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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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'd be quite surprised if it was completely clean.

I understood that LTSB was intended specifically for semi-critical/continous usage applications, like airport kiosks and the like.

To me, it would seem a bit irresposible to pollute LTSB with telemetry and cruft, when Microsoft knows full well that businesses bought that distribution for that specific guarantee.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I'd argue that IT support for linux is much easier to provide (and therefore, _should_ be cheaper, I can't say whether it is or not).

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.

Linux is a lot harder to maintain and it's usually for servers (read: important), companies pays for the experience. Any dude who can administer Linux should rebrand himself to devops and double his rate.

Windows is easier to maintain and more intuitive. There is always a dude who can make it work with a bit of point and click.

People who can administer both will eventually end up on a Linux jobs because they pay more and they don't risk being the monkey who maintains the printer.

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

#73
post #15

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.

They'd still produce documents in proprietary software, which is one of the reasons they migrated the first time. A government should not set itself up in a way that requires software from a specific vendor to interact with it.

They can export in an open format for publication, probably pdf. It shouldn't matter what's the format for edition.

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

#74

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.

Online excel is worse than desktop excel, true. But everything is better than libre office, which is what they are using right now.

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, netwo…

> I don't know how limux was done, but modern hardware may give just about nothing to the users. I am talking about machines with less than 2GB of RAM, running modern versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice in addition to all the custom software required for the jobs (including, for some, the Java SAP client). You get why people complain about the computers being slow? FF is notorious for memory hogging, Thun…

All fair points.

But the resource sinks are also something absurd that should be avoided. I've seen this first hand. Lots of business were seduced into migrating onto web based application. I was crying ..

Sure the old terminal apps were crude bug god they were fast, processing AND ergonomy. The new one looked fancy but wasn't a production tool. Came late and under delivered. And did less than the old tools by design.

It's all bs spread by consultants to gain market shares. Employees and consumers don't need this. The energy is spent where it shouldn't at the benefit of the wrong persons.

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

#77
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.

But micrisoft doesnt wants general PC's running LTSB. As they put it ..

"Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB is a separate Long Term Servicing Channel version. Long-term Servicing channel is not intended for deployment on most or all the PCs in an organization; it should be used only for special-purpose devices. As a general guideline, a PC with Microsoft Office installed is a general-purpose device, typically used by an information worker, and therefore it is better suited for the Semi-Annual servicing channel."

from: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how limux was done, but modern hardware may give just about nothing to the users. I am talking about machines with less than 2GB of RAM, running modern versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice in addition to all the custom software required for the jobs (including, for some, the Java SAP client). You get why people complain about the computers being slow? FF is notorious for memory hogging, Thun…

All fair points. But the resource sinks are also something absurd that should be avoided. I've seen this first hand. Lots of business were seduced into migrating onto web based application. I was crying .. Sure the old terminal apps were crude bug god they were fast, processing AND ergonomy. The new one looked fancy but wasn't a production tool. Came late and under delivered. And did less than the old tools by design…

> Sure the old terminal apps were crude bug god they were fast, processing AND ergonomy.

The old terminal apps are mostly designed to run in batches, and it's horrifically difficult to implement (secure!) interfaces to any modern systems - which is expected from a government these days. There's a reason why many banks still don't offer instant payments in 2017 - not just because a tiny profit can be made by holding the money for a day, but also because the mainframe based batch processing stuff is not able to do realtime.

And to make stuff worse: many of these terminal apps have severe issues. They don't accept UTF8 (some only ANSI!), leading to data loss when you have customers/citizens with uncommon characters in their names - while e.g. a German system will often accept the Umlauts, it will struggle with French or Slavic diacritics and completely fail at Cyrillic or Japanese. Or they're hardcoded for example to encode gender as bool (0=male, 1=female), which breaks with intersexual people, or that a marriage may be between homosexual people (because the data fields are named as husband / wife)...

Sure, the same issues plague web-apps or native desktop apps too, but for these you can at least hire decent programmers pretty much anywhere while you will spend enormous amounts of money for mainframe experts.

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