
Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows - lsh123
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/linux-pioneer-munich-poised-to-ditch-open-source-and-return-to-windows/
======
Merem
Hm..

"At the time the report was released, the FSFE questioned why Accenture was
commissioned to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software,
when the consultancy runs a joint venture with Microsoft called Avanade, which
helps businesses implement Microsoft technologies. For its part, Accenture
said it has an "independent view of the technology landscape".

"At the time Munich began the move to LiMux in 2004 it was one of the largest
organizations to reject Windows, and Microsoft took the city's leaving so
seriously that then CEO Steve Ballmer flew to Munich to meet the mayor. More
recently, Microsoft last year moved its German company headquarters to
Munich."

Everything else that is written there points towards it making no sense to
switch back to Windows.

~~~
frik
Lot's of comments (1600) on Heise: [https://www.heise.de/forum/heise-
online/News-Kommentare/Von-...](https://www.heise.de/forum/heise-online/News-
Kommentare/Von-Linux-zurueck-zu-Microsoft-Schwarz-Rot-in-Muenchen-will-LiMux-
rauswerfen/forum-374068/comment/)

Several comments mention "läuft wie geschmiert" which can be translated as
mobbed-up / bribed.

~~~
zeeZ
While someone being "geschmiert" does mean they were bribed, "läuft wie
geschmiert" translates to things running smoothly (like a well-oiled machine).

~~~
frik
If you know German, it's the double meaning of the word, it's sarcasm. If you
just look at the Duden dictionary, your findings are technically true.

~~~
squarefoot
Must be an international thing. In my country as well the act of "oiling
gears" means giving bribes in order to obtain something and/or speed up the
process by having your papers put on top of the pile.

------
lucb1e
I was afraid this would happen when I saw they made a custom distro called
LiMux. Maybe it was good in the beginning, though I doubt it given the reports
I heard, but by now it must be horribly outdated. (Going to the "project site"
as linked by wikipedia, I just get a blank page.)

Additionally, almost no workers will be using anything other than Windows or
OS X at home. Having to find explorer or the "add column" button in
libreoffice will be annoying at first, so users probably need more help to get
started.

It's a sad state of popular systems remaining popular... Personally I use
Linux both for ideological and practical reasons, and I recommend it to other
power users and computer-related professionals (software or security people),
but for users... until there are real advantages, I'm not sure I should
recommend it for fear of them going "everything is wrong" when really it's
functionally equivalent and they just have to re-learn where stuff is (the
cost of change..).

There are exceptions, old computers mainly, but generally I recommend users
stick with what they want in the desktop space. I'll just keep making remarks
about privacy and modifying scripts in my OS to change whatever I want. If
that doesn't trigger anything, they don't want to anyway.

~~~
buovjaga
I don't know what's up with the project page being gone, but the distro is not
outdated. They are working on a version with KDE Plasma 5.

Maybe some people don't realize, how much they have contributed upstream. For
the past couple of years I have worked with them as a volunteer in
LibreOffice. They regularly host hackfests for Debian & LibreOffice.

There are certain parts of LibreOffice like the KDE UI backend and mail merge
that they practically maintain by themselves. Recently they posted three job
openings for full-time LibreOffice developers. They already have several
inhouse + contractors (for LibO alone).

~~~
wiz21c
I think they should report extensively on that to fight against the Accenture
report. Not that the report is wrong, but if we want to switch to Linux
everywhere, we'll have to fight on other grounds that practicality,
robustness,etc.

Could you ask these people to explain why they think investing in LibreOffice
is worth it (and well, just remain silent if their experience is bad :-))

~~~
buovjaga
I heard the IT crew was left out of all hearings regarding this new proposal.
So it's just "la la la cannot hear you" -level professionalism on the part of
the council members.

------
jernfrost
Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using
Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows?

It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer
illiterate parents over to Linux previously.

To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great
advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing with
anti-virus software, clicking links they shouldn't, malware etc.

If I were to speculate a key problem is that so many people treat MS Word as
the standard format for exchanging written documents. Computer illiterate
people very frequently send emails with their main info written in MS Word.
They seem to have no idea that you can format your emails from a regular email
client.

Or how many people bundle images by pasting them into powerpoint rather than
just zipping them?

It would be interesting to know whether these are the sort of problems causing
a desire for a switch back to Windows or whether there are real legitimate
reasons.

~~~
barrkel
I have never had a good experience docking Linux laptops to a dock with
multiple monitors attached. The behaviour changes from only lighting up one
monitor to hard lockups on docking or suspending or something else, depending
on kernel version and whim.

Randomly the keyboard attached to the dock doesn't initialize and I need to
unplug and replug.

Unreliable docking is IMO an excellent reason not to use Linux on laptops. And
most people use laptops these days because of work from home optionality.

This is with a mix of Dell and Lenovo laptops with Intel display chipsets,
fwiw.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
To be fare it's pretty rubbish on Windows as well, in particular if you have
different resolutions on each screen. I have to reboot at least twice to get
everything working.

~~~
Macha
Also have issues booting up my mbp with multiple displays attached. Usually
have to unplug or replug them about 1 in 3 bootups because it's decided to use
the wrong resolution or not use one of the monitors.

Also whoever's decision it was that if you drop the right 10px at the left
edge of the screen, it should only show those 10px and not overlap onto the
neighbouring screen by default obviously does not use double monitors.

------
jimnotgym
I am deeply suspicious of the motives here...

Yes I'm sure people moan about IT. They moan about Windows where I work. They
probably moaned about the quality of the quills 100 years ago.

Libre office is perfectly capable for most users, and is very compatible with
MS Office. It is easy for users to transition too.

I doubt any of this has anything to do with any of those points.

~~~
mistermann
Microsoft Office is better, for not very much more $ per desktop.

~~~
jimnotgym
Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple
lists in Excel.

I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than
calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big
news for a developer.

365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you
have thousands of users

~~~
jasonlotito
> Better at what?

Style support for documents. LibreOffice doesn't have complete style support.
This is the one thing right now keeping me from even considering it.

~~~
kiwijamo
What is it missing? Styles is something I think OO/LO do reasonably well
already, and have done so since the StarOffice days. I am specifically talking
about paragraph styles so I wonder if there is some other type of styles OO/LO
is indeed missing.

------
jpliska
I wish some good designers would lend LibreOffice a hand. Even without
reworking UX they could win over more users by being less ugly (compare MS
Office start page)

------
massysett
I'm surprised the elected officials are so involved in deciding what desktop
software is in use. I'm not sure whether to be impressed that they are this
deep into details, or skeptical that politicians rather than professionals are
making these decisions. Both I guess. I just can't imagine the council in any
US jurisdiction meddling in what desktop OS is chosen throughout the
jurisdiction.

~~~
CaptSpify
I would imagine that the cost difference is enough to get their attention

~~~
Sylos
Reportedly, they haven't even looked at the costs of moving back to Windows
yet, nor is there any indication of this actually saving money in the long
run.

------
BrailleHunting
Note the report on which the recommendation was based was authored by a
derivative of the Big5 firm which helped Enron. (Arthur Anderson -> Accenture)
Technology consultants inventing expensive "customer need" projects is nothing
new.

~~~
lallysingh
Let's hit the real point. When MS moved it's headquarters there, they hired a
whole bunch of Munich voters.

~~~
pas
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627525)

------
massysett
They suggest that virtual desktops make the client OS irrelevant. My employer
(US government agency) went to completely virtual desktops and I was surprised
they stuck with Windows 7 for the client laptops. Seemed a perfect place to
put Red Hat or some other Linux. I wondered if Windows is priced so there is
no advantage to using anything else, or if even dumb clients still need enough
management that they would rather use a familiar OS.

~~~
Sanddancer
Windows is pretty inexpensive, and if you want something supported for more
than a year or two, the options do tend to be somewhat costly. RedHat, for
example, is $50/year for the equivalent of Windows Update. There are also a
number of other advantages for windows in terms of things like remote
management which RedHat doesn't have equivalents for.

~~~
ageofwant
Redhat has a vast array of remote management tools: Asible, puppet, cobbler,
ssh etc. Most all of them are superior to Microsoft's offerings. It would make
perfect sense to have a Linux host on machines if most applications are web
based.

~~~
tracker1
But then _you_ have to maintain ansible/puppet etc scripts to keep things in
order... and when one machine doesn't work right, _you_ have to figure it all
out, often searching through stack exchange sites/answers... let alone getting
answers for other distros, or even other versions of your distro than no
longer apply.

That doesn't even consider hardware variations and compatibility issues with
drivers.

~~~
yellowapple
You'd have to maintain Active Directory / Group Policy /etc. settings under
Windows anyway. It ain't like Windows automagically sets you up with a perfect
management solution for your organization. When one Windows machine doesn't
work right, you're still often the one searching through Stack Exchange,
Microsoft's support forums, etc. If you're going with something popular in the
enterprise like RHEL or SUSE, you're pretty much on equal footing when it
comes to support availability and troubleshooting (if not in a much better
situation due to the easier time - IMO - in actually
creating/maintaining/deploying system configurations).

Driver issues are indeed significant, however. It's a _lot_ better than it was
when I first started using Linux, but printing and scanning is still a major
pain point. Enterprise environments have a much easier time here than home
users due to being able to constrain driver problems to a select few
print/scan servers running CUPS/SANE instead of having to deal with this on a
workstation-by-workstation basis, but it's still far from ideal, and very few
businesses are truly "paperless".

~~~
massysett
These desktops are completely virtual; printing is through the virtual desktop
to a network printer. They don't even let us hook USB flash drives to the
client. So driver issues would be minimized here, which seemed to me to be all
the more reason to go with Linux here.

------
gigatexal
Don't be surprised if Microsoft made the windows licenses free or nearly so so
that they could sell them office 365 licenses.

~~~
tracker1
I'm half surprised they didn't try switching to o365 for their users, while
keeping the linux desktop distro, and allowing for exceptions for specific use
cases.

~~~
luca_ing
They require lots of very specific applications. From what one hears (Munich
native here), many of them are pretty bad.

Now, being bespoke apps, they'd probably just as horrible if they if they were
Windows apps, but it just gets rolled into the Linux blame.

------
shmerl
So, no real reason? Or may be MS paid someone in charge? It doesn't make any
sense really.

~~~
microcolonel
Funnily enough, after 2004, MS moved their German HQ to Münich.

~~~
sveme
Indeed, they moved five kilometers from Unterschleißheim, a Munich suburb, to
the city itself.

~~~
welterde
Actually it's 12km. But that's beside the point. Unterschleißheim is not part
of Munich itself, so in regards to the corporate tax it does make a difference
to both cities where it is paid (and we are talking about millions of euros
here).

------
TazeTSchnitzel
The mention of “Windows Basic Client” jumps out to me. Is that a reference to
the thin client version of Windows? If so, what's the point of switching away
from Linux?

------
throwaway2048
this "news" keeps being reposted every few years, and it hasn't been correct
yet.

~~~
sgift
There's a real chance that it will happen this time as there's no a
'supporting' consultation by Accenture that says going back to Windows would
be a good idea (see another sub-thread for the quality of an Accenture
consultation).

As if my tax money couldn't be spend on something more useful.

~~~
buovjaga
The Accenture study is not saying that. The LiMux folks were quite happy with
the study. Here it is, 10MB PDF with 450 pages: [https://www.ris-
muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...](https://www.ris-
muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277724.pdf)

------
alistproducer2
I'd love to see the financials that justify the move.

------
ksk
It's sad that we won't actually get a list of problems that devs can tackle.
Even so, I can entertain the thought of there being no ulterior motives, and
that maybe Linux isn't actually an OS that everyone likes or wants to use.

~~~
pas
Most of the problems are .. well, systemic, not much the devs can really
tackle:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452)

