6 ms·

Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least

Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows weren't completely technical either.

criddell 9y ago
It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time. What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut. More often than not, Linux wins on ideological grounds. There's nothing wrong with that, but you do need buy-in from your users.
- wastedhours 9y ago
  You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.
  - leadingthenet 9y ago
    That's only true in the US. Practically nobody in the EU has heard of / uses ChromeOS. Or maybe I'm just out of touch.
    - saiya-jin 9y ago
      nah, same here (IT person). it's that 'another' option when you actually are deciding between different 2, if deciding at all. and google's privacy approach has soured their portfolio for me a bit (albeit some of them are exceptionally well done and useful)
  - pirocks 9y ago
    I don't think that a switch from mostly MS to mostly chromeos would be a good thing. Chromeos forces everyone into google products far more than windows forces everyone into ms products.
  - criddell 9y ago
    I think education as an influencer is overrated. At my kids' school, they really don't care what hardware you use, as long as Google Docs works on it. If you don't have your own computer, the school will rent you a ThinkPad for $70 per year (including the summer) but they are really awful machines. A lot of people buy their own hardware.
    - wastedhours 9y ago
      That's precisely my point though (I could have made a better job of explaining I wasn't just talking about hardware/OS) - "as long as Google Docs works on it". Those kids will go into the world of work with knowledge of GDocs innately. That position has been Office for the best part of 20 years, it's baked into syllabuses, exams, training materials. If that changes, it potentially has huge impact going forwards.
dogma1138 9y ago
Munich effectively had a parallel program for anyone that had to work with any external entities, and many used it also internally. Munich never switched off Windows and MSFT Office at best it just abstracted or added additional layers of complexity. The moment you need to digitally sign some stupid PDF with some “proprietary” signature scheme or open some excel spread sheet it’s pretty much back to Windows.
- cies 9y ago
  So much for a sovereign govt. I'd say that a gov't should be able to dictate what format is used, especially when replacing a patent-encumbered private format with an open one. But heay, who still believes that gov'ts are on top of corps is living a fantasy I guess.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Ironically many of the tools that the German government and public sector created didn’t work. So when you have some docusign like scheme that doesn’t run on Linux or on non Adobe PDF clients well....
    - deknos 9y ago
      you mean like masterpdfeditor? :)
- deknos 9y ago
  Bullshit. The people using MSOffice were an absolute minority. The City had 18k Clients and on Windows on standard libreoffice, too. only for interaction with a few other institutions microsoft was needed. most of the time, this was provided via virtualmachine or terminalserver and for signature schemes there is for example masterpdfeditor. Are you uninformed, shill or windows-fanboi? I'm amazed the last days who comes out on reddit and ycombinator and spreads uninformed opinions...
mtgx 9y ago
If they had chosen something more mainstream like say Ubuntu or Debian, I don't think there would've been as many complaints. You can't have each city develop or maintain its own custom version of a Linux distro, I think that should have been obvious from the start. If anything, there should be an EU-version of Linux that's stripped of all American backdoors and constantly audited, because I think this is also a national security issue, not just an issue of vendor lock-in and long-term costs for taxpayers. But certainly it wouldn't make sense to have anything less than that, even a country-specific Linux distro doesn't make sense. I do think ultimately it was Microsoft's politics that convinced the city to move away from LiMux, but I think the problems were also real, which pushed them over to Microsoft more easily. If it had been an EU-backed Linux distro, I don't think they would've switched nearly as easily.

criddell 9y ago

It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time. What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut. More often than not, Linux wins on ideological grounds. There's nothing wrong with that, but you do need buy-in from your users.

wastedhours 9y ago
You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.
- leadingthenet 9y ago
  That's only true in the US. Practically nobody in the EU has heard of / uses ChromeOS. Or maybe I'm just out of touch.
  - saiya-jin 9y ago
    nah, same here (IT person). it's that 'another' option when you actually are deciding between different 2, if deciding at all. and google's privacy approach has soured their portfolio for me a bit (albeit some of them are exceptionally well done and useful)
- pirocks 9y ago
  I don't think that a switch from mostly MS to mostly chromeos would be a good thing. Chromeos forces everyone into google products far more than windows forces everyone into ms products.
- criddell 9y ago
  I think education as an influencer is overrated. At my kids' school, they really don't care what hardware you use, as long as Google Docs works on it. If you don't have your own computer, the school will rent you a ThinkPad for $70 per year (including the summer) but they are really awful machines. A lot of people buy their own hardware.
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    That's precisely my point though (I could have made a better job of explaining I wasn't just talking about hardware/OS) - "as long as Google Docs works on it". Those kids will go into the world of work with knowledge of GDocs innately. That position has been Office for the best part of 20 years, it's baked into syllabuses, exams, training materials. If that changes, it potentially has huge impact going forwards.

dogma1138 9y ago

Munich effectively had a parallel program for anyone that had to work with any external entities, and many used it also internally. Munich never switched off Windows and MSFT Office at best it just abstracted or added additional layers of complexity. The moment you need to digitally sign some stupid PDF with some “proprietary” signature scheme or open some excel spread sheet it’s pretty much back to Windows.

cies 9y ago
So much for a sovereign govt. I'd say that a gov't should be able to dictate what format is used, especially when replacing a patent-encumbered private format with an open one. But heay, who still believes that gov'ts are on top of corps is living a fantasy I guess.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Ironically many of the tools that the German government and public sector created didn’t work. So when you have some docusign like scheme that doesn’t run on Linux or on non Adobe PDF clients well....
  - deknos 9y ago
    you mean like masterpdfeditor? :)
deknos 9y ago
Bullshit. The people using MSOffice were an absolute minority. The City had 18k Clients and on Windows on standard libreoffice, too. only for interaction with a few other institutions microsoft was needed. most of the time, this was provided via virtualmachine or terminalserver and for signature schemes there is for example masterpdfeditor. Are you uninformed, shill or windows-fanboi? I'm amazed the last days who comes out on reddit and ycombinator and spreads uninformed opinions...

mtgx 9y ago

If they had chosen something more mainstream like say Ubuntu or Debian, I don't think there would've been as many complaints. You can't have each city develop or maintain its own custom version of a Linux distro, I think that should have been obvious from the start. If anything, there should be an EU-version of Linux that's stripped of all American backdoors and constantly audited, because I think this is also a national security issue, not just an issue of vendor lock-in and long-term costs for taxpayers. But certainly it wouldn't make sense to have anything less than that, even a country-specific Linux distro doesn't make sense. I do think ultimately it was Microsoft's politics that convinced the city to move away from LiMux, but I think the problems were also real, which pushed them over to Microsoft more easily. If it had been an EU-backed Linux distro, I don't think they would've switched nearly as easily.