Posted on 11/13/2017 6:18:16 AM PST by dayglored
Never go full Windows
Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.
A coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives on the committee voted (PDF, in Deutsche, natürlich) for the Windows migration on Wednesday, Social Democrat councillor Anne Hübner told The Register.
Munich rose to fame in the open-source world for deciding to use Linux and LibreOffice to make the city independent from the claws of Microsoft. But the plan was never fully realised – mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange – and in February the city council formally voted to end Linux migration and go back to Microsoft.
Hübner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said.
She estimated that about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds".
She said "in the past 15 years, much of our efforts were put into becoming independent from Microsoft," including spending "a lot of money looking for workarounds" but "those efforts eventually failed."
A full council vote on Windows 10 2020 migration is set for November 23, Hübner said. However, the Social Democrats and Conservatives have a majority in the council, and the outcome is expected to be the same as in committee.
She said the cost of the migration will not be made public until November 23, but today about 40 per cent of 30,000 users already have Windows machines.
CSU party council member Kristina Frank told The Reg: "Munich had huge difficulties in communicating with other authorities, communities and other externals.
"As everything needed to be developed by ourselves, the city's IT was 10 to 15 years behind market standard. The City of Munich is not an IT developer, but has other major concerns to deal with."
Hübner said "no final decision has yet been made" on whether LibreOffice will be swapped out for Microsoft Office. "That will be decided at the end of next year when the full cost of such a move will be known."
Peter Ganten, CEO of Univention in Bremen and a member of the Open Source Business Alliance, told El Reg: "The council of the city of Munich has just executed a decision which they have made long before."
Not all agree that it is a good decision.
Ganten said "of course nobody in the open-source community is happy that this decision has been made" and the city will spend "decades of man power" and "millions of euros" on migration (as it did with the LiMux project) while client OSes "becomes more and more unimportant and other organisations are wisely spending their money for platform neutral applications."
Matthias Kirschner, president of Free Software Foundation Europe in Berlin, said "there were never any studies" pinpointing what people were "unhappy" about. It might have been the LiMux client itself, or perhaps the migration process or lack of support.
He said he was also not aware of a comparison of the unhappiness of staffers in cities using Windows.
A report (PDF) by Microsoft partner Accenture commissioned by Munich found the most important issues were organisational.
Kirschner also described splitting the LibreOffice move as "strange" if the parties are concerned about interoperability. He said Microsoft Office will be "very, very expensive" so it's possible the coalition wanted to split up the costs, although he doesn't know for sure.
Next year, he said civil servants would require more training and could delay citizens receiving help – the move "is a cause for failure".
Kirschner said the Windows in Munich project will "paralyze the city administration for years" and civil servants and citizens will "suffer."
Florian Roth, of the Green Party, told The Reg: "Our Green Party are against this decision in favour of a mix of Linux and Windows. This is more secure and less expensive."
We contacted the city's press division, the mayor's office and the current head of Munich's IT department for comment on the migration vote.
An Italy-based spokesman for the Document Foundation, which is in charge of LibreOffice, attributed the decision to politics. "IT issues are normal regardless of operating system," he said. "When it's political, technology cannot do anything." ®
Does Windows even do containers? Can Windows run from removable devices? Linux is way more advanced in cloud technology (in fact, it runs most--if not all--clouds). How many Windows machines are in the Top500 list? How many are Linux?
If you want to throw around qualifications, then I've been involved with computers and IT for just a tad over 40 years myself. I have the degrees, experience, and RHCE to prove it. Those don't matter as much, though. What matters is that you throw around comments like "Going forward, Limux and many Linux distros, would have been left incompatible with the cloud way of doing things" and expect that people would just accept it, when the facts are obviously exactly the reverse of what you just said.
Windows bloats, and bloats, and bloats.
she doesn’t need to
“Windows bloats, and bloats, and bloats.”
And that’s bad just ipse dixit?
make a valid argument, other than “Windows is big”
There is a good reason Windows has kicked your oh-so-superior and smug Linux’s ass since forever.
Which is why you need to compare apples to apples. Comparing using Windows versus installing an OS (doesn’t matter which one) is worse than stupid.
Only on the desktop--everywhere else, Linux is kicking Windows off to the curb.
Yeah, windows bloats, and bloats, and bloats.
We’ve all heard that for more than 30 years, and yet, it’s still the go-to OS, for just about everything businesses and people do. Bloat does not matter, as long as things get faster and smarter and more thorough. Bloat is the dumb charge of the past.
Considering that Linux actually powers AWS and Google cloud, this statement makes no sense. It it pretty well follows that the rest of your argument falls flat.
OS bigots are very boring. I use what I need, when I need it, and at my choice. The best one is chosen for the individual job. Shoot, I don't even need an OS for the best things I do.
Yeah, run Windows in 32K bytes and get something done. I can just dump the OS and still get the best of things done with flair. Of course, I’m a “bare metal man”.
Bloat is the dumbness of the future. Who the hell needs to see what is inside his refrigerator on his phone? Just people who don’t have a real life.
I have 32K processors communicating by cell modules to a couple of cloud servers. One is Linux, the other is Windows. I am using homemade protocols and popular IOT protocols, depending on the application and customer preference. The cold hard truth is, I love the whole pile of crap end-to-end.
I do, however, enjoy being the devil's advocate. There is a demon within me that cries to get out as often as possible. ;-D
See? I knew I could find a reasonable and understanding person in the room.
I don’t care what people use, as long as it serves their needs and doesn’t become burdensome with high costs or complex/complicated handling.
Munich had problems in all directions, mostly stemming from an IT department which made their initial decisions by hating on Microsoft and loving Linux(which is always popular to do).
What is the name of that rock you're living under?
Linux has been designed client/server for about 99% if it's existence. IOW--it's always been client/server. I don't know where you've spent your 40 years of IT experience, but obviously it hasn't been around Linux. Give it up since you do not know what you are talking about.
Being the OS behind a lot of remote servers, is not the same as being the OS behind cloud services.
Do you read what you type? Services run on top of an OS. That OS is what runs the service. Linux runs the cloud. Do you even know what the cloud is? It's remote servers. That's all it is. It's not a difficult concept to grasp. Since Linux runs on those remote servers, Linux runs the cloud services mentioned (AWS and Google).
Windows does a fine job on the desktop. It's a nice little toy and collection of utilities. It's those utilities that most people mistake for an OS, and become addicted to. I use it on one of my monitors while the other two are dedicated to my Linux OS where my important work gets done.
IF that was why they made the initial decision, then it was the wrong decision. Software is a tool. Use the tool that gets the job done.
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