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Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

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Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#31
post #17
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the type of support. I'd expect a place such as the city hall to be somewhat low tech, regarding user sophistication levels. And in such an environment most of the support requests are the "where did the button go?" type. A switch to Linux has a good chance to increase these types of requests, at least in the near term.

Users should not be fiddling with the parts of the environment that change between Windows and Linux. Users should not be sticking USB sticks, setting up printers and so on. They should run the programs they are supposed to run in order to work.

Maybe they have to touch those things in order to make their workflow optimal, or even work in the first place.

One of my big issues with the Linux Desktop community is this attitude that they understand your workflow better than you do. You ask how to do something and you get variations of "don't do that".

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#32
post #10

That's not at all what it says. The cost of moving to Windows and office is ~€5 million: >€ 4.8 million and licenses (for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software distribution, The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway. Nothing in the article addresses the harder to track costs of user efficiency and expert support staff. I'm not claiming it's cheaper in either direction, but staffing…

> The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway.

What do you think why people complain about Limux all the time? Hint: the PCs, keyboard, mice, screens - everything WAY outdated. Most, I'd take a guess here though, not even able to run W7.

Also, LOL 4.8 M€ only for total cost of licenses and migration? Count that x4, at the very least.

Shifting the blame on Limux instead of the lack of money for proper hardware is the easy way of justifying to shift millions upon millions of dollars into the coffers of Accenture and Microsoft.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#33
post #9

I wonder how they plan to disable the spyware? Even the enterprise edition doesn't allow turning everything off. My employer is still rocking Windows 7 for this reason. At one point we trialed Windows Phone, the guide was a series of embarassing turn this feature off, turn that frature off to try to limit the amount of data being syphoned. Now we use iPhones.

Win10 LTSB is free of the crapware.

Ostensibly. Given the nigh-malware-like tactics that W10 uses to work around those who try to disable some of that behavior, I'd be quite surprised if it was completely clean.

And if that fails, it's till s a massive blob of closed source proprietary code at the end of the day. Your single option is to trust Microsoft.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#34

I've always found it suspicious that they essentially ended up with their own Distro.

That's how it works in Desktop Linux. The system is such a hodgepodge of interconnected pieces, each with their own slight variations in operation, configuration, and quirks, that once you finally put something together that works to your tastes you pretty much have to create your own distribution to keep it that way.

...or you can just contract Red Hat or SUSE (which used to be a German company) to standardize on RHEL/SLED plus some customizations. They would be a pretty big customer with a good perspective to add other municipalities and branches of government in the case of success.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#35

They should just get office 365 and use the online version of word Excel and PowerPoint in chromium. That's better than libre office and they won't need to switch to windows 10.

Online versions still pale in comparison to the desktop client. I'm sure people in accounting would be upset by a forced transition from desktop Excel.

To be fair accounting is supposed to use specialized software, not excel to do the actual accounting. Software that could absolutely be web based.

The problem I suppose is more hardware issues like printers, card readers and a lot of third party professional software that just doesn't have drivers for linux.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the main problem when it comes to Linux support is that people who really understand Linux/UNIX have an easier time finding better paying positions. Lower paid IT workers tend to hang around the MS ecosystem. This shows up in the cost of maintenance for Linux solutions.

I think so. Hiring half decent Linux support staff would be a nightmare. Window support staff are cheap and abundant. Not to mention the off the shelf outsourcing providers. IT in most large organizations already happens in India. Love Linux and use it as my main desktop. Supporting corporate wide? Big no.

AFAIK Accenture engineers were handling linux administration of Munich municipality so recruiting admins was not the issue.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#37
post #10

That's not at all what it says. The cost of moving to Windows and office is ~€5 million: >€ 4.8 million and licenses (for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software distribution, The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway. Nothing in the article addresses the harder to track costs of user efficiency and expert support staff. I'm not claiming it's cheaper in either direction, but staffing…

> The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway. What do you think why people complain about Limux all the time? Hint: the PCs, keyboard, mice, screens - everything WAY outdated. Most, I'd take a guess here though, not even able to run W7. Also, LOL 4.8 M€ only for total cost of licenses and migration? Count that x4, at the very least. Shifting the blame on Limux instead of the lack of money f…

I don't know how limux was done, but modern hardware may give just about nothing to the users.

Office was single threaded until 2007, companies with previous office licence wouldn't upgrade, but they had modern thinkcenter desktop with good dual core cpus yet their excel spreadsheet would choke on a single core all day long.

A good information system is almost an art, it requires proper knowledge from hardware, network config (Nobody does this because it's too subtle and not rewarding enough. But if someone did, any city could operate on "old" hardware using linux. I don't speak for the office suite because LibreOffice [1] is not good enough IMO. But for the rest it could be even better than recent win10 machines.

[1] I love their work, it's amazing but.. still not there yet, just like firefox and chrome.

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#38
post #7

Meanwhile: https://www.itworld.com/article/2716115/operating-systems/sw... I'm sure Munich council's decision to switch back to Windows, despite all the costs and long-term lock-in, had nothing to do with this totally random HQ-building in Munich: https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...

nice catch

Re: Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m

#40
post #19
post #10

That's not at all what it says. The cost of moving to Windows and office is ~€5 million: >€ 4.8 million and licenses (for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software distribution, The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway. Nothing in the article addresses the harder to track costs of user efficiency and expert support staff. I'm not claiming it's cheaper in either direction, but staffing…

I am not sure if your short summary is correct either. Isn't Windows is the reason why they want to tranformation from Linux to Windows? The original documents say something else. The original document mentions 89 million EUR. If the translation is half correct: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?act=url&... https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

The 89m is their ENTIRE IT budget over 6 years.
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