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Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

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Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#51

Post by dajohnson89 »

jackweirdy wrote: post #44
nickpsecurity wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accenture is an unbiased source in this. They will give you the pro's and con's of a number of high-margin products from Microsoft. You'll know which of them is best for you. You will not find them slanted enough to tell you to port your infrastructure to Windows 2012 on dedicated servers over instances of your current 2003 Servers running on Windows 2012 with HyperV. They wouldn't push that over a cost-efficient imp…

I always got the impression companies like Accenture were brought in to "evaluate the landscape" when the company bringing them in already had an opinion and could use an outsider confirming their opinion.

This is much of what management consulting is all about.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#52

Post by sgift »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #7

this "news" keeps being reposted every few years, and it hasn't been correct yet.

There's a real chance that it will happen this time as there's no a 'supporting' consultation by Accenture that says going back to Windows would be a good idea (see another sub-thread for the quality of an Accenture consultation).

As if my tax money couldn't be spend on something more useful.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#53

Post by cwyers »

DrScump wrote: post #47
sunflowerfly wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are only considering the up front ccst. Support and maintenance costs are not free.

Support applies to both. Maintenance cost for these two alternatives is zero, since updates are free.

Office 365 comes with paid support. As far as maintenance being zero for OpenOffice... that's not how doing IT works at all. Things will break, or users won't be able to figure out how to do things, and they WILL ask for maintenance.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#54

Post by [deleted] »

jernfrost wrote: post #16

Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows? It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously. To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing…

[deleted]

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#55

Post by jasonlotito »

jernfrost wrote: post #16

Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows? It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously. To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing…

I purchased a Dell laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed on it. It's been a painful experience. The hardware is what I wanted, but Ubuntu is a constant problem. There are constant errors popping up alerts about various issues. Fully utilizing my keyboard is an issue (super key is not usable at the moment). But the biggest issue currently is not being able to use an external monitor with it because of DPI issues. The resolution of my laptop is 4k, but the monitors I want to attach don't have the same high DPI. This means the resolution gets all wanky bewteen the two, making it problematic to use.

I remember setting up a 3-head system back in the day custom coding my own XFree86 Config file by hand. That was about 15 years ago. Frankly, it doesn't feel like things have improved much. And I have less desire to hand code things that, frankly, should be sorted out by now for a desktop OS.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#56

Post by jasonlotito »

jimnotgym wrote: post #9
mistermann wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Office is better, for not very much more $ per desktop.

Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple lists in Excel. I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big news for a developer. 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users

> Better at what?

Style support for documents. LibreOffice doesn't have complete style support. This is the one thing right now keeping me from even considering it.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#57

Post by Eridrus »

jernfrost wrote: post #16

Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows? It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously. To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing…

I have an Ubuntu dev box for GPGPU computing, the UI sometimes completely freezes. Maybe it's NVIDIA's drivers. I've also noticed that some software that has automatic updates doesn't automatically update by default (Chrome? Firefox? I can't remember right now).

In 2014, dual monitors didn't work by default and I had to find some command to put in my startup scripts. Maybe this is better now, but that wasn't that long ago.

Package managers seem to be trying to straddle the world of library management for C/++ development and app stores at the same time, doing a subpar job at both IMO.

I get the impression that needing to fiddle with the system is seen as normal in Linux-land, when it's really not.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#58

Post by nisa »

jernfrost wrote: post #16

Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows? It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously. To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing…

What you can read about the topic in Germany is that the switch had a lot of ideology behind it and after more than 13 years people are still unhappy.

You have to consider this is an administration of one of the largest cities in Germany with lot's of custom processes and tools. Also workers there vary from their IT background and I guess most are not power users.

Their approach was basically eliminate Windows everywhere and tell everyone Linux is better.

They even gave everyone notebooks with with their own flavor of Ubuntu and KDE4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) and more or less forced them to use this. They were using Kolab - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab and while I appreciate the effort if they really forced all users to use KDE Kontact with KDE4 I can understand that frustration was there. In my experience it's a UI nightmare and source of endless bugs. There is a difference between using out of personal interest or depending on it for work.

Their OpenOffice addons called WollMux was written in Java and at least judging from the screenshots is also an UI nightmare.

There was also criticism that the project was badly managed in parts and incompetence in the IT could have played a role.

These are all rumours, but it's believable.

Add to this that basically everyone else uses Outlook and MS Office and consider the difficulties when opening .docx stuff in LibreOffice and you can guess where the frustration might come from.

Another aspect is that Microsoft has quite a good story and technology with .NET and Active Directory / Group Policy and Powershell as well as .NET Integration to Office. Everything is accessible and .NET devs are plenty. Linux is more or less a wild garden of different solutions of different quality. This might contribute to the problems as more effort is needed to bring the software up to scratch. It's not something that is nice to hear but I can imagine that in the reality of public administration this stuff matters.

These might be reasons besides the political aspect of it. The polical stuff has some conspiracy touch to it and while I can image that a successful Linux toolkit for public administration that works well enough and can be deployed would easily kill Microsoft in that sector it's also likely that the opensource software is just lacking in some key aspects. Maybe it's a mixture of both.

Re: Linux pioneer Munich poised to ditch open source and return to Windows

#59

Post by Sanddancer »

massysett wrote: post #4

They suggest that virtual desktops make the client OS irrelevant. My employer (US government agency) went to completely virtual desktops and I was surprised they stuck with Windows 7 for the client laptops. Seemed a perfect place to put Red Hat or some other Linux. I wondered if Windows is priced so there is no advantage to using anything else, or if even dumb clients still need enough management that they would rath…

Windows is pretty inexpensive, and if you want something supported for more than a year or two, the options do tend to be somewhat costly. RedHat, for example, is $50/year for the equivalent of Windows Update. There are also a number of other advantages for windows in terms of things like remote management which RedHat doesn't have equivalents for.
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