Munich On The Cost Of Returning To Windows From Linux

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Switch the government to Linux they said. You'll save lots of money they said. :eek:

Reiter said that moving to Windows 7 would require the council to replace all the PCs for its 14,000-plus staff, a move he said would cost €3.15 million. That figure did not include software licensing and infrastructure costs, which Reiter said could not be calculated without further planning. He said a move to Windows 8 would be far more costly. Reiter said going back to Microsoft would mean writing off about €14m of work it had carried out to shift to Limux, OpenOffice and other free software.
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Granted I have no experience with Linux but you have to replace the PCs? Seriously? You don't just wipe drives and install a new OS with drivers for whatever hardware you happen to have?

Sounds more like a scheme by the government to get money for new computers.
 
This is peanuts for them. My boss lives in Munich and he told me their municipality diverted some large amounts of money to build their own fiber network around. Talking about tens of kilometers of fiber just so they [the administration] can enjoy their own private network.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Granted I have no experience with Linux but you have to replace the PCs? Seriously? You don't just wipe drives and install a new OS with drivers for whatever hardware you happen to have?

Sounds more like a scheme by the government to get money for new computers.
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depends... Linux can run on slower computers in some cases.

Could be they stretched their replacement cycle beyond what windows can support.

Then again Win7 has been out forever you would think most hardware can run it.
 
They must have some really crappy PCs if they would all have to be replaced to run Windows 7. Just wait till 10 comes out and get it for free!
 
heatlesssun said:
They must have some really crappy PCs if they would all have to be replaced to run Windows 7. Just wait till 10 comes out and get it for free!
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It would not be free. You'd still have to use windows!
 
How would going to windows 8 instead of 7 be "far more costly"?

As for licensing (volume licensing) I can see how it might be cheaper in the long run to replace computers, even if they have computers that would run Windows 7/8.

If they bought PCs that didn't have any licensing on them then they cannot even use volume licensing unless they first bought stand alone licenses for every PC. (yes this is how it works and is totally retarded).

And from personal experience, computers with 4GB of RAM can choke a lot of times on Windows 7. Bump them up to 8 or 16 and they are soooooo much faster, even for simple stuff like running MS Office.
 
They upgraded their XP era machine to their Linux distro, and now that they have to buy new machines, they will probably jump back on windows to save the pain of reimaging in Linux and updating all of that for the new hosts. Although, they will have to deploy it all whether on windows or Linux anyways, so who knows if money will be saved. Free software, heavy support costs?

Plus moving to windows 7 is probably not the best choice considering it is so old now. They would be better advised to hang on their Linux until 10 drops and run with that.

Either way, good luck to their admins, they are all screwed.
 
€220 per PC is cheap. Slogging though something which is not working out is bound to cost much more than that.
 
dandirk said:
depends... Linux can run on slower computers in some cases.

Could be they stretched their replacement cycle beyond what windows can support.

Then again Win7 has been out forever you would think most hardware can run it.
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Reading the article my guess is that they migrated to LiMux instead of Win 7 when faced with the need to replace WinXP. It doesn't come right out and say it, but it does say that the LiMux transition allowed them to continue using lower spec hardware. From this I implied that they were talking about continued use of XP era hardware.
 
When I worked for one of the big 3 cable ISPs we Visit was just being released, and we were still on NT with 256mn sdram and 800mhz CPUs.
Our new software wouldn't run, so we finally upgraded to XP with a gig of ddr2 and dual core 2ghz CPUs.
Companies and governments aren't too different, keep the same stuff until it can't be used anymore, then upgrade to the minimal requirements they can get by with.
 
Suggesting that Munich go to Windows 8 is cruel. They're already coming from one disaster and don't need another so soon.
 
SGA76 said:
When I worked for one of the big 3 cable ISPs we Visit was just being released, and we were still on NT with 256mn sdram and 800mhz CPUs.
Our new software wouldn't run, so we finally upgraded to XP with a gig of ddr2 and dual core 2ghz CPUs.
Companies and governments aren't too different, keep the same stuff until it can't be used anymore, then upgrade to the minimal requirements they can get by with.
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And that is the absolute worst way to do it.

The best way is to set a 3 or 5 year replacement cycle and then buy what will definitely be enough for the next 3-5 years. Sure it cost more in the short term, but just with the man hours saved in the first few weeks will more than make up for the difference in cost.

Buying the absolute cheapest piece of trash that will work for you right now is the most retarded thing to do.
 
dandirk said:
depends... Linux can run on slower computers in some cases.

Could be they stretched their replacement cycle beyond what windows can support.

Then again Win7 has been out forever you would think most hardware can run it.
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They probably stretched or most likely dropped their desktop + laptop replacement cycle when they moved to Linux. This could have made the original switch and deployment a lot cheaper and look better on paper to push the process through to make the switch.
It has me wondering how much on average , over all ,their hardware replacement costs were for each out of warrantee parts... that's if they dropped or super stretched out their replacement cycle.
It would also be interesting to see a detailed list of assets and the costs for those assets that is currently going to be replaced.
Will they purchase all new assets or lease the hardware / assets. What type of cycle they will use for future replacements and what type of deal they will make with the Hardware vendor < dell HP Lenovo ..etc > on hardware replacement.
fun fun fun
 
cyclone3d said:
The best way is to set a 3 or 5 year replacement cycle and then buy what will definitely be enough for the next 3-5 years. Sure it cost more in the short term, but just with the man hours saved in the first few weeks will more than make up for the difference in cost.
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This is basically how we do it. A lot of our fleet was getting long in the tooth until we got everyone on 7 last year where you either got a nice clean refresh or a new system and all those came with SSDs. I'm pretty sure the bulk of our machines will still be running well in three our more years without the typical age slowdowns of Windows PCs of the past.
 
When Upgrading the OS, they aren't going to buy a bunch of keys and redistribute it they are going to buy new PC's with keys already on them. I don't know if its going to save them money in the log run but it would be much faster then going through each machine, installing the OS and ensuring they work right.

Win7 will be much cheaper for them because they can get cheaper PC's with Win7 already install. Win8 PC's will be a bit more expensive.
 
cyclone3d said:
How would going to windows 8 instead of 7 be "far more costly"?

As for licensing (volume licensing) I can see how it might be cheaper in the long run to replace computers, even if they have computers that would run Windows 7/8.

If they bought PCs that didn't have any licensing on them then they cannot even use volume licensing unless they first bought stand alone licenses for every PC. (yes this is how it works and is totally retarded).

And from personal experience, computers with 4GB of RAM can choke a lot of times on Windows 7. Bump them up to 8 or 16 and they are soooooo much faster, even for simple stuff like running MS Office.
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I think it would be training costs.... these are user going from XP to Linux then to 8 ... there would be a lot of refresher costs to be shelled out ... figure out how u are going to get metro and desktop implemented for the city... as in what apps do you want your user to see on metro and then the desktop... it may sound easy but that simple thing is a nightmare to come up with ... the whole user experience not a technical issue.
Also it looks like training wise going to win7 then over to 10 before the life cycle of 7 is played out will be easier for the support end and user end that say XP to Linux to win8 to 10 ...
Those are my thoughts I maybe completely wrong.
BTW in the past if you partnered with MS and go with a package support thing you get a free upgrade from one OS to the new OS if you sign up for a certain kind of deal so if they cut over from win 7 on a certain date with the right deal win 10 may be close to free to switch.
 
cyclone3d said:
How would going to windows 8 instead of 7 be "far more costly"?
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Training some people to click lower right corner, then start their app, instead of clicking the window orb and starting their app, can consume huge amounts of money given the average person's intelligence.
 
heatlesssun said:
They must have some really crappy PCs if they would all have to be replaced to run Windows 7. Just wait till 10 comes out and get it for free!
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It could be they just want some certified Windows or Linux machines.

cyclone3d said:
How would going to windows 8 instead of 7 be "far more costly"?
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Different enough that they need to retrain their employee's.

And from personal experience, computers with 4GB of RAM can choke a lot of times on Windows 7. Bump them up to 8 or 16 and they are soooooo much faster, even for simple stuff like running MS Office.
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Considering we're dealing with XP machines, I would imagine that these machines have 1-2 GB worth. Getting something like 8 or 16 GB would be unnecessarily expensive and pointless.
 
pavementeater said:
I think it would be training costs.... these are user going from XP to Linux then to 8 ... there would be a lot of refresher costs to be shelled out ... figure out how u are going to get metro and desktop implemented for the city... as in what apps do you want your user to see on metro and then the desktop... it may sound easy but that simple thing is a nightmare to come up with ... the whole user experience not a technical issue.
Also it looks like training wise going to win7 then over to 10 before the life cycle of 7 is played out will be easier for the support end and user end that say XP to Linux to win8 to 10 ...
Those are my thoughts I maybe completely wrong.
BTW in the past if you partnered with MS and go with a package support thing you get a free upgrade from one OS to the new OS if you sign up for a certain kind of deal so if they cut over from win 7 on a certain date with the right deal win 10 may be close to free to switch.
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Maybe but I see Microsoft being harsh on this one. Munich "abandoned" them once and now the customer want's to come back. You have two choices, cut them a deal and help them out but you know that if you make the return easier on them they will not remember it. Munich will still bail on Microsoft the next time they get a wild hair and decide to save some bucks for the short term. Your other choice is to make them pay as a lesson they won't forget any time soon. As long as you don't take advantage of them they only have themselves to blame.
 
heatlesssun said:
This is basically how we do it. A lot of our fleet was getting long in the tooth until we got everyone on 7 last year where you either got a nice clean refresh or a new system and all those came with SSDs. I'm pretty sure the bulk of our machines will still be running well in three our more years without the typical age slowdowns of Windows PCs of the past.
Click to expand...

cyclone3d said:
And that is the absolute worst way to do it.

The best way is to set a 3 or 5 year replacement cycle and then buy what will definitely be enough for the next 3-5 years. Sure it cost more in the short term, but just with the man hours saved in the first few weeks will more than make up for the difference in cost.

Buying the absolute cheapest piece of trash that will work for you right now is the most retarded thing to do.
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It's all in the head & asset count .
Isn't a 5 year cycle a bit long for a desktop laptop replacement ? How well does 5 year swap work out ? I'm asking just out of curiosity not say it's wrong .
:)
 
lcpiper said:
Maybe but I see Microsoft being harsh on this one. Munich "abandoned" them once and now the customer want's to come back. You have two choices, cut them a deal and help them out but you know that if you make the return easier on them they will not remember it. Munich will still bail on Microsoft the next time they get a wild hair and decide to save some bucks for the short term. Your other choice is to make them pay as a lesson they won't forget any time soon. As long as you don't take advantage of them they only have themselves to blame.
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True true ... You could be and most likely are dead on about that.
It still would be better if MS did not go evil route and just use this as one of their selling points for other Governments that are trying to make the switch from them to another OS.
 
pavementeater said:
It's all in the head & asset count .
Isn't a 5 year cycle a bit long for a desktop laptop replacement ? How well does 5 year swap work out ? I'm asking just out of curiosity not say it's wrong .
:)
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We've been on 3 year cycles and decided to up the specs on incoming machines hoping to push that to 4 or 5. I got my new Windows 7 machine 14 months ago and it's still rocking like new. We only got 128 GB SSDs, but being a big bank, the idea is not to store stuff locally, but it make things a little tight. But otherwise I think an 8 GB Ivy Bridge device will be good enough for more for the next three years.
 
schizrade said:
They upgraded their XP era machine
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The funny thing is that avoiding an upgrade to XP was a primary motivator to go to Linux instead. The systems were running NT 4, which was nearing the end of its support in 2002 when the city council approved the move to LiMux. It wasn't completed until the end of 2013, at a cost of at least €23 million. MS said the cost to move to XP and updated MS Office back in 2002 would have been around €17 million.
 
heatlesssun said:
We've been on 3 year cycles and decided to up the specs on incoming machines hoping to push that to 4 or 5. I got my new Windows 7 machine 14 months ago and it's still rocking like new. We only got 128 GB SSDs, but being a big bank, the idea is not to store stuff locally, but it make things a little tight. But otherwise I think an 8 GB Ivy Bridge device will be good enough for more for the next three years.
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ahhh ok , are they leasing assets or out right purchasing ?
Sorry so many questions :p ... It's been a slow day 4 me , ka ka ka.
I can see desktops going past 3 years but laptops over 3 seems like stretching the life expectancy for use deployed stuff a bit far, but cost wise could be a good thing depending on how well the users treat their stuff.
thanks :D
 
I think it was more the whole "lack of planning ahead" than Linux which cost them their money.
But Linux is far easier to blame than piss poor leadership and bureaucracy.
 
pavementeater said:
ahhh ok , are they leasing assets or out right purchasing ?
Sorry so many questions :p ... It's been a slow day 4 me , ka ka ka.
I can see desktops going past 3 years but laptops over 3 seems like stretching the life expectancy for use deployed stuff a bit far, but cost wise could be a good thing depending on how well the users treat their stuff.
thanks :D
Click to expand...

It's some kind of lease deal through HP, not exactly sure how it works, but the longer the terms the cheaper it works out. Again, these machines were well speced to go long. We're trying to go past 3 years, it may not work out but the idea was to spec the fleet higher up front so that it should be possible. I can't see why the machine I have won't last another 3 years. My main personal laptop is over three years old now and for officer productivity and Visual Studio development for business apps, it's still plenty powerful.
 
pxc said:
The funny thing is that avoiding an upgrade to XP was a primary motivator to go to Linux instead. The systems were running NT 4, which was nearing the end of its support in 2002 when the city council approved the move to LiMux. It wasn't completed until the end of 2013, at a cost of at least €23 million. MS said the cost to move to XP and updated MS Office back in 2002 would have been around €17 million.
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Fuuuuuuuck.

11 year failed migration... FUUUUUUUUCK.

lmao. How indie of Munich.
 
cyclone3d said:
And from personal experience, computers with 4GB of RAM can choke a lot of times on Windows 7. Bump them up to 8 or 16 and they are soooooo much faster, even for simple stuff like running MS Office.
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In a business environment where all you're doing with the computer is Powerpoint, e-mail and accessing some extremely simple interface web based databases and such?

An office environment PC doesn't need mass horsepower or memory. The only thing demanding our office PCs run is McAfee. McAfee was the sole reason I had to upgrade some PCs in our lab that are basically only used for copying files over the network and e-mail. Old single core CPU would die when it was scanning time, needed a separate core for scanning... At current popularity of Linux, there aren't enough viruses written that affect it to warrant a virus scanner, so that'd be a plus (until it got significant adoption and people started writing viruses for it.
 
heatlesssun said:
It's some kind of lease deal through HP, not exactly sure how it works, but the longer the terms the cheaper it works out. Again, these machines were well speced to go long. We're trying to go past 3 years, it may not work out but the idea was to spec the fleet higher up front so that it should be possible. I can't see why the machine I have won't last another 3 years. My main personal laptop is over three years old now and for officer productivity and Visual Studio development for business apps, it's still plenty powerful.
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I hear ya ... thanks for the info an replying back.
Our stuff tends to have short life expectancy due to user abuse on the laptops and going with mid - low level shite.
If the person is a higher level manager or an executive they get the better stuff.
The Zbook15 seems like a realty good piece if that's what you have out there but I feel for ya if you have the HP 840. We got a slew of the bad 840s . We've been seeing quite a few issues with the MB going out for no apparent reason , but HP's turn around on the parts replacements has always been good ...
thanks again & Cheers . :)
 
ktk said:
lol u must be smoking some strong stuff. :D
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With that installed and no modern apps, no, it wouldn't be significantly different from a UI standpoint. Nothing that would involve tons of intensive training. An video and a reference guide would cover most of the training needed for most people.

When Windows 10 hits, I imagine would we probably be good to have similar materials as the desktop experience will be familiar but not exactly the same as prior versions of Windows. The task view and virtual desktops would probably need a little going over for many.
 
Ashbringer said:
It could be they just want some certified Windows or Linux machines.


Different enough that they need to retrain their employee's.


Considering we're dealing with XP machines, I would imagine that these machines have 1-2 GB worth. Getting something like 8 or 16 GB would be unnecessarily expensive and pointless.
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XP machines.... More like 512MB of memory.

You can roll out Windows 7 on 2GB of memory. We've done it and as long as the image is clean it will be enough to get by on. Obviously 4GB would be much better and the pcs with 8GB a lot of the memory isn't even getting used.

With a clean pc you can get it booted up inside of a gig of used space, and have enough room for a browser with a few tabs open and maybe 1 or two other little programs if you have 2GB of RAM. As stated the configuration of your AV software is usually the limiting factor and we needed to make that a bit more lightweight so it didn't take all the memory.


@pavementeater: We used to do 3 year cycles religously back when hardware was advancing quickly. With todays pcs doing 4 - 5 years is certainly doable if you had new hardware to begin with. We over reached a bit trying to keep dual core 2GB pcs around, but the quad core with 4GB still has enough life in it for now.
 
heatlesssun said:
With that installed and no modern apps, no, it wouldn't be significantly different from a UI standpoint. Nothing that would involve tons of intensive training. An video and a reference guide would cover most of the training needed for most people.

When Windows 10 hits, I imagine would we probably be good to have similar materials as the desktop experience will be familiar but not exactly the same as prior versions of Windows. The task view and virtual desktops would probably need a little going over for many.
Click to expand...

You obviously do not work in a large environment.

ANY change to the average mouth breathers machine results in mental breakdowns. Standard deploys and loadouts help a ton.

Our desktop/workstation deployment guy is also finding out the Windows 8.1 big dumb starts screen menu thing that is back end configurable and lockable has done very well in a small soak test of users. He is saying even morons are taking to it faster than with XP>7. Apparently contextual menus and dummies do not mix well and the combo of Office 2013 (think standard deploy ribbon) and Window 8.1 removes many of them. It is interesting that while technical users balk at the new look and feel, average users seem to gravitate to it when it is properly presented to them.

We are firm on windows 7 for now, but 10/O2013 will be our next jump.
 
Red Falcon said:
I think it was more the whole "lack of planning ahead" than Linux which cost them their money.
But Linux is far easier to blame than piss poor leadership and bureaucracy.
Click to expand...
Then this failure shouldn't really matter. You can just point to the hundreds of other successful Linux migrations, and ignore that this was supposedly the shining example of how successful Linux migrations could be.

Double-speak!
 
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