6 ms·

I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project to succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that was the project's name - was a brutal usab

I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project to succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that was the project's name - was a brutal usability disaster. As in, almost meme-level bad. It's like the Berlin airport in software. Sure, Microsoft has a huge office in Munich, and they definitely applied political pressure, too (it'd be naive to assume they didn't). The project's stated goal was to be a showcase of how Linux can work in the public sector. But because of that goal, there was also massive political pressure the other way around. The simple truth is that Microsoft's products were/are just far superior than what the Limux initiative shipped. The Linux transition caused massive productivity losses in the municipality's administration. It's easy to say that VBS macros are evil, but if you migrate away from them, you need to provide an alternative. Simple things like a good calendar, working printing functionality, LOTS of basic stuff - it just felt like the IT was a decade behind. Here on HN, Windows continually gets roasted by how bad its UX is compared to Mac OS. With Limux vs Windows, the difference was practically 10x as large as that. I REALLY hope the LibreOffice transition goes well. Hopefully, this is a much wiser approach than trying to migrate everything off Windows at once.

smartbettor 5y ago
thanks for mentioning the Berlin airport fiasco - I had never heard the story - hilarious and very troubling for those in Berlin!
- mlry 5y ago
  Oh, if you find the story of BER hilarious and troubling you should read up on the 2021 vote for federal and local parliaments. Or the civil administration there in general where you have to make an appointment to get your passport renewed months in advance.
  - pas 5y ago
    > 2021 vote for federal and local parliaments tldr?
    - DocTomoe 5y ago
      Some people are unhappy with the results. One candidate was generally hated by the public and got fucked by the press with "creative photo editing", badly. One candidate was poised to become the first green chancellor, but then managed to have not one, not two, but three case of academic fraud and lying about her past tacked to her ticket. Her party came in second. One candidate was all about some nebulous idea of "freedom", which made him relevant enough that his party now is king maker, when the first-time voters, who traditionally would go to the Green Party, decided enough Covid Lockdowns is enough. And one candidate did ... nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which means he also couldn't embarrass himself (even though historically, he's a ... problematic ... figure). This guy came in first, so he's going to be the next chancellor. And that's just the candidates. Then you got the State of Berlin obviously unable to hold democratic elections, given - there was a lack of ballots in many voting offices - in some voting offices, there were ballots for other districts, which rendered those votes invalid - they accidentally allowed 16-year-olds to vote in the federal elections (where you have to be 18 to vote) - they accidentally gave a mandate to the wrong guy, who shared the same name, but not the same party affiliation with the actual winner - some votes were cast after 18:00, which is the official cutoff date - in some districts, there was a 150% participation rate - some offices sent people waiting in line home because "it's unlikely you'll be in in time" - ... I am sure I am missing a few catastrophes - a LOT went wrong in Berlin ... It was hilarious to watch this mess unfold.
sofixa 5y ago
Wasn't that only initially, and was drastically improved later on? Even Accenture (the biggest Microsoft partner)'s audit didn't conclusively say that switching back to Windows will be better than what Limux was at that point. Furthermore, the French Gendermerie is using Linux at a similar scale, and there are no usability problems. If they can make it work, i don't think it's impossible for anyone else.
- merb 5y ago
  > "Accenture (the biggest Microsoft partner)" actually accenture's biggest partner is not microsoft, it's money. really, they would sell their employees souls for money.
ilamont 5y ago
Was a post-mortem of the Munich project published anywhere? Some people may remember the hype over the One Laptop Per Child Project, which had a noble mission that many people could get behind. In 2011 I heard from someone at MIT who criticized aspects of the program such as no real planning for support when the devices broke down in the field. Other issues came out years later, including unrealistic cost estimates and the crank: If you remember the OLPC at all, you probably remember the hand crank. It was OLPC’s most striking technological innovation — and it was pure vaporware. Designers dropped the feature almost immediately after Negroponte’s announcement, because the winding process put stress on the laptop’s body and demanded energy that kids in very poor areas couldn’t spare. Every OLPC computer shipped with a standard power adapter. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...
- nivenkos 5y ago
  It's a shame it failed and there are no real cheap netbooks anymore (aside from Chromebooks). I used an Acer Aspire One when travelling through Germany as a student (to research jobs and conferences) - and it was amazing being able to program and write papers on such a small device. Reading about the hardware issues reminds me a lot of the ZX Spectrum reviews (especially the keyboard!) - keeping a low price means a lot of compromises unfortunately.
  - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
    The modern equivalent is a tablet with its corresponding type cover.
    - nivenkos 5y ago
      AFAIK I can't really run Jupyter notebooks, R, LaTeX and Rust on a tablet though. Perhaps the JingPad.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
deknos 5y ago
> I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project to succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that was the project's name - was a brutal usability disaster. As in, almost meme-level bad. It's like the Berlin airport in software. Bullshit > The simple truth is that Microsoft's products were/are just far superior than what the Limux initiative shipped. The Linux transition caused massive productivity losses in the municipality's administration. It's easy to say that VBS macros are evil, but if you migrate away from them, you need to provide an alternative. ah, because of that, departments nowadays cannot exchange word documents with universities, still after the said this would work then? bullshit. And Macros were replaced if the department and users cooperated and didn't wall the project off. > Simple things like a good calendar, working printing functionality, LOTS of basic stuff - it just felt like the IT was a decade behind. Here on HN, Windows continually gets roasted by how bad its UX is compared to Mac OS. With Limux vs Windows, the difference was practically 10x as large as that. lol, funny. the exchange solution still does not have all the features the old one (which was ugly) had. Bullshit. I was there. You are just biased. And there are known bugs with Windows and with Office. And ask what? Nobody fixes them, users have to live with it. Back with LiMux and LibreOffice we fixed and repaired stuff. You use network-manager with openconnect or 802.1x with hooks? or the KDE printing dialog? or libreoffice with the QT interface? you can thank the LiMux project for that. i'll tell you a little secret: half a year ago there was still no replacement for printer administration which the limux team built, the administration is still done with the config-/deployment solution for limux there. (i do not know the current situation, but that's just ridiculous) LiMux worked. Stop your shilling. Because NOBODY could tell us real technical problems we couldn't solve. One of us even fixed the borked intel graphics driver once.
- afavour 5y ago
  > I was there. You are just biased. That doesn’t mean you’re free of bias. If anything it means the opposite. “Limux worked” and “we solved a whole ton of problems and had to implement printing dialogs, QT interfaces and more” feel like statements somewhat at odds with each other. Were all these bug fixes complete on day one or did they have to be done after the Limux switch had been made? Obviously I’m an outside observer here but boasting that you had to do a whole ton of work including network management and that no one has done much to it since makes it sound to me like maybe Linux isn’t or wasn’t ready.
fsflover 5y ago
Actually, the Limux project is well alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline May 2020 - Newly elected politicians in Munich take a U-turn and implement a plan to go back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux.
- azangru 5y ago
  Fascinating!
gentleman11 5y ago
The problem is that a lot of organizations see foss as purely a free thing and not an investment. If they put half the money they spent on licensing into paying people to improve the foss packages they use, the ecosystem would transform and everyone would benefit. Massive cost savings overall, and it would push paid software to work harder to compete (who knows, it might even force Microsoft to offer decent privacy policies and remove ads from their manipulative desktop)
- tdeck 5y ago
  Organizations like school systems don't have a great track record managing custom software projects. They don't know what to look for and who to hire, and how much things should cost. It's very likely that these problems would translate into funding FOSS development as well. Also, it's a big headache to manage custom development compared to buying or downloading an off the shelf package.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    This is the opposite of custom development for the most part, with the exception of some integration work.
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  > If they put half the money they spent on licensing into paying people to improve the foss packages... Like in a legally-binding contract way or some hippie way hoping for the best?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Hiring developers to work on specific package improvements is what is normally done. Could be legally binding, probably would be a standard employment agreement but you could do it through a hippie way (coding circle?).
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    great to see the "H-word" used as a slur, again (great for my own sense of antagonistic prejuidice being alive and well that is). for a more constructive reinforcement of what a "hippy way" might be, in business and government: anti-rascist, that is actively inviting and communicating with others socially; inclusive generally; valuing cooperation; building and valuing talent for its own sake; bringing in arts to shared spaces; generally vegetarian; health proactive; tolerance of personal drug use including tobacco; deeply environmentalist; generally opposed to military-style administration; generally opposed to authoritarian governments; use of non-monetary trade goods; valuing education and definitely advanced education. are these things "fail" in City Administration as the parent comment implies ? not necessarily
zoomablemind 5y ago
>...I REALLY hope the LibreOffice transition goes well. If anything that rings alert on my mind is the LO's Calc, which at times decides to become slow and consume the CPU for no apparent reason. Or equally annoying flacky interoprability betwen LO Writer and MS Office Word (works in general, but loses some alignment, magles styles etc.) As much as I'm for LO and want them to succeed, I feel for the clerks dealing with these counter-productive issues.
- olyjohn 5y ago
  You say you want them to succeed, but I don't believe you are sincere. This negativity with anecdotal evidence is so annoying. Like the whole world will come to a halt because some document formatting got fucked up. I see this same shit with Excel all the time. It's fucking FULL of bugs that have just been around for so long, people just get used to it and work around it. I mean, if you selected a group of 30 rows in Excel, then use CTRL to deselect one row in the middle... it doesn't deselect it, it "selects" the row again, so now it's just darker than all the other rows. Is this fixed yet? It was a bug in fucking Office 2016 and goes back years. Nobody said it wasn't ready for use! It's such a fucking basic feature. To de-select a single row out of a group that is selected. It's the single most counter-productive thing ever. When I found this bug, I was blown away that nobody ever complained about it! I worked with thousands upon thousands of people with Excel and it was never a problem?! Word doesn't even play nice with it's own files... ever moved a file from Office 2013 to Office 2016? I've seen it garble files a million times. Move a Word doc from Mac to Windows and shit gets hosed sometimes. The clerks will get used to the issues. Just the same way that they got used to the hot fucking garbage that Microsoft charges enterprises and governments substantial amounts of money for, and provides precisely dick for support in return. EDIT: I mean look at this shit! Apparently deselecting is a new concept to Microsoft! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/deselect-a-selection-d1b56f30-7d63-4a64-8f0b-da4958204b52 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/deselect-a-select... Note: This feature is only available in Excel for Window if you have Office 2019, or if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription. If you are a Microsoft 365 subscriber, make sure you have the latest version of Office.
  - deleted 5y ago
ruph123 5y ago
I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy. Why not just use one of the avaible distros or why not even make a deal with SUSE (a bavarian company) to have a subscription model with support directly from experienced distro makers? Surely they could've made sure that all important features and workflows can be implemented. Of course this would've needed to be a public bidding but if Red Hat gets it or SUSE does not really matter and surely is much cheaper than Microsoft licenses.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy. For the same reason there are hundreds of forks and counting: it is difficult to get the environment you want without rebuilding everything from scratch, and once you do that you have to maintain it.
- josefx 5y ago
  They went with an Debian/Ubuntu based fork due to popularity. >if Red Hat gets it If your goal is to run a proprietary OS you might as well stay with Windows. No reason to endorse outdated IBM enterprise crapware after they killed the only compatible distro that didn't require paying the IBM tax to test and develop software for it.
- ptman 5y ago
  The big distros are quite customizable in order to suit a large audience. A large organization typically has defaults and customizations that need to be added. A common strategy is to _distribute_ their customizations by creating a distribution based on some more widely used distribution. Google had Goobuntu based on Ubuntu.
- deknos 5y ago
  because back in the day, no distribution was good enough for our needs. today is a completely other situation. redhat might, but they borked it somehow as they said we would not be allowed to change anything or loose all support. at least that was what i heard. and then there was supposedly the decision "we do not want any external company due to the bad experience with microsoft".
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
I think the truth between what you say and the other person accusing you of being biased is somewhere in the middle. They basically went too mach ahead of the time. Mind you, the project started 18 years ago! The computing landscape was very different back then. I know what you mean as I was forced by my employer to use Linux on the desktop at that time and it was mediocre - but many things changed in the meantime. Probably the most important: the web revolution has happened. Nobody is using abominations like the ActiveX/Silverlight/whatever anymore. VBS is no longer omnipresent (partly because of security reasons). Hardware support in Linux is incomparable to what was in 2004. SO yes, I can imagine it was terrible back then, but I still think it's very important not to give up and I'm happy they basically restarted the project recently.
- deknos 5y ago
  the hardware thing was not a problem for us as we could dictate which computers were bought. so computers were bought which would be compatible. our problem was: none of the tools we needed were available in the quality and richness as they exist today. automatic deployment to hundred of PCs at the same time with extensive automatic configuration? session and configuration management per user? departments want to use different backgrounds per house or subdepartment. all that stuff had to be built in a scalable way. the solutions today were not available back then.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    I'm sorry, but I disagree about the two last points. Around 2001/2002 I was doing this kind of work of purchasing new desktops and deployments on hundreds of machines using a combination of PXE and Kickstart (I believe Kickstart appeared in 1998). It was not ideal, but it worked, and each department had their own settings. The only complaint I heard from my colleagues was that they cannot install "little sheep" (one of these gimmicks that would sit on your desktop and distract you). Actually some of them were upset they cannot install games, but they preferred not to voice this concern aloud. As to your first problem, the lack of software, yes, it was a huge problem then. What we had to use at that time was substandard. I personally suffered (even though I love Linux on the server). Also KDE was unstable and a memory hog, Gnome wasn't much better, and you couldn't just buy more RAM. I'm very happy these days are over.
908B64B197 5y ago
I suspect the reason for that is nobody ever tried a Linux deployment as big as that, so the tooling to manage it simply didn't exist.

smartbettor 5y ago

thanks for mentioning the Berlin airport fiasco - I had never heard the story - hilarious and very troubling for those in Berlin!

mlry 5y ago
Oh, if you find the story of BER hilarious and troubling you should read up on the 2021 vote for federal and local parliaments. Or the civil administration there in general where you have to make an appointment to get your passport renewed months in advance.
- pas 5y ago
  > 2021 vote for federal and local parliaments tldr?
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    Some people are unhappy with the results. One candidate was generally hated by the public and got fucked by the press with "creative photo editing", badly. One candidate was poised to become the first green chancellor, but then managed to have not one, not two, but three case of academic fraud and lying about her past tacked to her ticket. Her party came in second. One candidate was all about some nebulous idea of "freedom", which made him relevant enough that his party now is king maker, when the first-time voters, who traditionally would go to the Green Party, decided enough Covid Lockdowns is enough. And one candidate did ... nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which means he also couldn't embarrass himself (even though historically, he's a ... problematic ... figure). This guy came in first, so he's going to be the next chancellor. And that's just the candidates. Then you got the State of Berlin obviously unable to hold democratic elections, given - there was a lack of ballots in many voting offices - in some voting offices, there were ballots for other districts, which rendered those votes invalid - they accidentally allowed 16-year-olds to vote in the federal elections (where you have to be 18 to vote) - they accidentally gave a mandate to the wrong guy, who shared the same name, but not the same party affiliation with the actual winner - some votes were cast after 18:00, which is the official cutoff date - in some districts, there was a 150% participation rate - some offices sent people waiting in line home because "it's unlikely you'll be in in time" - ... I am sure I am missing a few catastrophes - a LOT went wrong in Berlin ... It was hilarious to watch this mess unfold.

sofixa 5y ago

Wasn't that only initially, and was drastically improved later on? Even Accenture (the biggest Microsoft partner)'s audit didn't conclusively say that switching back to Windows will be better than what Limux was at that point. Furthermore, the French Gendermerie is using Linux at a similar scale, and there are no usability problems. If they can make it work, i don't think it's impossible for anyone else.

merb 5y ago
> "Accenture (the biggest Microsoft partner)" actually accenture's biggest partner is not microsoft, it's money. really, they would sell their employees souls for money.

ilamont 5y ago

Was a post-mortem of the Munich project published anywhere? Some people may remember the hype over the One Laptop Per Child Project, which had a noble mission that many people could get behind. In 2011 I heard from someone at MIT who criticized aspects of the program such as no real planning for support when the devices broke down in the field. Other issues came out years later, including unrealistic cost estimates and the crank: If you remember the OLPC at all, you probably remember the hand crank. It was OLPC’s most striking technological innovation — and it was pure vaporware. Designers dropped the feature almost immediately after Negroponte’s announcement, because the winding process put stress on the laptop’s body and demanded energy that kids in very poor areas couldn’t spare. Every OLPC computer shipped with a standard power adapter. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...

nivenkos 5y ago
It's a shame it failed and there are no real cheap netbooks anymore (aside from Chromebooks). I used an Acer Aspire One when travelling through Germany as a student (to research jobs and conferences) - and it was amazing being able to program and write papers on such a small device. Reading about the hardware issues reminds me a lot of the ZX Spectrum reviews (especially the keyboard!) - keeping a low price means a lot of compromises unfortunately.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  The modern equivalent is a tablet with its corresponding type cover.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    AFAIK I can't really run Jupyter notebooks, R, LaTeX and Rust on a tablet though. Perhaps the JingPad.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago

deknos 5y ago

> I'm from Munich. As much as I would've liked that project to succeed (I really did), I can tell you that Limux - that was the project's name - was a brutal usability disaster. As in, almost meme-level bad. It's like the Berlin airport in software. Bullshit > The simple truth is that Microsoft's products were/are just far superior than what the Limux initiative shipped. The Linux transition caused massive productivity losses in the municipality's administration. It's easy to say that VBS macros are evil, but if you migrate away from them, you need to provide an alternative. ah, because of that, departments nowadays cannot exchange word documents with universities, still after the said this would work then? bullshit. And Macros were replaced if the department and users cooperated and didn't wall the project off. > Simple things like a good calendar, working printing functionality, LOTS of basic stuff - it just felt like the IT was a decade behind. Here on HN, Windows continually gets roasted by how bad its UX is compared to Mac OS. With Limux vs Windows, the difference was practically 10x as large as that. lol, funny. the exchange solution still does not have all the features the old one (which was ugly) had. Bullshit. I was there. You are just biased. And there are known bugs with Windows and with Office. And ask what? Nobody fixes them, users have to live with it. Back with LiMux and LibreOffice we fixed and repaired stuff. You use network-manager with openconnect or 802.1x with hooks? or the KDE printing dialog? or libreoffice with the QT interface? you can thank the LiMux project for that. i'll tell you a little secret: half a year ago there was still no replacement for printer administration which the limux team built, the administration is still done with the config-/deployment solution for limux there. (i do not know the current situation, but that's just ridiculous) LiMux worked. Stop your shilling. Because NOBODY could tell us real technical problems we couldn't solve. One of us even fixed the borked intel graphics driver once.

afavour 5y ago
> I was there. You are just biased. That doesn’t mean you’re free of bias. If anything it means the opposite. “Limux worked” and “we solved a whole ton of problems and had to implement printing dialogs, QT interfaces and more” feel like statements somewhat at odds with each other. Were all these bug fixes complete on day one or did they have to be done after the Limux switch had been made? Obviously I’m an outside observer here but boasting that you had to do a whole ton of work including network management and that no one has done much to it since makes it sound to me like maybe Linux isn’t or wasn’t ready.

fsflover 5y ago

Actually, the Limux project is well alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline May 2020 - Newly elected politicians in Munich take a U-turn and implement a plan to go back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux.

azangru 5y ago
Fascinating!

gentleman11 5y ago

The problem is that a lot of organizations see foss as purely a free thing and not an investment. If they put half the money they spent on licensing into paying people to improve the foss packages they use, the ecosystem would transform and everyone would benefit. Massive cost savings overall, and it would push paid software to work harder to compete (who knows, it might even force Microsoft to offer decent privacy policies and remove ads from their manipulative desktop)

tdeck 5y ago
Organizations like school systems don't have a great track record managing custom software projects. They don't know what to look for and who to hire, and how much things should cost. It's very likely that these problems would translate into funding FOSS development as well. Also, it's a big headache to manage custom development compared to buying or downloading an off the shelf package.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  This is the opposite of custom development for the most part, with the exception of some integration work.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
> If they put half the money they spent on licensing into paying people to improve the foss packages... Like in a legally-binding contract way or some hippie way hoping for the best?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Hiring developers to work on specific package improvements is what is normally done. Could be legally binding, probably would be a standard employment agreement but you could do it through a hippie way (coding circle?).
- mistrial9 5y ago
  great to see the "H-word" used as a slur, again (great for my own sense of antagonistic prejuidice being alive and well that is). for a more constructive reinforcement of what a "hippy way" might be, in business and government: anti-rascist, that is actively inviting and communicating with others socially; inclusive generally; valuing cooperation; building and valuing talent for its own sake; bringing in arts to shared spaces; generally vegetarian; health proactive; tolerance of personal drug use including tobacco; deeply environmentalist; generally opposed to military-style administration; generally opposed to authoritarian governments; use of non-monetary trade goods; valuing education and definitely advanced education. are these things "fail" in City Administration as the parent comment implies ? not necessarily

zoomablemind 5y ago

>...I REALLY hope the LibreOffice transition goes well. If anything that rings alert on my mind is the LO's Calc, which at times decides to become slow and consume the CPU for no apparent reason. Or equally annoying flacky interoprability betwen LO Writer and MS Office Word (works in general, but loses some alignment, magles styles etc.) As much as I'm for LO and want them to succeed, I feel for the clerks dealing with these counter-productive issues.

olyjohn 5y ago
You say you want them to succeed, but I don't believe you are sincere. This negativity with anecdotal evidence is so annoying. Like the whole world will come to a halt because some document formatting got fucked up. I see this same shit with Excel all the time. It's fucking FULL of bugs that have just been around for so long, people just get used to it and work around it. I mean, if you selected a group of 30 rows in Excel, then use CTRL to deselect one row in the middle... it doesn't deselect it, it "selects" the row again, so now it's just darker than all the other rows. Is this fixed yet? It was a bug in fucking Office 2016 and goes back years. Nobody said it wasn't ready for use! It's such a fucking basic feature. To de-select a single row out of a group that is selected. It's the single most counter-productive thing ever. When I found this bug, I was blown away that nobody ever complained about it! I worked with thousands upon thousands of people with Excel and it was never a problem?! Word doesn't even play nice with it's own files... ever moved a file from Office 2013 to Office 2016? I've seen it garble files a million times. Move a Word doc from Mac to Windows and shit gets hosed sometimes. The clerks will get used to the issues. Just the same way that they got used to the hot fucking garbage that Microsoft charges enterprises and governments substantial amounts of money for, and provides precisely dick for support in return. EDIT: I mean look at this shit! Apparently deselecting is a new concept to Microsoft! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/deselect-a-selection-d1b56f30-7d63-4a64-8f0b-da4958204b52 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/deselect-a-select... Note: This feature is only available in Excel for Window if you have Office 2019, or if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription. If you are a Microsoft 365 subscriber, make sure you have the latest version of Office.
- deleted 5y ago

ruph123 5y ago

I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy. Why not just use one of the avaible distros or why not even make a deal with SUSE (a bavarian company) to have a subscription model with support directly from experienced distro makers? Surely they could've made sure that all important features and workflows can be implemented. Of course this would've needed to be a public bidding but if Red Hat gets it or SUSE does not really matter and surely is much cheaper than Microsoft licenses.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy. For the same reason there are hundreds of forks and counting: it is difficult to get the environment you want without rebuilding everything from scratch, and once you do that you have to maintain it.
josefx 5y ago
They went with an Debian/Ubuntu based fork due to popularity. >if Red Hat gets it If your goal is to run a proprietary OS you might as well stay with Windows. No reason to endorse outdated IBM enterprise crapware after they killed the only compatible distro that didn't require paying the IBM tax to test and develop software for it.
ptman 5y ago
The big distros are quite customizable in order to suit a large audience. A large organization typically has defaults and customizations that need to be added. A common strategy is to _distribute_ their customizations by creating a distribution based on some more widely used distribution. Google had Goobuntu based on Ubuntu.
deknos 5y ago
because back in the day, no distribution was good enough for our needs. today is a completely other situation. redhat might, but they borked it somehow as they said we would not be allowed to change anything or loose all support. at least that was what i heard. and then there was supposedly the decision "we do not want any external company due to the bad experience with microsoft".

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

I think the truth between what you say and the other person accusing you of being biased is somewhere in the middle. They basically went too mach ahead of the time. Mind you, the project started 18 years ago! The computing landscape was very different back then. I know what you mean as I was forced by my employer to use Linux on the desktop at that time and it was mediocre - but many things changed in the meantime. Probably the most important: the web revolution has happened. Nobody is using abominations like the ActiveX/Silverlight/whatever anymore. VBS is no longer omnipresent (partly because of security reasons). Hardware support in Linux is incomparable to what was in 2004. SO yes, I can imagine it was terrible back then, but I still think it's very important not to give up and I'm happy they basically restarted the project recently.

deknos 5y ago
the hardware thing was not a problem for us as we could dictate which computers were bought. so computers were bought which would be compatible. our problem was: none of the tools we needed were available in the quality and richness as they exist today. automatic deployment to hundred of PCs at the same time with extensive automatic configuration? session and configuration management per user? departments want to use different backgrounds per house or subdepartment. all that stuff had to be built in a scalable way. the solutions today were not available back then.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  I'm sorry, but I disagree about the two last points. Around 2001/2002 I was doing this kind of work of purchasing new desktops and deployments on hundreds of machines using a combination of PXE and Kickstart (I believe Kickstart appeared in 1998). It was not ideal, but it worked, and each department had their own settings. The only complaint I heard from my colleagues was that they cannot install "little sheep" (one of these gimmicks that would sit on your desktop and distract you). Actually some of them were upset they cannot install games, but they preferred not to voice this concern aloud. As to your first problem, the lack of software, yes, it was a huge problem then. What we had to use at that time was substandard. I personally suffered (even though I love Linux on the server). Also KDE was unstable and a memory hog, Gnome wasn't much better, and you couldn't just buy more RAM. I'm very happy these days are over.

908B64B197 5y ago

I suspect the reason for that is nobody ever tried a Linux deployment as big as that, so the tooling to manage it simply didn't exist.