Munich Council: To Hell with Linux, We’re Going Full Windows in 2020

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Staff member
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
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 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.
 
Add Munich to the growing list of cities who thought they were escaping the devil called Microsoft for the open-source waters of Linux only to revert at some point during the journey. Wonder if anyone there is yelling (in German of course) "This is the year of the Linux [desktop]!" o_O
 
I know how they feel. I usually install some flavor of Linux about twice to thrice a year in order to tinker around (which I've done since the Mandrake 7 days from 17/18 years ago), and it all comes back to the same conclusion: there are some differing serious limitations and bugs (varies depending on the distro) that still crop up, and I wind up going right back to Windows. Just installed Kubuntu 17.10 on my older laptop a few days ago, and it's still buggy with the software center crashing during the installation of whatever selected programs/games I pick. Tried to get Linux Mint 18.2 installed, but it won't boot from the HDD after installing (laptop thinks there's no OS installed, despite other distros seeing it and asking if I want to reclaim all HDD space or install alongside Linux Mint). This is with a full UEFI install, BTW...which Fedora 26 and Kubuntu 17 install and boot with, but Mint 18 just won't for some reason.

..I can only image the nightmare in a large corporate/government environment.
 
I love linux, I really really do. But it's just not great for desktop use for anyone who isn't a in dev or IT.

Disagree. Have my parents and other friends/family on easy versions of linux (mint, ubuntu, etc) and they are perfectly content with desktop use. Most things are all browser now anyway (google suite, youtube, etc) and all "personal" stuff happens on smartphones, so I've had relatively little complaints about the desktop. Sure, initial setup is a bit of a pain, but I assume their IT would do that too. After that, it pretty much runs itself. As long as hardware doesn't change and network doesn't change too much, there's no real headache.
 
Disagree. Have my parents and other friends/family on easy versions of linux (mint, ubuntu, etc) and they are perfectly content with desktop use. Most things are all browser now anyway (google suite, youtube, etc) and all "personal" stuff happens on smartphones, so I've had relatively little complaints about the desktop. Sure, initial setup is a bit of a pain, but I assume their IT would do that too. After that, it pretty much runs itself. As long as hardware doesn't change and network doesn't change too much, there's no real headache.

I have personally used linux for all my desktops/laptops/etc for many years. Linux mint/Ubuntu are ridiculously easy to use compared to most distros in the fast (I though I mostly use arch). Even still, it sounds like your parents are the exception; while most people could use linux if they wanted to put in the time, most people are still just technologically illiterate. Even if most things can be done via browser, you have to have competent sys admins to set things up, and then you are limited to the exact applications you can use. While open source projects can do alot; governments especially will often have old, antiquated software stacks they need to make run, inhouse-applications, and quite honestly lots of random shit that just doesn't make sense. So while linux might work in an ideal environment, I just don't see most corporations or governments getting there.
 
Why'd you post a picture of Polish girls about a German city? Do they all look the same to you?
 
I wonder if this has anything to do with this:

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-headquarters/

And of course, money exchanging hands and stuff.

But anyways, its done.
Microsoft moves a single facility to a small building (the ENTIRE thing fits in a picture where you can see in the windows) and you think Munich uprooted their entire IT because of it.

It's seven floors. Not seventy. Any moderately-sized German town could fill seven floors of office building in moments.
 
There's corruption in play 100% sure. For example why on earth would they use costly Exchange servers when a free, simple and working open source alternatives are available. Someone was either too inept to work without Microsoft or payolas were paid. Probably both.
 
Microsoft moves a single facility to a small building (the ENTIRE thing fits in a picture where you can see in the windows) and you think Munich uprooted their entire IT because of it.

It's seven floors. Not seventy. Any moderately-sized German town could fill seven floors of office building in moments.
And when the hell did I said all that crap that you claim i posted?

And you really think that MS wasnt pissed the PR slap in the face they got when this move happened 10 years ago?

You really think they would just let it pass?

You are really naive.
 
It's amazing how many of you want to bash Linux and don't even bother reading the article. They failed to leave MS because they never should have tried to begin with.

This was not a failure on the part of Linux and open source. This was a failure on their part plain and simple. They were idiots.

Right from the article:

She estimated 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".

So roughly 400 programs couldn't run on Linux and yet they still fucking tried? Pure stupidity. The bean counters only saw possible savings and their IT staff were run by morons.
 
There's corruption in play 100% sure. For example why on earth would they use costly Exchange servers when a free, simple and working open source alternatives are available. Someone was either too inept to work without Microsoft or payolas were paid. Probably both.
You find me a free Linux based email system that has proper integration what ever passes for Linux's alternatives to Active Directory, and SharePoint, that senselessly integrates with the Office Suite and file shares, that also then ties into secure wireless systems and networking systems for proper VLAN integration and firewall access.

When you start getting into the thick of it and you have a lot of complex systems all needing to integrate there are very few Open Source alternatives to the Microsoft lineup out there and none of them are particularly well polished.
 
For my personal use, I always felt the pain of dealing with Windows was less than the pain of migrating to Linux. But since Windows 8/10 came out, I have changed my mind. When I retire my current Windows 7 system, I'm moving to Linux. I'm experimenting with Ubuntu on an old laptop right now, and so far it's going pretty well. Good riddance Microsoft.
 
Add Munich to the growing list of cities who thought they were escaping the devil called Microsoft for the open-source waters of Linux only to revert at some point during the journey. Wonder if anyone there is yelling (in German of course) "This is the year of the Linux [desktop]!" o_O

There's quite a few of them popping up in this thread.
 
I absolutely LOVE to tinker around in Linux. I've compiled a lot of emulators, game source-ports, set up servers, networks, etc. in my house. However, there is no way I would want my work to switch over, and try to use it in a serious fortune-100 capacity. I mean, it could be done, but it would be a nightmare. We'd have to re-staff quite a bit of IT, workers do not like to learn new tools either, no matter how small the differences. That includes office applications, production applications, development environments, etc. Now, if the entire company was brought up on Linux from day one, that might work. There are plenty of companies out there that run just fine. Large corporations or government offices though... Switching from one to the other would be horrific.
 
There's corruption in play 100% sure. For example why on earth would they use costly Exchange servers when a free, simple and working open source alternatives are available. Someone was either too inept to work without Microsoft or payolas were paid. Probably both.

You find me a free Linux based email system that has proper integration what ever passes for Linux's alternatives to Active Directory, and SharePoint, that senselessly integrates with the Office Suite and file shares, that also then ties into secure wireless systems and networking systems for proper VLAN integration and firewall access.

When you start getting into the thick of it and you have a lot of complex systems all needing to integrate there are very few Open Source alternatives to the Microsoft lineup out there and none of them are particularly well polished.

Beat me to it. Anyone who thinks exchange can be easily replaced clearly has never run more than a very simple setup. Also libre office sucks compared to office.
 
You find me a free Linux based email system that has proper integration what ever passes for Linux's alternatives to Active Directory, and SharePoint, that senselessly integrates with the Office Suite and file shares, that also then ties into secure wireless systems and networking systems for proper VLAN integration and firewall access.

When you start getting into the thick of it and you have a lot of complex systems all needing to integrate there are very few Open Source alternatives to the Microsoft lineup out there and none of them are particularly well polished.

Active Directory is just LDAP and you can use Samba if you want the file shares. Postfix for SMTP, Dovecot for IMAP, whatever you like. The only thing lacking is the integrated calendar which is 90% of what businesses want when they go Outlook/Exchange. LibreOffice for most tasks, but not the outliers that are useful like Project or Visio. Those wireless VLANs and firewalls that you clearly lack experience with work fine on Linux; those standards were developed in a POSIX world after all. Whether it's worth the TCO is the real question and right now it only fits SMBs; for Enterprise scale you want a vendor to yell at and your Microsoft VAR is it.
 
You find me a free Linux based email system that has proper integration what ever passes for Linux's alternatives to Active Directory, and SharePoint, that senselessly integrates with the Office Suite and file shares, that also then ties into secure wireless systems and networking systems for proper VLAN integration and firewall access.

When you start getting into the thick of it and you have a lot of complex systems all needing to integrate there are very few Open Source alternatives to the Microsoft lineup out there and none of them are particularly well polished.
Open source does not mean free. However, there are TONS of polished mail servers. Here's a full list:

There are alternatives for SharePoint tons of them actually. Samba has been integrating with Active Directory for decades. In terms of wireless systems and networking systems, VLAN Integration, and especially firewall, what do you think those systems run? They run Linux or Unix. Again people have been integrating with this stuff for years.

What the real problem is that hybrid environments can pose significant barriers to the two different paradigms and poor planning makes it a bitch to do. But can it be done? Um yeah. It's really not that hard anymore. Especially with Google in the mix as well.
 
We used to drink tons of beer when I worked there. (men and women) Release parties especially. I don't really miss it though. I'd rather have a spot of whiskey after work than beer at work.
 
When you need Excel, you need Excel. Libre Apache Office (whatever it is called now) or "Sheets" just doesn't cut it. It's really the only thing Microsoft has going for it.

Fragmentation certainly doesn't help at all.
 
...So roughly 400 programs couldn't run on Linux and yet they still fucking tried? Pure stupidity. The bean counters only saw possible savings and their IT staff were run by morons.

I'm a big supporter of GNU/Linux, but I agree that they were not cut out for the migration. Their major complaints from a few years ago was mail server compatibility. That's the worst excuse ever and a clear indication of "not even trying" considering how simple to configure and powerful the open source alternatives are. If the complaints are "I want my Microsoft-specific fluff feature", then buy it. And for the 200 other apps ;) it isn't difficult to rapidly replace custom administrative tools using common libraries and back-ends. It does take some time, but fuck, they had like 5 years. What have they been doing? Moaning?
 
When you need Excel, you need Excel. Libre Apache Office (whatever it is called now) or "Sheets" just doesn't cut it. It's really the only thing Microsoft has going for it.

Fragmentation certainly doesn't help at all.

Of course, that's an issue with Excel, not any office suite alternative. MS Office, the least compatible with international ISO standards office suite marketed as the most compatible office suite.

The power of the MS marketing team, as evidenced by Germany's switch back to MS products....
 
Of course, that's an issue with Excel, not any office suite alternative. MS Office, the least compatible with international ISO standards office suite marketed as the most compatible office suite.

The power of the MS marketing team, as evidenced by Germany's switch back to MS products....

Let the power of BOB compel you!

BOB.jpg
 
Windows is by far easier to manage, update, and control than linux when it comes to your low level help desk and support. Windows is used in schools, is familiar in homes, and people know how to work around and through that. Couple that with MS giving away Office for free to students it's a no brainer people open up Libre/Open Office and go "WTF is this garbage?" and the smallest issues compound into larger issues and the project fails completely.

LInux is GREAT server OS, it's a horrible desktop OS.

/linux admin
//RedHat4LYFE
///3slashies
 
The problem with going all Linux is document compatibility.

For better or for worse (actually for a lot worse) Microsoft's Office document formats have become the de-facto standard.

While every open source office package supports opening them, they never render exactly the same as they do in a true MS Office install. Page margins, sizes, etc, etc are very slightly off in ways that add up and cause problems.

If you are only doing business with other users of LibreOffice, LibreOffice is great, but as soon as you have to interact with others, the problems arise.

It's really a freaking shame, as all it would take to get rid of Microsoft dominance of the desktop once and for all is sufficient critical mass.

If it weren't for games and for Microsoft Office, I'd never use anything but Linux. Yes, even on the desktop.
 
Last edited:
Of course, that's an issue with Excel, not any office suite alternative. MS Office, the least compatible with international ISO standards office suite marketed as the most compatible office suite.

The power of the MS marketing team, as evidenced by Germany's switch back to MS products....

Nah. Excel really is just better than all the others, has nothing to do with compatibility.
 
Nah. Excel really is just better than all the others, has nothing to do with compatibility.


Excel has some advantages. It does much better with very large spreadsheets. If you need to graph 100,000 datapoints, Excel will do great, but LibreOffice will struggle.

Some of Excel's UI (particularly the chart generation process, and various data manipulation tools) flow much better, though I have to say that 7 years later I still fucking hate the ribbon interface and wish I had traditional menus so I could find things easier.

That aside, 99.9% of what I do as an engineer I can do just as well in either.
 
To be fair, if you grew up in the tech world cutting your teeth on Windows then trying to suddenly transition to something *NIX based just isn't going to work. Linux requires you to know a little about your OS in the first place. I've been running various forms of Linux for about 8 years now and it all depends on what distro you are using. Is it Debian based? That would be distros like Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint etc etc. Or is it Arch based? Like Manjaro, Antergos? While most distributions use the Linux kernel, there underlying architecture can vary so one persons distro of choice might not be another persons.

It also depends on what your using it for as well. All the VM's on my hypervisor run Linux based servers, however on my personal workstation I dual boot Windows 10 and Arch Linux. Each serves it's purpose.
 
To be fair, if you grew up in the tech world cutting your teeth on Windows then trying to suddenly transition to something *NIX based just isn't going to work. Linux requires you to know a little about your OS in the first place. I've been running various forms of Linux for about 8 years now and it all depends on what distro you are using. Is it Debian based? That would be distros like Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint etc etc. Or is it Arch based? Like Manjaro, Antergos? While most distributions use the Linux kernel, there underlying architecture can vary so one persons distro of choice might not be another persons.

It also depends on what your using it for as well. All the VM's on my hypervisor run Linux based servers, however on my personal workstation I dual boot Windows 10 and Arch Linux. Each serves it's purpose.

And if the scenario was reversed and the tech world had been Linux based as opposed to forcefully Windows based, you'd be saying the same thing. As a technically inclined individual, let alone an actual tech, you should be fluent in the operation of both Linux and Windows anyway - Hypothetically speaking.
 
Back
Top