> “The decision to convert (14.000 PC clients) back to Microsoft from Limux [some time] until 2020 was a purely political one. Christian Ude: “There wasn’t a single unsolvable technical problem.”
I have worked on the Limux team during university. There were a couple of problems that led to resentments:
- fossilized, underpowered computers (1G RAM!) combined with fossilized software versions (Firefox/Thunderbird/Openoffice) thanks to testing/conformity requirements. This was what drove the majority of customer complaints.
- underpowered Internet uplinks of the dozens of government offices - you would think each had a gigabit fiber uplink, which is far from reality
- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay compared to the free market
- special IT software was mostly Windows-only or, if it was available for Linux, compiled for rpm-based distros while Limux was Ubuntu-based leading to all sorts of issues
- city staff being used to MS and not to Linux, requiring extensive training
- infighting among departments of the city, not everyone was a friend of centralization in IT
Technically all of this would be solvable but the budget was too low. People, especially key deciders, blamed it on "Linux" instead on their failure to provide adequate resources. The colleagues were the best people I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics
> - lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay compared to the free market
Abso-fucking-lutely. IMO this is the main factor why most government IT in Germany is in such a disastrous state. Not just abysmal pay, but also coupled with:
a) Limited-term contracts (usually 2 years)
b) Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore
c) In the case of Limux, Munich has one of the highest costs of living in all of Germany. You earn the same amount of money for a position, no matter if you live in Munich or somewhere in the middle of nowhere with half the cost of living.
d) Since this year there's now also a requirement that a candidate must not have worked under a limited-term contract for the government before. You can imagine how that works out, when most government jobs of the last decade were mostly limited-term.
> Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore
Surely 40k EUR seems very little from an American perspective, but in Germany you cannot really expect much more than maybe 50-60K straight out of uni (as a normal, average student). 40k is surely less (I think E13 is more than 40k though), but the difference isn't that huge.
For normal users the software must "Just Work (tm)" (former "Plug&Play"). These people need devs/power-users to turn to for help, though should usually be unnecessary. The experience need to surpass alternatives, ie. better privacy, no advertisements, rapid updates, more choice, freedom, no bugs, no useless notifications and distractions.
Not sure how this aligns with most businesses and govs, though they should support companies/orgs that make this their core.
"The colleagues were the best people I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics"
So you’re confirming Microsoft’s point that Linux on the desktop provides no cost advantage? Combine that with OpenOffice’s Word 6 level UI, and it’s understandable why they went back.
He’s confirming using free software is not free. People trained to use Microsoft’s ribbon can’t use OpenOffice, just like many people trained to use older Office versions can’t use the ribbon.
I’m always surprised by the need for training to click on the “bold” or “save” button. Yet Facebook has 2.41 billion monthly users. One cause would be that people are afraid of the career implication of
clicking « save » on a document that shouldn’t be saved (the « mismanagement trauma » is how I would call that).
I know Atlassian changed it colors[1] for “cringy blue” because it made people less afraid of clicking than “serious blue”. But generally the same persons who succeed to become fashionistas on Instagram and plug it with their Google Analytics somehow and make hundreds with it, are sometimes the same who would need a training to use the Microsoft ribbon, come Monday morning.
> - what was the difference between LiMux and the Microsoft direction
Unfortunately I left Limux years before that shit happened so I cannot answer that question directly - I'll try with general politics instead. It was a political decision IMO - politicians were fed up with Limux shortcomings (which was caused mainly by their inability to provide users with decent hardware), that got combined with the decision of MS to move its Europe headquarters and thus a lot of prestige and tax money to Munich. Basically a "quid pro quo" deal, the politicians knew what was expected (getting rid of the flagship Linux government project) for this. Old government head and Limux fan Christian Ude went out to retirement, his successor Reiter... well, my opinion about that dude is beyond what is acceptable under HN guidelines. I'm happy he's at least done what he could against our local neo-nazis, but everything else... thanks but no thanks.
> - how much more would be needed to fix LiMux problems
A shitload of money. Limux was 15k desktops (for ~30k employees) IIRC, which means replacing all of them at ~1k € (new PC, monitor, mouse and keyboard - believe me, everything needed upgrades) or 15 million € alone for the hardware, plus upgrading alll the government building networks (probably 500 buildings, of which alone 300 are schools) and uplinks which will rack into three-digit million sums... and for staff, instead of the ~8 people working on Limux proper maybe 30-50 developers alone, which means another 1.5M a year at least in staffing costs.
You either pay with licensing or hire a team to support. There’s no free as in beer, anywhere. At least once you get beyond some guy’s single Linux Mint install on his personal laptop, but not at any complex scale. Active Directory, development support, these things are needed. Hiring and maintaining a competent team is most often more expensive and importantly, far more difficult to competently do than licensing. Microsoft has a complete, vertically aligned stack that they’ve spent decades building and refining, there’s a lot of value there. Ubuntu is setup to compete here, and they’re a fine choice, but you do lose some things over going with Microsoft.
99% of the desktops in my office are ubuntu. A few are centos or windows. Laptops usually come with windows so we don't remove it. Some are mac. Shared resources like email, shared storage,vpn, wifi and cluster access auth via ldap.
Most of the windows desktops belong to the admin group.
We host our own...everything..from dns to room booking. Most of it run on lxc on proxmox.
The most painful things to do here..one of them is definitely licensing.
Linuxes are easy. All you need is ssh access. Ansible can do everything afterwards. Much easier to troubleshoot.
Windows are hard. Very hard to troubleshoot. And so many ports open but still hard to remotely manage.
Like adding printers. A line in /etc/cups/client.conf will suffice for all the linux machines. I can even add that via ansible.
Windows requires installing drivers n clicking things in the gui for each printer.
Its like 100 times more effort to do the same chores...
Support? I urge you to try run your IT on Microsoft, with a support contract. Their phone support was useless, is useless, and will be useless.
I worked in BestBuy once, their IT gave up on fixing Windows and defaulted to re-imagining disks upon first issues with Win/Office despite having a support contract.
That's not the sort of support that I'm talking about. That's trivial, and those Best Buy employees are most likely just incompetent, kids off the street that enjoy computers. It's true you might get better desktop support out of a Redhat engineer (for Windows, desktop Linux, or otherwise), if you could afford to pay him. The same would apply if people had a direct line to a Microsoft engineer.
I'm talking about ensuring some script you wrote in VB6 in 1998 still works on machines in 2019. Take that scenario times 100. It's not advertised but they do fix (or break, then fix) enterprise issues better than any entity I've seen, and definitely at that scale.
In this century, cloud apps as a managed service are sufficient for some 90 pct of office workers. Chromebook/thin clients can be wiped on the hour or chucked in the trash if they break. So, 365, which is killing it. Not an MS cheerleader but this is the right play for them.
Developers are obviously different and need a curated desktop experience.
In this century, cloud apps as a managed service are sufficient for some 90 pct of office workers.
Is there data on this?
So, so, so, so many companies have random internal desktop apps, or are dependent on external ones, that I think chucking a Chromebook at 90% of office workers is a pipe dream.
Thin-clients are very much last century, mid-last century at that. They were called terminals. That's just a new buzzword because technology became fashionable for the non-technical, like calling server farms, "the cloud".
A thin-client is just a desktop that can't do much of anything under its own power. There's good reason Apple keeps advancing their A-series chips, why not stop at "thin client" (running a browser), like a Chromebook? Instead, they're near desktop Intel speeds. To answer that, it's because they want their platform to actually be able to do something on its own. AR, VR, image processing, video editing, you name it. No developer is required to own it, unlike this idea that "curated desktops", which can be around the power of an Apple A13, as somehow just aimed at developers.
Agreed on O365. Microsoft can do thin clients, and has a complete stack that integrates easily to resolve more complex demands out of the box. Just because it's the 21st century doesn't mean any of these concepts listed are new, nor is what Microsoft built in the 80's, 90's and 00's valueless. Depending on requirements it's very strongly to the contrary.
If your employee’s tasks are more typically clerical ones like data entry, working with MS Word documents, etc., then why do you want computing power capable of “AR, VR, image processing, video editing”? That sounds like something that the employee would be applying towards rich social media experiences instead, which is probably something you don’t want them doing on company time.
Aye, but that's not my point. I'm saying everything that's old is new again. No one builds a processor that's computationally limited to lock employees into data entry. It was done in the 70s and prior out of necessity. Pretty much everything that's out there from Snapdragons to RPis are Facebook-capable.
“We assume our readers are wise enough to understand that Microsoft is the same old corrupt company, with new lies and PR.”
I assume Microsoft still wants to make as much money from Windows and Office as they can but the trend has been to get users onto Azure and that’s not incompatible with Linux desktops and LibreOffice. That said, it’s possible that Microsoft Germany is doing things of which Redmond wouldn’t approve if it were fully know back at HQ. This isn’t Ballmer’s MSFT anymore.
I thought the same thing on azure but I recently stood up an environment there and found there are a lot of cool tools available that are greyed out with a message saying “not available on Linux hosts”. Maybe it’s just temporary until they add those features and Linux stuff deploys just fine, but I did feel like Linux was a second class citizen. It doesn’t help that most of the selection boxes I ran into had Windows as the default option.
It depends on the service, and a lot is the legacy of Azure actually being windows first or only for the first 5 or 6 years. I'm betting the area you were playing around in was web apps or VMs. If you look at the various container based offerings or the newer dev tools they are clearly Linux first. I'm pretty sure the new Visual Studio online offering doesn't even have a windows configuration.
I’m not sure it’s changed much on the Windows / Office side. There’s definitely a different attitude with Azure. However, it’s hard to tell if that’s a culture change or if it’s just because they are the little guy in the cloud space.
Techrights (formerly Boycott Novell) is not the place to go for that.
It is the conspiracy site that has claimed such things as Microsoft caused the Deepwater Horizon spill, Bill Gates invests in companies that cause polio in Africa, the real purpose of the Gates Foundation's work in Africa is to oppress brown people so that Africa can be recolonized by western governments, that Microsoft has significant control over the US government, the French government, the UK government, PBS, the Lancet, the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and others (possibly related to Microsoft's attendance at the Bilderberg meetings).
And that's just a few I remember from literally hundreds of such things that have been posted there in the 13 or so years its been around.
It's not all conspiracy theory stuff, but even when it covers something that is actually true it tends to mix in some of the conspiracy stuff.
Conspiracy necessarily implies violating the law. They do not typically claim lawbreaking, more usually just garden-variety underhanded dealing. Microsoft is not at all shy about engagement in the latter.
Consistent pressure in one direction over decades can have profound effects even when nothing that seems especially noteworthy is done.
The interview has practically no content. The mayor says that a leader of the ‘green’ party suddenly switched sides supporting Microsoft at every turn but states no reason why, so insinuations this was influenced by Microsoft somehow aren’t made in the interview. Then he laments about how much this probably is going to cost and what they could have done, mostly invest in better hardware and just better politics, convincing people of the value of independence and data security.
That’s maybe the reason why also the linked article almost has no content. It’s just a series of allegations and diversions into how much Microsoft sucks. There’s not even anecdotal evidence mentioned. As much as I sympathize with the view, you need to back it up. I didn’t get any value from the article, and that’s disappointing cause I’m sure there’s a real story to be told here.
I'm not sure that was the point. It's clearly stated in the article that the move back to Windows had no technical merit with regard to operations of the FOSS supplicants. The HN crowd is well aware of all of the default telemetry and "spyware" that is the current generation of desktop Windows.
Personally, it feels like the beginning of the turning of a tide. Large organizations are finally starting to wear on the idea of "subscriptions" as a default base for lock-in and data collection. "Our service runs in the cloud for your benefit!" they say. "It's a subscription that delivers customer value!" they say. None of it's true. The angle is investor value. Everyone at Microsoft size is building products for the bottom line, not the consumer. Microsoft doesn't get a pass because the article doesn't drill on point by point how Microsoft has marginalized and abused OSS since they took the first pot shots at Linux.
I still don't understand how organizations rationalize Windows as a core OS their business runs on. Primarily Microsoft environments fuel the majority of the security industry today and so it appears to be one big cyclical money laundering scheme. Microsoft continues to build on a platform that's always rife with security flaws, the Enterprise security vendors "solve" this and it's a fantastic circle of POs for everyone, including Microsoft.
While you may not have gotten "value" from the article the continued solicitation of the punches Microsoft has pulled to continually remind people of that is worth it enough to publish it. Burying what they've done and continue to do brings nobody value.
Thanks for linking. Agreed, eg.the idiom should have read "sink or swim" (not eat or die), but is the rest really that bad? Also the source article isn't too informative to begin with.
Unfortunately, that's pretty much par for the course with Schestowitz. Even where he's got some actual meat (and many of his roasts are at best thin stews, often verging on homeopathic), he trips over himself slathering on the umbrage and insinuation.
I tend to believe what he's insinuating here, that Microsoft prioritises desktop licenses well above any apparances of playing nice with Linux (Azure may be a market, but that's virtually (hah!) all servers). But Schestowitz can't get out of his own way to tell the story.
Going straight to the source is generally recommended in any case. All the more so in this instance.
I have worked on the Limux team during university. There were a couple of problems that led to resentments:
- fossilized, underpowered computers (1G RAM!) combined with fossilized software versions (Firefox/Thunderbird/Openoffice) thanks to testing/conformity requirements. This was what drove the majority of customer complaints.
- underpowered Internet uplinks of the dozens of government offices - you would think each had a gigabit fiber uplink, which is far from reality
- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay compared to the free market
- special IT software was mostly Windows-only or, if it was available for Linux, compiled for rpm-based distros while Limux was Ubuntu-based leading to all sorts of issues
- city staff being used to MS and not to Linux, requiring extensive training
- infighting among departments of the city, not everyone was a friend of centralization in IT
Technically all of this would be solvable but the budget was too low. People, especially key deciders, blamed it on "Linux" instead on their failure to provide adequate resources. The colleagues were the best people I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics