
Another German regional government is switching from Linux to Windows - XzetaU8
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3036673/another-german-regional-government-is-switching-from-linux-to-microsoft-windows
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reacharavindh
It always hits the nerve to hear that a public organization is moving back to
MS from FOSS, but I wish this kind of demand(from governments) would lead to a
open company that is strictly focused on developing an alternative to Windows
desktop. Linux is heavily pulled in the server direction, and we need a
company other than RedHAt who can pull Linux ecosystem a bit together to build
an opinionated but coherent desktop.

Trying to support all of the email clients, calendar tools and obscure media
decoders will never lead us to an usable Linux based Desktop.

~~~
nisa
If you consider that every municipality in EU (or world) has similiar problems
and the costs for running Microsoft and other commercial software is quite
high everywhere I really don't know why the EU doesn't start some public
company or organisation and polish the existing open-source tools.

It's probably considered anti-competitive but let's image they scrap 1 billion
of their budgets and invest in opensource:

\- polish Samba to be a viable Windows Server replacement. Replication,
missing Kerberos functionality, Implement ADWS, ADFS - maybe Exchange APIs.
Save millions on server costs.

\- unfuck LibreOffice, develop a strong foundation to implement typical
processes

\- polish KDE / Plasma to macOS/Windows usability/stability \- rewrite
kmail/korganizer with modern usability/ui

Not sure if that's possible but it feels like a lot of things are 60-80% done
- maybe taking a leap and fixing the other 60-80% might make a difference.

\- have an EU wide service agency that supports municipalities in implementing
OSS

\- demand opensource software for public money.

\- create strong open standards and enforce them by law for public
institutions.

maybe it will take 5 to 10 years but everyone should profit.

~~~
zimbatm
It's an unsubstantiated claim but my impression is that governments are not
good at managing companies.

Who gets to decide if it's better to use LibreOffice or OpenOffice? What are
the features that are the most important for the office replacement? How is it
going to be supported? Is there a line where people can call to complain about
the product? Taking all that OSS and packaging it sounds a lot like running a
company, especially when multiple "consumers" are involved.

~~~
nisa
Good questions. Maybe something like a cooperative¹ that is independed of the
states? Such a project could probably even be refinanced by users who pay for
consulting.

How to organize this in such a way that it will be successfull and efficient?
Let's start researching it now.

It's such a shame how European universities and every other part of the state
is switching to Microsoft because the on-premise alternatives mostly suck.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)

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peatmoss
I feel like there are two models for desktop computing—one that is very hard
to accommodate for a traditional enterprise, and another where Linux is very
well suited.

If one is looking for a managed solution with heavyweight apps including an
office suite, email / calendar, etc., then anything other than Windows is
going to be unsatisfactory to people who expect Windows. I even include macOS
with Linux in that assessment. Let's call this model of centralized control of
fat clients the culmination of the 1990s enterprise desktop.

On the other hand, if a company has gone down the road of Google / web apps
for everything, then Linux starts to be a very effective bootloader for a web
browser.

Personally, I like the fat-client model of the 1990s, and feel that Linux best
satisfies my desires. But it's hard to deny the comprehensiveness of Windows &
Active Directory for those enterprises that also want to stick to this model.

The web-only model feels a little too lean to me. In any enterprise, there are
bound to be instances where web apps aren't going to cut it.

This is where I have hopes for Chrome OS once it begins to support native
Linux apps. At that point, it's not a thin client, and it's not a fat client.
I wonder then if we may see some of these enterprises walk back from Windows.

~~~
frockington
I think we are a long way from anyone walking back from Windows. It will be an
uphill battle for Google due to the lack of privacy awareness (I'm not saying
Microsoft is better or worse, just that Google is not looked upon kindly in
the privacy regard)

~~~
peatmoss
Perhaps. But I also think that, of the people who are sticking to the
heavyweight fat-client model of computing, some are doing so for technical
reasons and others are doing so for principled reasons. If Google's softening
on the "everything must be a web app" removes the technical barriers, I could
imagine an expansion of Chrome OS.

As a paying FastMail customer, I'm right there with you on Google's privacy
posture. But given the number of corporate G-Suite customers, I don't think
principled rejection of Google over privacy concerns is the major impediment
to Chrome OS adoption.

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yoz-y
I was under the impression that most of the administrative work was now done
in a browser anyways. I wonder what exactly they get by switching to windows,
better fleet management tools maybe?

~~~
mikejb
I think the assumption is incorrect. The Microsoft Office suite is used a lot,
IIUC

~~~
glitchc
Concur. The office suite and surrounding ecosystem (Exchange, Sharepoint) are
king in enterprise environments. The latest versions run poorly or not at all
on anything other than Windows.

~~~
behringer
But the linux alternative for those tools are exceptionally decent and free.

~~~
booleandilemma
What’s a better Linux alternative than Outlook? I’ve tried Thunderbird and I’m
not impressed.

I’ve noticed that a lot of Linux users equate “free” (as in price) with
“better”, and this isn’t necessarily so.

~~~
thom
Kontact was KDE's attempt at integrating its productivity stuff into one app,
I liked it for a while when I lived in email+calendar world, but I don't think
it speaks Exchange if that's what you mean.

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rehemiau
Linux Foundation needs to run a hardware support testing program for desktop
linux to be successful. In a situation where hardware manufacturers don't
support linux and there's no regression testing for community developed
drivers, it will never be successful.

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jagermo
In my opinion, Munich's Linux project could have been saved if they invested a
little in the UI part. It was horrible out of date, a pain to use and looked
like something out of a 90's geocities web page.

The work flows were slow and had too many unnecessary clicks.

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LiterallyDoge
If Linux (or somebody) would focus on the UI and stability in a the non-
perfect world of the dumb tweaks I do to change the gem color on my flux
capacitors, I think it would be viable, but right now, Linux feels like owning
a fish tank, and I can't do business on a fish tank, even though I really want
to.

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baybal2
They will heavily regret this decision.

If MS was offering them "cheap N years contract," than it is already decided
that they will jack up prices the second their contract expires.

~~~
teget
> They will heavily regret this decision.

Unlikely. Yes, this is a political decision as most actual users of the
systems were ok with the linux client. However, the article is a bit
misleading. They are bringing the systems used by a subdepartment of the
states department of finance in line with the stack used within the remainder
of the department (about 1/3 were linux clients, the state already owns over
50.000 other windows clients (lower estimate, most likely more if you include
organization which manage their own infrastructure (like universities)), they
know what to expect from microsoft). While the systems worked it always
required special attention when interoperating with other states (for example:
certain informationrequests by other states are standardized between all
states (based on a shared windows solution). Lower saxonian employees could
not interact with it directly and had to rely on their inhouse solution
instead of reusing the existing and proven solution used by all other states).
There are notable costs associated to beeing a special flower while maintining
conformance to financial regulations.

Yes, I believe that biting the bullet and migrating more departments to open
systems would be the better longterm solution (which would also force vendors
to port their solutions). But there will be several elections before that pays
off and would require a significant investment before the benefits show (and
possible coordination between the states) and in the midterm moving to Windows
might be the better option. Moving to linux doesn't win an election, but
failing to move to linux might loose you one.

However, even after the move about 1/4 to 1/3 of the computers/servers owned
by the state will run linux/bsd (iirc).

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AdmiralAsshat
> This time it's all about the roving staff, who aren't using OpenSUSE and
> didn't use Solaris before it. They've always been Windows users and it seems
> that officials feel it might be time for a bit of consistency.

So my takeaway is that someone at the top was pissed off that he had to use an
e-mail client other than Outlook and made a multi-million dollar
infrastructure decision based on that.

~~~
swarnie_
I've worked on a number of large rollout projects where multiple vendors have
been considered.

When you tell a CEO/CFO/CIO that you can bundle OS, updates, productivity
tools, communication/colab tools all in to one monthly bill they almost always
take the MS route. The predictability of the financing is the key thing
helping MS kill it in enterprise.

It also helps that 90% of their staff have never known anything else and will
need very little training.

~~~
moviuro
> very little training

That's the worst assuption ever. Not because everyone uses tool X, everyone
understands how to make it work properly. Did you _ever_ try to move a picture
from a document you got from M. Johnson? You'll get a headache because moving
that one picture will fuck up your title formatting in page 13 and the table
in page 2.

Everyone using MS Office I met could use a good week-long training session
about do's and don't's, how to write proper documents, presentations that
don't suck, etc.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Well, the users usually _think_ they don't need training, and isn't that all
that counts?

