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You make it sound as if the migration wasn't a success while the original article claims it to be more than successful. In my experience, switching over PC's to

by danford 12y ago

You make it sound as if the migration wasn't a success while the original article claims it to be more than successful. In my experience, switching over PC's to something like Ubuntu is no issue in most cases. So they had to set a up a few computers with windows/wine?? That's no reason to keep all your PCs windows. Plenty of government have it the other way around where they're running Linux on a few computers and windows on the rest. Also, while you quote a few articles that show organizations "changing their mind" on Linux, there are plenty of articles that show governments and organizations still attempting a migration, most recently the entire Indian government (http://itsfoss.com/tamil-nadu-switches-linux/ http://itsfoss.com/tamil-nadu-switches-linux/), The French switched 37,000 PCs to linux (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/01/french-national-police http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/01/french-nation...), Don't forget the Munich saved 10,000,000 Euros by switching to Linux. I could keep going. In my experience Windows is not needed in 90% of cases and when it is it's for a skilled task that involves skilled workers. It's a fact that skilled workers do not make up even close to a majority of the work force. Also, Ubuntu is certified to run on 70% of desktop computers: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/ http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/ . One of the the manufacturers I work closely with is Dell and for the most part I haven't had any problems installing Linux on any business model Dell desktop that there is. Business models don't typically come with high end nVidia GPUs and other unnecessary hardware, so upgrading to Linux is no problem most of the time. On budget and typical business systems Linux seems to be the king of resume times and performance (at least in my experience). I've only used windows 8 on an employees laptop and from what I can tell, it wasn't made to perform well on his Toshiba to say the least. I've seen both windows 7 and windows 8 running very well on the right hardware though. The performance of windows on budget hardware (~75% of consumer) is mediocre at best. Can we stop pretending Linux has no use for anything?

throwaway235622 12y ago
The 10 million euro saving seems to have put the costs as solely the costs of 1) Upgrading to Windows 7 at the end of 2011 (lol) 2) Upgrading versions of Office 3) Upgrading PCs to be able to run Windows 7 They assumes all other costs are the same. Which confuses me a bit because they said they had consultants working to develop the underlying OS itself (so wouldn't you save the cost of those consultants if you're buying Windows?). But I don't mean to be begging the question, as there's no real reason to not trust them (but isn't there no real reason not to trust HP by the same token?). Anyway, I can't read German so maybe I missed something. http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR10-million-savings-for-Munich-1755802.html http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR... http://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII2/RII/ris_vorlagen_dokumente.jsp?risid=2773053 http://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII2/RII/ris_vorlagen_dokumente.j... I'm not a huge fan of their numbers, but I guess if they hold up and people are 100% equally productive then it's fine. But really saving 10 million over the course of a 10 yr project for a city government the size of Munich doesn't seem that significant to me. >You make it sound as if the migration wasn't a success while the original article claims it to be more than successful Why does it have to be either a failure or more then successful? Why couldn't have just been a completed project that wasn't a huge success or failure. Honestly that the article doesn't mention any issues other then a handwavey "there have been hurdles", doesn't inspire me to think the article is the greatest in the world. But maybe I'm just cynical.
- danford 12y ago
  >they said they had consultants working to develop the underlying OS itself I think a lot of people make the assumption that just because you're running windows you're not going to run into any road blocks that require hiring developers to extend this or that or create a plugin here or there. Of course you can't extend the windows OS, and why would you want to? Probably to optimize something. Why would you want to optimize something? Probably to make things run better. Why would you want things to run better? Probably because it saves money. So for all we know the development on LiMux may have been what saved them the money.
orkoden 12y ago
> In my experience, switching over PC's to something like Ubuntu is no issue in most cases. If it's an issue or not depends on the software people use to do their work. If 90% of it is spent in a web app and the rest is e-mail plus the occasional presentation or letter, then yes it's not a huge issue. However many people in work environments depend on specialized applications that may not be available on linux. Then you not only have to change OSs but also end user applications. I have been through a failed migration to Ubuntu from Windows. The new head of IT and CTO were huge linux nerds and wanted to transition promising huge cost savings. As it turns out LibreOffice plus Evolution could just not replace MS Office and Outlook. Our accountants refused after after a week of trying to use Calc instead of Excel. Sales and Marketing people found that Outlook had features that were not available anymore. A major internal FileMaker application was supposed to be replaced by a LAMP web application. That project languished for half a year before it was given up after it failed to become usable. It was never even attempted to replace the Exchange server. The designer never started to switch away from their Macs. In the end it was decided that everyone could use the OS of their choice. So we now have mix of about 60% Windows, 30% Macs, 10% Linux on the desktop. The attempted migration cost the company a lot of money and time. > haven't had any problems installing Linux on any business model Dell desktop Installation is not the issue. >Can we stop pretending Linux has no use for anything? Nobody says that. > performance Firefox is faster on Windows than on Linux. Battery life usually also is better, though Macs are miles ahead there.
- danford 12y ago
  >Firefox is faster on Windows than on Linux. Not on any of my computers. I have windows 8 installed on a separate partition on my laptop and have literally only used it to upgrade the system and I installed firefox to browse the web while I wait for updates. This pristine OS that has almost never been used boots up fairly fast, but then when I login it takes 3 minutes to load the start screen. Then of course the first thing I want to do is go to my desktop, but guess what? The whole OS chokes when I click the button to bring it up. I've gotten use to giving windows 8 a "warm up" period of about ten minutes, but this still doesn't help. I go to open Firefox on the desktop and literally nothing happens for 3 minutes, I end up pressing the icon again, then I get 5 FF windows, 2 mcaffe pop-ups, some crap from dell, and oh look! more up-dates. This is on a brand new dell with integrated graphics and an intel core i5 with regular HDD. Linux doesn't have any of these problems. Now I'm sure you can tell me all the tricks to getting Windows to run faster, but if I wanted to spend all day configuring my OS I would use Arch. How many people work in your company if you don't mind me asking? In my experience, a lot of companies that have thousands of computers are employing people who aren't important enough to have a company Outlook account. Believe it or not many companies still use dos (and train the employees to use a command line dos interface in 3 days). Plenty of companies can switch to Linux, maybe not your 15 person start-up where everyone has a specialized task, but plenty of others can.

by danford 12y ago

throwaway235622 12y ago

The 10 million euro saving seems to have put the costs as solely the costs of 1) Upgrading to Windows 7 at the end of 2011 (lol) 2) Upgrading versions of Office 3) Upgrading PCs to be able to run Windows 7 They assumes all other costs are the same. Which confuses me a bit because they said they had consultants working to develop the underlying OS itself (so wouldn't you save the cost of those consultants if you're buying Windows?). But I don't mean to be begging the question, as there's no real reason to not trust them (but isn't there no real reason not to trust HP by the same token?). Anyway, I can't read German so maybe I missed something. http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR10-million-savings-for-Munich-1755802.html http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR... http://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII2/RII/ris_vorlagen_dokumente.jsp?risid=2773053 http://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII2/RII/ris_vorlagen_dokumente.j... I'm not a huge fan of their numbers, but I guess if they hold up and people are 100% equally productive then it's fine. But really saving 10 million over the course of a 10 yr project for a city government the size of Munich doesn't seem that significant to me. >You make it sound as if the migration wasn't a success while the original article claims it to be more than successful Why does it have to be either a failure or more then successful? Why couldn't have just been a completed project that wasn't a huge success or failure. Honestly that the article doesn't mention any issues other then a handwavey "there have been hurdles", doesn't inspire me to think the article is the greatest in the world. But maybe I'm just cynical.

danford 12y ago
>they said they had consultants working to develop the underlying OS itself I think a lot of people make the assumption that just because you're running windows you're not going to run into any road blocks that require hiring developers to extend this or that or create a plugin here or there. Of course you can't extend the windows OS, and why would you want to? Probably to optimize something. Why would you want to optimize something? Probably to make things run better. Why would you want things to run better? Probably because it saves money. So for all we know the development on LiMux may have been what saved them the money.

orkoden 12y ago

> In my experience, switching over PC's to something like Ubuntu is no issue in most cases. If it's an issue or not depends on the software people use to do their work. If 90% of it is spent in a web app and the rest is e-mail plus the occasional presentation or letter, then yes it's not a huge issue. However many people in work environments depend on specialized applications that may not be available on linux. Then you not only have to change OSs but also end user applications. I have been through a failed migration to Ubuntu from Windows. The new head of IT and CTO were huge linux nerds and wanted to transition promising huge cost savings. As it turns out LibreOffice plus Evolution could just not replace MS Office and Outlook. Our accountants refused after after a week of trying to use Calc instead of Excel. Sales and Marketing people found that Outlook had features that were not available anymore. A major internal FileMaker application was supposed to be replaced by a LAMP web application. That project languished for half a year before it was given up after it failed to become usable. It was never even attempted to replace the Exchange server. The designer never started to switch away from their Macs. In the end it was decided that everyone could use the OS of their choice. So we now have mix of about 60% Windows, 30% Macs, 10% Linux on the desktop. The attempted migration cost the company a lot of money and time. > haven't had any problems installing Linux on any business model Dell desktop Installation is not the issue. >Can we stop pretending Linux has no use for anything? Nobody says that. > performance Firefox is faster on Windows than on Linux. Battery life usually also is better, though Macs are miles ahead there.

danford 12y ago
>Firefox is faster on Windows than on Linux. Not on any of my computers. I have windows 8 installed on a separate partition on my laptop and have literally only used it to upgrade the system and I installed firefox to browse the web while I wait for updates. This pristine OS that has almost never been used boots up fairly fast, but then when I login it takes 3 minutes to load the start screen. Then of course the first thing I want to do is go to my desktop, but guess what? The whole OS chokes when I click the button to bring it up. I've gotten use to giving windows 8 a "warm up" period of about ten minutes, but this still doesn't help. I go to open Firefox on the desktop and literally nothing happens for 3 minutes, I end up pressing the icon again, then I get 5 FF windows, 2 mcaffe pop-ups, some crap from dell, and oh look! more up-dates. This is on a brand new dell with integrated graphics and an intel core i5 with regular HDD. Linux doesn't have any of these problems. Now I'm sure you can tell me all the tricks to getting Windows to run faster, but if I wanted to spend all day configuring my OS I would use Arch. How many people work in your company if you don't mind me asking? In my experience, a lot of companies that have thousands of computers are employing people who aren't important enough to have a company Outlook account. Believe it or not many companies still use dos (and train the employees to use a command line dos interface in 3 days). Plenty of companies can switch to Linux, maybe not your 15 person start-up where everyone has a specialized task, but plenty of others can.