocking it? Wait ten seconds before putting it to sleep. Also: never make more than one state change at a time. For example, don't put the computer to sleep while docked, then undock it. Undock it first, wait ten seconds, then put it to sleep. YMMV, but like I said: I think this has eliminated this problem for me. I've been using this process for some months now, and I'm doing much better at the uptime game (28 days since my last restart, right now).

arca_vorago 10y ago

Honestly as a sysadmin who has been trying to push FOSS in the workplace, I can say the number one barrier is simply lack of neuralplasticity in older people and an unwillingness to learn new things. Combined with a lack of backing from management, it's a recipe for an overworked IT team that is probably already getting crapped on politcally and budgetarily, which is what I suspect has happened in Munich. While I think in most cases technically Linux can meet the needs of the workplace, it's the cultural grip of Windows that is the most difficult to break.

madez 10y ago
This is why I see the dominance of Windows as a problem that should be dealt with on the political level. My hope for Europe is lost in this regard, but I think Russia or China could come up with something interesting.
- milesrout 10y ago
  The thing that astounds me the most is that it's the single clearest example of a monopoly in history. There really is no better example of a monopoly in any industry ever. Microsoft had >95% of desktops running Windows, and the many various government organisations all over the world tasked with preventing and dealing with these sorts of monopolies did nothing.
  - bayesian_horse 10y ago
    In all fairness, there is hardly anything to be done about it. You just can't come up with a full MS Office replacement fast enough to be relevant. Short of completely dismantling Microsoft, or even seizing their assets by governments (two options I don't approve of), I don't see a way to break that monopoly as long as this kind of Office Software is relevant.
    - dukeluke 10y ago
      Exactly. An industry with a high barrier to entry is prone to becoming a monopoly.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jasonlotito 10y ago

I purchased a Dell laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed on it. It's been a painful experience. The hardware is what I wanted, but Ubuntu is a constant problem. There are constant errors popping up alerts about various issues. Fully utilizing my keyboard is an issue (super key is not usable at the moment). But the biggest issue currently is not being able to use an external monitor with it because of DPI issues. The resolution of my laptop is 4k, but the monitors I want to attach don't have the same high DPI. This means the resolution gets all wanky bewteen the two, making it problematic to use. I remember setting up a 3-head system back in the day custom coding my own XFree86 Config file by hand. That was about 15 years ago. Frankly, it doesn't feel like things have improved much. And I have less desire to hand code things that, frankly, should be sorted out by now for a desktop OS.

afashglaksnhb 10y ago
The Dell comes with a package to prevent the windows key working. Don't know why. A search and one command and you'll be using the the windows key properly.

Eridrus 10y ago

I have an Ubuntu dev box for GPGPU computing, the UI sometimes completely freezes. Maybe it's NVIDIA's drivers. I've also noticed that some software that has automatic updates doesn't automatically update by default (Chrome? Firefox? I can't remember right now). In 2014, dual monitors didn't work by default and I had to find some command to put in my startup scripts. Maybe this is better now, but that wasn't that long ago. Package managers seem to be trying to straddle the world of library management for C/++ development and app stores at the same time, doing a subpar job at both IMO. I get the impression that needing to fiddle with the system is seen as normal in Linux-land, when it's really not.

michaelmrose 10y ago
I'm guessing you went with the open source drivers that have transitioned from horrible to merely inferior without much help from nvidia. The official drivers from nvidia, which you would install as a matter of course with windows, both work better and come with a gui to configure your settings and multiple monitors.
- danieldk 10y ago
  If (s)he uses the box for GPGPU computing, you can be pretty sure that they are using nVidias drivers. (CUDA doesn't work when the Nouveau drivers are loaded.)
- Eridrus 10y ago
  Fwiw, I used the Nvidia drivers. But the fact that users are presented with a choice and have the opportunity to screw things up sort of shows the misalignment between Linux and the general public. The general public wants and needs a computer they can't screw up, not something endlessly configurable. For most people, if things don't work out of the box, they might as well not work at all. Many people don't even know drivers exist because they've never had to manually install them.
ensiferum 10y ago
If you do GPU computing you can obviously expect your UI to freeze. Consumer level GPU's don't have (generally) interruptible behaviour, so the scheduling is between command buffer submissions and the same GPU is used to run your desktop and display server. So if you have a cuda kernel that runs for a long time for example everything else is blocked. Even worse if you have an infinite loop in your kernel ;)

nisa 10y ago

What you can read about the topic in Germany is that the switch had a lot of ideology behind it and after more than 13 years people are still unhappy. You have to consider this is an administration of one of the largest cities in Germany with lot's of custom processes and tools. Also workers there vary from their IT background and I guess most are not power users. Their approach was basically eliminate Windows everywhere and tell everyone Linux is better. They even gave everyone notebooks with with their own flavor of Ubuntu and KDE4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) and more or less forced them to use this. They were using Kolab - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab and while I appreciate the effort if they really forced all users to use KDE Kontact with KDE4 I can understand that frustration was there. In my experience it's a UI nightmare and source of endless bugs. There is a difference between using out of personal interest or depending on it for work. Their OpenOffice addons called WollMux was written in Java and at least judging from the screenshots is also an UI nightmare. There was also criticism that the project was badly managed in parts and incompetence in the IT could have played a role. These are all rumours, but it's believable. Add to this that basically everyone else uses Outlook and MS Office and consider the difficulties when opening .docx stuff in LibreOffice and you can guess where the frustration might come from. Another aspect is that Microsoft has quite a good story and technology with .NET and Active Directory / Group Policy and Powershell as well as .NET Integration to Office. Everything is accessible and .NET devs are plenty. Linux is more or less a wild garden of different solutions of different quality. This might contribute to the problems as more effort is needed to bring the software up to scratch. It's not something that is nice to hear but I can imagine that in the reality of public administration this stuff matters. These might be reasons besides the political aspect of it. The polical stuff has some conspiracy touch to it and while I can image that a successful Linux toolkit for public administration that works well enough and can be deployed would easily kill Microsoft in that sector it's also likely that the opensource software is just lacking in some key aspects. Maybe it's a mixture of both.

buovjaga 10y ago
Regarding the problems: http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-flagship-munichs-u-turn-install-windows-10-everywhere-by-end-of-2020/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-flagship-munichs-u-turn-i... "According to Kirschner, Munich's IT problems are not so much down to the use of free software as they are the result of poor management and organizational structure, a view backed up by Accenture's study." Here is the full study (10MB PDF): https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277724.pdf https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...

Sylos 10y ago

This is mostly a political thing, rather than them having any real problems.

mschuster91 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? I worked there. The biggest problems back a few years ago: 1) So-called "Fachverfahren", basically software for stuff like managing drivers' licenses or other bureaucratic procedures, is written and supplied for Windows only. Often enough that meant Munich had to pay a boatload of money for a Linux port. Or the software HAD a Linux port, but for RHEL or other "enterprise linux" crap distros - which meant using stuff like "alien" or, worse, manual repackaging to make them compatible with Ubuntu. Yay for version hell - statically linked programs were an exception. 2) DRIVERS. There's a lot of custom hardware - special printers for printing on documents like ID cards, fingerprint readers for the new national ID cards, RFID readers with support for said ID cards... you won't believe how much stuff there is. And all of this needs to have Linux drivers and tooling. 3) Employee training. Back in my days KDE was used (and I believe it still is), but it's different enough from Windows that people need training. And there's 35k of employees, most of which don't have any IT experience outside from their Windows computer at home. 4) The computers themselves. Let's just say that the computers in any public agency are almost always horribly outdated. Many users complain(ed) about the speed of LiMux, which mostly was caused by old or underpowered (esp. RAM, given that OpenOffice and Firefox are really really memory hungry) systems. 5) Networking. Depends on the building and agency, of course, but e.g. my school was connected via a 16 mbit uplink, over which the entire Internet traffic went... I believe the biggest problem LiMux had and still has is a lack of proper funding - especially for hardware.

sveme 10y ago
Adding to that, a couple of months ago they had to close the KVR, the office where you have to register yourself, your car and basically have all your contacts with German bureaucracy down for a couple of days due to IT issues. As far as I know, your points 1) and 2) are the main issues. Having to work myself with software talking to Windows hardware drivers from MacOS via Parallels, I can understand the problems of this additional complexity.
- mschuster91 10y ago

johannes1234321 10y ago

Random example, aside from the Microsoft Office-incompatibilites: For producing a passport they have to use software by the federal agency which talks to a fingerprint reader. The municipality has no choice what is used there.

xtiansimon 10y ago

When I read the quote, "highest possible compatibility", I recalled the problems I had in my Microsoft-dominant office after I shared some files I edited at home using libre-office. No one was ever prevented from working on the files I saved, but my xls exports from libre-office were annoyingly affected. I wonder if it's not just the sort of annecdote between techies and non-techies which makes the difference. I think a non-techie will ascribe too much weight to their user-experience (a file doesn't display the same when sharing files) and conclude the file is somehow corrupt or unreliable. At best, I suspect office workers, whose work is absolutely and entirely within the realm of email, text docs and spreadsheets, don't have the patience to deal with these irreularities. Or, at worst, in a hard-driving efficiency oriented workplace minor inconveniences add up. I tend to favor CSV to xls to begin with, but this clearly adds additional steps when I utilize functions which can only be saved natively. For myself, I'm inured to these inconveniences from web and software development and ignore the efficency costs in some office-task-contexts (txt, csv, email) because I'm already committed to working with specific workflows.