
Munich ends its long-running love affair with Linux - antouank
https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/26/linux-pioneer-munich-switches-to-windows/
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MsMowz
Microsoft just moved an office into Munich and now, over the objections of the
municipal IT staff, the city is switching to Windows. Interesting.

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javajosh
_> objections of the municipal IT staff_

Where? I'd read that.

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craftyguy
The link is literally in the article... anyways, here you go:
[https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-
comp...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-in-munich-no-compelling-
technical-reason-to-return-to-windows-says-citys-it-chief/)

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javajosh
My understanding is that this was commentary by the head of the IT staff,
Karl-Heinz Schneider. I was thinking a slew of staff (plural, not singular)
were raising a clarion call about this, but it's just one guy.

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creshal
"Love" affair is a bit of a misnomer. Munich forked most of their userland
software in '03 and were surprised to find out that handling so much software
maintenance on their own is a) expensive and b) leads to poor results.

IMO, LiMux was always doomed to fail, and it's a testament to the slowness of
public institutions that it took this long to realize their mistake.

If the same project was undertaken now, with the lessons learned (no goddamn
forks of entire desktop environments just because Janice in accounting wants
her buttons in a different order!) it would give _much_ better results.

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reacweb
I think I can understand some complaints about Linux because I use it as my
main desktop OS since many years, but I want to fix two points:

\- "compatibility headaches" is a problem caused by the usage of Microsoft
office. Linux has no compatibility problem with itself or with standards.

\- "apps and hardware that absolutely needed Microsoft's platform to run, and
those were destined to stay". Since 2003, these products are 14 years old. It
is hard to believe most of them could not have been renewed without this
dependency.

I think that acceptance of Microsoft office proprietary format is the main
cause of failure.

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Annatar
_Linux has no compatibility problem with itself or with standards._

Linux in general has huge compatibility problems with himself: right now I’m
building binutils because RPM from RHEL6 encodes dependencies into the SRPM
that are not backward compatible. Then there is NFS V4 as another example of
incompatibility with reference implementations. Then there is ss versus
netstat, yet another incompatibility, this time architectural. There are many,
many such examples which desktop users and developers aren’t even aware of but
system and kernel engineers and system administrators suffer on Linux daily.

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Annatar
Stunned silence ensues while reality sinks in (:-D)

Can’t wait to read n-gate’s take on this.

