7 ms·

Another German regional government is switching from Linux to Windows

48 points by XzetaU8 8y ago

yoz-y 8y ago
I was under the impression that most of the administrative work was now done in a browser anyways. I wonder what exactly they get by switching to windows, better fleet management tools maybe?
- mikejb 8y ago
  I think the assumption is incorrect. The Microsoft Office suite is used a lot, IIUC
  - glitchc 8y ago
    Concur. The office suite and surrounding ecosystem (Exchange, Sharepoint) are king in enterprise environments. The latest versions run poorly or not at all on anything other than Windows.
    - behringer 8y ago
      But the linux alternative for those tools are exceptionally decent and free.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Open/LibreOffice compared to MS Office is a joke in a corporate environment where Excel and Powerpoint are kings. There is also not a single email client that integrates resource management as well as outlook good luck linking Thunderbird to your conferencing and meeting room management systems.
        vetinari 8y ago
        > There is also not a single email client that integrates resource management as well as outlook This is an argument I've never understood. Why do you want your calendaring mashed together with your mail? I much prefer the macOS model, where mail, calendar and contacts are separate applications. Nothing prevents them to use the same data store, but not having to switch them in modal mode is a big win.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Because when you need to juggle multiple meetings across 3 continents and 5 time zones it's much easier to kick everything off in a single email and having full visibility into who is available and when, and then having all of the resources needed for the meeting to be automatically reserved. The latter is especially important when you have different conferencing / dial in systems in different regions that all need to be reserved and tied to the same meeting request. This isn't about having different apps that model has no advantage or a disadvantage the ability to see the presence of people and resources across the entire organization is the big important feature that is not available on other platforms at all or without a momentous amount of work.
        VonGallifrey 8y ago
        > juggle multiple meetings across 3 continents and 5 time zones For some reason I thought that you where still talking about German provincial government. Which was extremely funny for me to imagine since those guys are not even allowed to speak English in official capacity.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Even for them it can make a lot of difference the only thing I need to do to book a room is to forward an email of the invite of the meeting to the booking system and it would book a room for me and setup the conference system to automatically call in that is a convenience that is hard to give up when you don’t have Exchange and AD that have all the user and resource info stored for multiple systems to hook into.
      - booleandilemma 8y ago
        What’s a better Linux alternative than Outlook? I’ve tried Thunderbird and I’m not impressed. I’ve noticed that a lot of Linux users equate “free” (as in price) with “better”, and this isn’t necessarily so.
        thom 8y ago
        Kontact was KDE's attempt at integrating its productivity stuff into one app, I liked it for a while when I lived in email+calendar world, but I don't think it speaks Exchange if that's what you mean.
        krylon 8y ago
        Evolution can talk to Exchange servers. I would have preferred Thunderbird, but so far Evolution has done nothing to annoy me.
      - roytries 8y ago
        I'm not a heavy MS Office user. But at my current job I get to use Office 2016, while at my previous job I had to use LibreOffice. While LibreOffice is usable its just nowhere near the quality of MS Office. I take this as an example, because I think this is the tool most people will be talking about :). As a programmer my company shelves out a few hundred dollar per year so I can use a high quality IDE. In the end this saves time and money. If I would be a business analyst or PO I would expect the company I work for to shelve out a few hundred dollar per year for the apps I need in my day to day work. In that case it would be MS Office (and Windows). (MS Windows Enterprise edition is only $90 per year, Office $360, that's a lot less expensive than my developer tools). Good tools save money, and currently I can't think of anything that surpasses MS Excel, MS Word, or MS PowerPoint
      - pwned1 8y ago
        "Exceptionally decent"? It can't even be compared to MS Office in quality and usability.
      - jamesrcole 8y ago
        I think this is a common situation: a worker is sent a non-trivial Word document, possibly from someone external, that will only be properly rendered in Word itself.
      - glitchc 8y ago
        As my betters have already responded, the tools are decent in and of themselves, but pale when compared directly to Office. Just in scientific consulting alone, for example, frequently the codebase is best manipulated in Linux, but documentation (reports, analysis) must be done in Windows, as there's a back and forth with the client who is frequently using Windows. Wine is unreliable, and often the only real options are either dual-boot or VM.
      - mikejb 8y ago
        How compatible are they? If I send you a word document with tables and layouts and strange things, will you be able to open, modify and send it back s.t. I can open it again without everything being one big clusterfuck?
      - close04 8y ago
        Maybe but it's like showing up with a shiny new street Mercedes at a Formula 1 race. You'll just end up being the safety car. Don't take each solution in a vacuum. Consider that you have to use one and put them head to head. Unless you're a very flexible company or with some very very niche requirements the MS solution will win every time. People usually understand "Linux (open source) is no good" instead of the real conclusion: today it's not the best for everything so why assume it should be everywhere?
  - yoz-y 8y ago
    Even that moves to the cloud though. I have not used the office 365 tools at all but from my understanding they should have feature parity at some point. But then I suppose that editing a hundred page call to bids document in a browser tab does not really work well.
- picsao 8y ago
  Networkeffects when it comes to maintaining, buying and switching? The desktop OS was the hub of hubs before the mobile revolution and for company's who still dwell mostly in that world, still is.
- eitally 8y ago
  MS is extremely flexible with pricing in their EAs. They can make any arbitrary product pretty much free by gladly readjusting prices, discounts and benefits in other parts of the agreement. It wouldn't surprise me if they made the switch appealing by this sort of shenanigan, but client CALs are pretty much free already at volume. It's the server licenses where they kill you ... but with Azure flexibility as an option, not to mention O365, it's super-easy to see how MS makes lock-in look very, very appealing. source: use to own the MS EA at an F200 company that tried to extract Office in favor of Google Drive + LibreOffice, and Windows Server + SQL Server for CentOS + PostgreSQL.
- 0x4f3759df 8y ago
  I'm under the impression that its more to do with external hardware compatibility like printer drivers (do industrial printers have linux drivers?), license plate scanners, etc.
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    I don’t know about license plate scanners, but usually the more industrial the printer, the higher likelihood that Linux will do just fine. I think the main reasons are that big industrial printers are likely to support standards like IPP and Postscript. Also, Apple uses CUPS just the same as Linux. Some cheap home printers require proprietary binary drivers, but many printers are supported by CUPS with some minimal config definitions.
peatmoss 8y ago
I feel like there are two models for desktop computing—one that is very hard to accommodate for a traditional enterprise, and another where Linux is very well suited. If one is looking for a managed solution with heavyweight apps including an office suite, email / calendar, etc., then anything other than Windows is going to be unsatisfactory to people who expect Windows. I even include macOS with Linux in that assessment. Let's call this model of centralized control of fat clients the culmination of the 1990s enterprise desktop. On the other hand, if a company has gone down the road of Google / web apps for everything, then Linux starts to be a very effective bootloader for a web browser. Personally, I like the fat-client model of the 1990s, and feel that Linux best satisfies my desires. But it's hard to deny the comprehensiveness of Windows & Active Directory for those enterprises that also want to stick to this model. The web-only model feels a little too lean to me. In any enterprise, there are bound to be instances where web apps aren't going to cut it. This is where I have hopes for Chrome OS once it begins to support native Linux apps. At that point, it's not a thin client, and it's not a fat client. I wonder then if we may see some of these enterprises walk back from Windows.
- frockington 8y ago
  I think we are a long way from anyone walking back from Windows. It will be an uphill battle for Google due to the lack of privacy awareness (I'm not saying Microsoft is better or worse, just that Google is not looked upon kindly in the privacy regard)
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    Perhaps. But I also think that, of the people who are sticking to the heavyweight fat-client model of computing, some are doing so for technical reasons and others are doing so for principled reasons. If Google's softening on the "everything must be a web app" removes the technical barriers, I could imagine an expansion of Chrome OS. As a paying FastMail customer, I'm right there with you on Google's privacy posture. But given the number of corporate G-Suite customers, I don't think principled rejection of Google over privacy concerns is the major impediment to Chrome OS adoption.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
> This time it's all about the roving staff, who aren't using OpenSUSE and didn't use Solaris before it. They've always been Windows users and it seems that officials feel it might be time for a bit of consistency. So my takeaway is that someone at the top was pissed off that he had to use an e-mail client other than Outlook and made a multi-million dollar infrastructure decision based on that.
- vetinari 8y ago
  > So my takeaway is that someone at the top was pissed off that he had to use an e-mail client other than Outlook and made a multi-million dollar infrastructure decision based on that. Nah, decisions like this are usually greased much better than just by the good feeling of using Outlook again.
- swarnie_ 8y ago
  I've worked on a number of large rollout projects where multiple vendors have been considered. When you tell a CEO/CFO/CIO that you can bundle OS, updates, productivity tools, communication/colab tools all in to one monthly bill they almost always take the MS route. The predictability of the financing is the key thing helping MS kill it in enterprise. It also helps that 90% of their staff have never known anything else and will need very little training.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    And to be honest they're not wrong (in those aspects)
  - moviuro 8y ago
    > very little training That's the worst assuption ever. Not because everyone uses tool X, everyone understands how to make it work properly. Did you ever try to move a picture from a document you got from M. Johnson? You'll get a headache because moving that one picture will fuck up your title formatting in page 13 and the table in page 2. Everyone using MS Office I met could use a good week-long training session about do's and don't's, how to write proper documents, presentations that don't suck, etc.
reacharavindh 8y ago
It always hits the nerve to hear that a public organization is moving back to MS from FOSS, but I wish this kind of demand(from governments) would lead to a open company that is strictly focused on developing an alternative to Windows desktop. Linux is heavily pulled in the server direction, and we need a company other than RedHAt who can pull Linux ecosystem a bit together to build an opinionated but coherent desktop. Trying to support all of the email clients, calendar tools and obscure media decoders will never lead us to an usable Linux based Desktop.
- ams6110 8y ago
  > an opinionated but coherent desktop Isn't this Ubuntu?
  - reacharavindh 8y ago
    I experimented with Ubuntu by giving a laptop running plain Ubuntu to my retired parents. They are new to computers and their needs are simple. * Video calls - Skype or FaceTime * watch youtube. * Transfer pictures from digital camera to laptop and view them (many times ;-) ) * local newspaper's website * play their local music library * Not confuse them. But, Ubuntu failed them miserably. They had a hard time using because, their words - "what works one time, doesn't the next time." When my dad closes the lid, he expects the laptop to go to sleep mode, and again open the lid to wake it, just doesn't work all time, give some kind of messages only a tech person would understand. Their observation - "text is not sharp". I checked it on their laptop display, Windows is rather sharp and usable while Ubuntu's default font rendering is too soft and they need to squint a bit to read. internet connectivity - There are so many issues with the default wifi setup on their laptop. Dad gets frustrated if it shows him a dialog box with information he does not understand. So, often times the laptop lies there gathering dust until I or a friend goes to their house to "fix it" - often times just reboot the damn thing. After this struggle, they bought a Windows laptop.
- nine_k 8y ago
  I don't see how coherence is a problem. Windows the platform is pretty incoherent. The article is light on details, but I think the issue is really in interoperability. When everyone around you runs Windows, you either have to be very good at interoperating with key Windows apps (all parts of Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, MS Project, etc), or to run Windows, too. Part of the problem is that many of these things operate on closed data formats, and MS has little incentive to help with interoperbilty. Conversion tools can exist but they are often cumbersome, imperfect, and thus painful for regular use. This is how an ecosystem lock-in works. BTW it's not specific to Windows; every platform makes it simpler to use this platform's tools, and, because of that, any out-of-platform tools become harder to use in comparison.
rehemiau 8y ago
Linux Foundation needs to run a hardware support testing program for desktop linux to be successful. In a situation where hardware manufacturers don't support linux and there's no regression testing for community developed drivers, it will never be successful.
- lovescalajs 8y ago
  Linux foundation CEO uses a Macintosh
baybal2 8y ago
They will heavily regret this decision. If MS was offering them "cheap N years contract," than it is already decided that they will jack up prices the second their contract expires.
- teget 8y ago
  > They will heavily regret this decision. Unlikely. Yes, this is a political decision as most actual users of the systems were ok with the linux client. However, the article is a bit misleading. They are bringing the systems used by a subdepartment of the states department of finance in line with the stack used within the remainder of the department (about 1/3 were linux clients, the state already owns over 50.000 other windows clients (lower estimate, most likely more if you include organization which manage their own infrastructure (like universities)), they know what to expect from microsoft). While the systems worked it always required special attention when interoperating with other states (for example: certain informationrequests by other states are standardized between all states (based on a shared windows solution). Lower saxonian employees could not interact with it directly and had to rely on their inhouse solution instead of reusing the existing and proven solution used by all other states). There are notable costs associated to beeing a special flower while maintining conformance to financial regulations. Yes, I believe that biting the bullet and migrating more departments to open systems would be the better longterm solution (which would also force vendors to port their solutions). But there will be several elections before that pays off and would require a significant investment before the benefits show (and possible coordination between the states) and in the midterm moving to Windows might be the better option. Moving to linux doesn't win an election, but failing to move to linux might loose you one. However, even after the move about 1/4 to 1/3 of the computers/servers owned by the state will run linux/bsd (iirc).
LiterallyDoge 8y ago
If Linux (or somebody) would focus on the UI and stability in a the non-perfect world of the dumb tweaks I do to change the gem color on my flux capacitors, I think it would be viable, but right now, Linux feels like owning a fish tank, and I can't do business on a fish tank, even though I really want to.
jagermo 8y ago
In my opinion, Munich's Linux project could have been saved if they invested a little in the UI part. It was horrible out of date, a pain to use and looked like something out of a 90's geocities web page. The work flows were slow and had too many unnecessary clicks.

48 points by XzetaU8 8y ago

I was under the impression that most of the administrative work was now done in a browser anyways. I wonder what exactly they get by switching to windows, better fleet management tools maybe?

mikejb 8y ago
I think the assumption is incorrect. The Microsoft Office suite is used a lot, IIUC
- glitchc 8y ago
  Concur. The office suite and surrounding ecosystem (Exchange, Sharepoint) are king in enterprise environments. The latest versions run poorly or not at all on anything other than Windows.
  - behringer 8y ago
    But the linux alternative for those tools are exceptionally decent and free.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Open/LibreOffice compared to MS Office is a joke in a corporate environment where Excel and Powerpoint are kings. There is also not a single email client that integrates resource management as well as outlook good luck linking Thunderbird to your conferencing and meeting room management systems.
      - vetinari 8y ago
        > There is also not a single email client that integrates resource management as well as outlook This is an argument I've never understood. Why do you want your calendaring mashed together with your mail? I much prefer the macOS model, where mail, calendar and contacts are separate applications. Nothing prevents them to use the same data store, but not having to switch them in modal mode is a big win.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Because when you need to juggle multiple meetings across 3 continents and 5 time zones it's much easier to kick everything off in a single email and having full visibility into who is available and when, and then having all of the resources needed for the meeting to be automatically reserved. The latter is especially important when you have different conferencing / dial in systems in different regions that all need to be reserved and tied to the same meeting request. This isn't about having different apps that model has no advantage or a disadvantage the ability to see the presence of people and resources across the entire organization is the big important feature that is not available on other platforms at all or without a momentous amount of work.
        VonGallifrey 8y ago
        > juggle multiple meetings across 3 continents and 5 time zones For some reason I thought that you where still talking about German provincial government. Which was extremely funny for me to imagine since those guys are not even allowed to speak English in official capacity.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Even for them it can make a lot of difference the only thing I need to do to book a room is to forward an email of the invite of the meeting to the booking system and it would book a room for me and setup the conference system to automatically call in that is a convenience that is hard to give up when you don’t have Exchange and AD that have all the user and resource info stored for multiple systems to hook into.
    - booleandilemma 8y ago
      What’s a better Linux alternative than Outlook? I’ve tried Thunderbird and I’m not impressed. I’ve noticed that a lot of Linux users equate “free” (as in price) with “better”, and this isn’t necessarily so.
      - thom 8y ago
        Kontact was KDE's attempt at integrating its productivity stuff into one app, I liked it for a while when I lived in email+calendar world, but I don't think it speaks Exchange if that's what you mean.
      - krylon 8y ago
        Evolution can talk to Exchange servers. I would have preferred Thunderbird, but so far Evolution has done nothing to annoy me.
    - roytries 8y ago
      I'm not a heavy MS Office user. But at my current job I get to use Office 2016, while at my previous job I had to use LibreOffice. While LibreOffice is usable its just nowhere near the quality of MS Office. I take this as an example, because I think this is the tool most people will be talking about :). As a programmer my company shelves out a few hundred dollar per year so I can use a high quality IDE. In the end this saves time and money. If I would be a business analyst or PO I would expect the company I work for to shelve out a few hundred dollar per year for the apps I need in my day to day work. In that case it would be MS Office (and Windows). (MS Windows Enterprise edition is only $90 per year, Office $360, that's a lot less expensive than my developer tools). Good tools save money, and currently I can't think of anything that surpasses MS Excel, MS Word, or MS PowerPoint
    - pwned1 8y ago
      "Exceptionally decent"? It can't even be compared to MS Office in quality and usability.
    - jamesrcole 8y ago
      I think this is a common situation: a worker is sent a non-trivial Word document, possibly from someone external, that will only be properly rendered in Word itself.
    - glitchc 8y ago
      As my betters have already responded, the tools are decent in and of themselves, but pale when compared directly to Office. Just in scientific consulting alone, for example, frequently the codebase is best manipulated in Linux, but documentation (reports, analysis) must be done in Windows, as there's a back and forth with the client who is frequently using Windows. Wine is unreliable, and often the only real options are either dual-boot or VM.
    - mikejb 8y ago
      How compatible are they? If I send you a word document with tables and layouts and strange things, will you be able to open, modify and send it back s.t. I can open it again without everything being one big clusterfuck?
    - close04 8y ago
      Maybe but it's like showing up with a shiny new street Mercedes at a Formula 1 race. You'll just end up being the safety car. Don't take each solution in a vacuum. Consider that you have to use one and put them head to head. Unless you're a very flexible company or with some very very niche requirements the MS solution will win every time. People usually understand "Linux (open source) is no good" instead of the real conclusion: today it's not the best for everything so why assume it should be everywhere?
- yoz-y 8y ago
  Even that moves to the cloud though. I have not used the office 365 tools at all but from my understanding they should have feature parity at some point. But then I suppose that editing a hundred page call to bids document in a browser tab does not really work well.
picsao 8y ago
Networkeffects when it comes to maintaining, buying and switching? The desktop OS was the hub of hubs before the mobile revolution and for company's who still dwell mostly in that world, still is.
eitally 8y ago
MS is extremely flexible with pricing in their EAs. They can make any arbitrary product pretty much free by gladly readjusting prices, discounts and benefits in other parts of the agreement. It wouldn't surprise me if they made the switch appealing by this sort of shenanigan, but client CALs are pretty much free already at volume. It's the server licenses where they kill you ... but with Azure flexibility as an option, not to mention O365, it's super-easy to see how MS makes lock-in look very, very appealing. source: use to own the MS EA at an F200 company that tried to extract Office in favor of Google Drive + LibreOffice, and Windows Server + SQL Server for CentOS + PostgreSQL.
0x4f3759df 8y ago
I'm under the impression that its more to do with external hardware compatibility like printer drivers (do industrial printers have linux drivers?), license plate scanners, etc.
- peatmoss 8y ago
  I don’t know about license plate scanners, but usually the more industrial the printer, the higher likelihood that Linux will do just fine. I think the main reasons are that big industrial printers are likely to support standards like IPP and Postscript. Also, Apple uses CUPS just the same as Linux. Some cheap home printers require proprietary binary drivers, but many printers are supported by CUPS with some minimal config definitions.

peatmoss 8y ago

I feel like there are two models for desktop computing—one that is very hard to accommodate for a traditional enterprise, and another where Linux is very well suited. If one is looking for a managed solution with heavyweight apps including an office suite, email / calendar, etc., then anything other than Windows is going to be unsatisfactory to people who expect Windows. I even include macOS with Linux in that assessment. Let's call this model of centralized control of fat clients the culmination of the 1990s enterprise desktop. On the other hand, if a company has gone down the road of Google / web apps for everything, then Linux starts to be a very effective bootloader for a web browser. Personally, I like the fat-client model of the 1990s, and feel that Linux best satisfies my desires. But it's hard to deny the comprehensiveness of Windows & Active Directory for those enterprises that also want to stick to this model. The web-only model feels a little too lean to me. In any enterprise, there are bound to be instances where web apps aren't going to cut it. This is where I have hopes for Chrome OS once it begins to support native Linux apps. At that point, it's not a thin client, and it's not a fat client. I wonder then if we may see some of these enterprises walk back from Windows.

frockington 8y ago
I think we are a long way from anyone walking back from Windows. It will be an uphill battle for Google due to the lack of privacy awareness (I'm not saying Microsoft is better or worse, just that Google is not looked upon kindly in the privacy regard)
- peatmoss 8y ago
  Perhaps. But I also think that, of the people who are sticking to the heavyweight fat-client model of computing, some are doing so for technical reasons and others are doing so for principled reasons. If Google's softening on the "everything must be a web app" removes the technical barriers, I could imagine an expansion of Chrome OS. As a paying FastMail customer, I'm right there with you on Google's privacy posture. But given the number of corporate G-Suite customers, I don't think principled rejection of Google over privacy concerns is the major impediment to Chrome OS adoption.

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

> This time it's all about the roving staff, who aren't using OpenSUSE and didn't use Solaris before it. They've always been Windows users and it seems that officials feel it might be time for a bit of consistency. So my takeaway is that someone at the top was pissed off that he had to use an e-mail client other than Outlook and made a multi-million dollar infrastructure decision based on that.

vetinari 8y ago
> So my takeaway is that someone at the top was pissed off that he had to use an e-mail client other than Outlook and made a multi-million dollar infrastructure decision based on that. Nah, decisions like this are usually greased much better than just by the good feeling of using Outlook again.
swarnie_ 8y ago
I've worked on a number of large rollout projects where multiple vendors have been considered. When you tell a CEO/CFO/CIO that you can bundle OS, updates, productivity tools, communication/colab tools all in to one monthly bill they almost always take the MS route. The predictability of the financing is the key thing helping MS kill it in enterprise. It also helps that 90% of their staff have never known anything else and will need very little training.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  And to be honest they're not wrong (in those aspects)
- moviuro 8y ago
  > very little training That's the worst assuption ever. Not because everyone uses tool X, everyone understands how to make it work properly. Did you ever try to move a picture from a document you got from M. Johnson? You'll get a headache because moving that one picture will fuck up your title formatting in page 13 and the table in page 2. Everyone using MS Office I met could use a good week-long training session about do's and don't's, how to write proper documents, presentations that don't suck, etc.

reacharavindh 8y ago

It always hits the nerve to hear that a public organization is moving back to MS from FOSS, but I wish this kind of demand(from governments) would lead to a open company that is strictly focused on developing an alternative to Windows desktop. Linux is heavily pulled in the server direction, and we need a company other than RedHAt who can pull Linux ecosystem a bit together to build an opinionated but coherent desktop. Trying to support all of the email clients, calendar tools and obscure media decoders will never lead us to an usable Linux based Desktop.

ams6110 8y ago
> an opinionated but coherent desktop Isn't this Ubuntu?
- reacharavindh 8y ago
  I experimented with Ubuntu by giving a laptop running plain Ubuntu to my retired parents. They are new to computers and their needs are simple. * Video calls - Skype or FaceTime * watch youtube. * Transfer pictures from digital camera to laptop and view them (many times ;-) ) * local newspaper's website * play their local music library * Not confuse them. But, Ubuntu failed them miserably. They had a hard time using because, their words - "what works one time, doesn't the next time." When my dad closes the lid, he expects the laptop to go to sleep mode, and again open the lid to wake it, just doesn't work all time, give some kind of messages only a tech person would understand. Their observation - "text is not sharp". I checked it on their laptop display, Windows is rather sharp and usable while Ubuntu's default font rendering is too soft and they need to squint a bit to read. internet connectivity - There are so many issues with the default wifi setup on their laptop. Dad gets frustrated if it shows him a dialog box with information he does not understand. So, often times the laptop lies there gathering dust until I or a friend goes to their house to "fix it" - often times just reboot the damn thing. After this struggle, they bought a Windows laptop.
nine_k 8y ago
I don't see how coherence is a problem. Windows the platform is pretty incoherent. The article is light on details, but I think the issue is really in interoperability. When everyone around you runs Windows, you either have to be very good at interoperating with key Windows apps (all parts of Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, MS Project, etc), or to run Windows, too. Part of the problem is that many of these things operate on closed data formats, and MS has little incentive to help with interoperbilty. Conversion tools can exist but they are often cumbersome, imperfect, and thus painful for regular use. This is how an ecosystem lock-in works. BTW it's not specific to Windows; every platform makes it simpler to use this platform's tools, and, because of that, any out-of-platform tools become harder to use in comparison.

rehemiau 8y ago

Linux Foundation needs to run a hardware support testing program for desktop linux to be successful. In a situation where hardware manufacturers don't support linux and there's no regression testing for community developed drivers, it will never be successful.

lovescalajs 8y ago
Linux foundation CEO uses a Macintosh

baybal2 8y ago

They will heavily regret this decision. If MS was offering them "cheap N years contract," than it is already decided that they will jack up prices the second their contract expires.

teget 8y ago
> They will heavily regret this decision. Unlikely. Yes, this is a political decision as most actual users of the systems were ok with the linux client. However, the article is a bit misleading. They are bringing the systems used by a subdepartment of the states department of finance in line with the stack used within the remainder of the department (about 1/3 were linux clients, the state already owns over 50.000 other windows clients (lower estimate, most likely more if you include organization which manage their own infrastructure (like universities)), they know what to expect from microsoft). While the systems worked it always required special attention when interoperating with other states (for example: certain informationrequests by other states are standardized between all states (based on a shared windows solution). Lower saxonian employees could not interact with it directly and had to rely on their inhouse solution instead of reusing the existing and proven solution used by all other states). There are notable costs associated to beeing a special flower while maintining conformance to financial regulations. Yes, I believe that biting the bullet and migrating more departments to open systems would be the better longterm solution (which would also force vendors to port their solutions). But there will be several elections before that pays off and would require a significant investment before the benefits show (and possible coordination between the states) and in the midterm moving to Windows might be the better option. Moving to linux doesn't win an election, but failing to move to linux might loose you one. However, even after the move about 1/4 to 1/3 of the computers/servers owned by the state will run linux/bsd (iirc).

LiterallyDoge 8y ago

If Linux (or somebody) would focus on the UI and stability in a the non-perfect world of the dumb tweaks I do to change the gem color on my flux capacitors, I think it would be viable, but right now, Linux feels like owning a fish tank, and I can't do business on a fish tank, even though I really want to.

jagermo 8y ago

In my opinion, Munich's Linux project could have been saved if they invested a little in the UI part. It was horrible out of date, a pain to use and looked like something out of a 90's geocities web page. The work flows were slow and had too many unnecessary clicks.