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From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. You can throw a lot of resources at the migration, money, good technical exper
by buran77 6y ago
From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. You can throw a lot of resources at the migration, money, good technical experts, and get it done right. But making the regular users happy? That's a whole different subject. Truth is most users still run Windows at home and are familiar with it. Getting used to something else will meet some resistance. Then you have the minor compatibility issues especially in a people facing institution.
To this day eventually this attrition pushes many back to the more compatible and familiar solution.
I've seen (usually very small) companies going to Linux and other FOSS solutions without actually understanding this beyond "they're free". Migration went great. Later on I came back to do the migration the other way around once they faced that attrition and realized that support costs were dwarfing the license cost.
- mschuster91 6y ago> From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. Former actual LiMux team member here, so I can speak from experience (almost a decade ago though). The hardest part was convince users to be happy on utterly inadequate and aged hardware. No, 1 GB of RAM won't cut it when you have to have Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and some fucking Java crap open at the same time, and 1024x768 screens won't do so either.
- bitL 6y agoYeah, that must have been a huge problem. These days however an OKayish notebook can be had for $400 or an i3 NUC with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD with an IPS 1080p monitor for $500, and those would run any Linux well for foreseeable future without killing city's budget.
- mschuster91 6y agoUnfortunately that isn't easy with the way government procuring works. Basically, you make a specsheet what you want (e.g. spare components must be available for a duration of X years) and then have to publish tenders, and usually the vendors offering bids have to fulfill certain conditions (e.g. must have a reliable history working with governments). The last part alone excludes many cheap vendors as they don't have government contracting experience, and the spare parts requirements kills the rest as they can only be so cheap because they don't have to build much of a spare parts infrastructure. (Note: this is not specifically relating to LiMux in any way, I have no knowledge about the contracts/tender process that happened back then) Also, the scale matters: 15.500 PCs are even at 500$ apiece 7.75 million €.
- user5994461 6y ago>>> Getting used to something else will meet some resistance. It's too gentle to say that users are struggling or resisting. The fact on the ground is that a significant part of users are simply incapable of learning new computer software, they can't even use effectively the software they've been working on for years. This is glaring in a giant government organization with tens of thousands of employees. Thus any attempt to move OS is doomed to fail. Classic example is the popup when closing a word document. "Do you want to save the document before exiting? Save/Quit/Cancel". The typical user clicks the little red cross in the top right corner of the dialog.
- ivanche 6y agoIMO this is UX fail. If the question starts with "Do you...", only reasonable button choices should be "Yes" and "No", not "Save", "Quit" and "Cancel".
- bmn__ 6y agoIt's not reasonable. This goes against all major HIG. I encourage you to read them so that you come to an understanding why verbs must be used instead of yes/no.
- ivanche 6y agoIt would be more helpful if you included a link or two. I don't have time to read "all major HIG". It might not be reasonable from your POV, but from mine it is - if I ask you "Do you know Michael Jordan?" and you answer "Cancel" I would've thought you're nuts.
- anticensor 6y agoI could similarly answer "Stop it!".