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South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

koreaherald.com

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Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#231

Post by nradov »

ethbro wrote: post #174
loup-vaillant wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost. By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office. The only way to break out of this, I think, is for governments to forbid themselves to use pr…

And for why that's important: business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades. Dealing with this at work now. And it's not like they're disinterested or incapable of learning, literally no one thought "Gee, what those folks are doing looks a lot like c…

The Excel file format has been a publicly released open standard for years.

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#232

Post by pergadad »

ethbro wrote: post #172
teh_klev wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen some spectacular cockups over the years and eye watering sums of money burned because no-one factored in risk properly. And they more often than not happen on government projects, and usually some big name consultancy is heavily involved - Capita, PwC et-al.

Having worked the consultant gig for a bit, we never talked about risk. Honestly, because most customers sponsoring projects were morons. If you told them there was a 25% chance of failure, they'd go with someone else who claimed a 0% chance of failure. I finally decided most of this was just sponsors covering their ass. If they initiated a project with risk and it failed, that reflected on them. If they initiated a…

Or just not the right expertise to launch and manage such a contract. Sadly really difficult for government to hire the right expertise - either hiring procedures are too complicated (equitable!) or slow (thorough!) or not interested (salaries not competitive as citizens would be outraged about gov paying high salaries for high expertise).

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#233

Post by pergadad »

ethbro wrote: post #171
luckydata wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention it's a LOT of work that needs to be coordinated by someone with the vision and skill to make it happen. People like that are not exactly common in the public administration of any country.

Mostly because government and small-scale enterprise balk at the salaries they command. Income inequality is a concern, and some people are certainly overpaid. But at the C* or technical architect level, the cost of pinching pennies is dominated by the cost of choosing a wrong direction (or not recognizing a changing situation and correcting quickly enough).

Public sector salaries are simply set a certain way - through a political process, covering all employees. There is little leeway to give higher/lower salaries to a few as that smells like cronyism. You can't negotiate a gov salary, except for externals.

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#234

Post by la_barba »

verall wrote: post #152
la_barba wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as another anecdote to yours, I regularly get months of uptime with my Windows 10 dev box. Its been nothing but rock solid for me (so was 7 and 8 before that).

I'm not sure if it is possible to get months of uptime on a Windows 10 box without having pro/enterprise and disabling auto-updates. I have done this on my W10 desktop workstation and agree - literally no downtime/crashes until I have to windows update. OOTH, my W10 laptop (xps 13 9343) is forced by microsoft to update. This means that every week my lappy spends around 90 minutes downloading, installing, failing, and…

Yes, months of uptime === no updating. The 'months' part was just to show that Windows10 doesn't necessarily suck for every single person. I'm quite happy with it, but I'm happy with Ubuntu and W7 and OSX too. I haven't disabled W10 updates, but being the sysadmin at our company I have a special OU for machines that I manually update via WSUS.

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#235

Post by pushpop »

Nomentatus wrote: post #224
Nomentatus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just given up on Linux again. Again. And it's the GUI that makes that decision final. There were also (and I'm still fighting 'em) serious file issues (perhaps related to file name lengths, perhaps not), but these may well have arisen from Windows/Linux interactions or even Windows not getting along with Windows. But flickering and otherwise unusable or unstable GUI features in the distributions finally did me i…

Turns out that the most serious file name issues are mostly down to disagreements between Linux and Windows about what characters are kosher - Linux allows a finger-slip to insert characters in folder and file names (such as a forward slash) that cause windows to crash out of copying tasks without specific explanations. It's taking me more than a week to isolate and fix these issues one by one in a large file system.…

Linux will allow anything as a valid file name. Including slashes, colons, new line characters and even none-printable characters. Usually GUIs filter will catch the worst offenders but it’s less of an issue on the CLI because you can escape all of those weird characters pretty easily (at least it’s easy once you know how. There is a little bit of a discoverability problem there though).

Windows, on the other hand, not only has special characters that cannot be used but also reserved words that cannot be used as file names (eg COM). Then there’s the issue with magic file extensions and even Windows Explorer hiding extensions entirely by default.

On balance I prefer Linux’s approach. Sure it creates some problems but they’re easy to be worked around and usually only rear their head when you start using lesser polished UIs or shared file systems with Windows. Plus Linux empowers you to use those names if needed, or change them if it’s a problem. Whereas Windows has these weird hidden show stoppers - many of which were only relevant in the days of DOS but have been carried forward in every iteration of Windows since (including NT) for compatibility reasons. That causes way more problems to developers - which is my personal use case.

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#236

Post by gcells »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #7

I hope that Indian govt switches to Linux

Boss Linux developed by CDAC comes to mind https://www.bosslinux.in/

Although the penetration is quite low. The project looked stalled few years back, seems like they are back again. Last release is dated 28.8.2018

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#238

Post by maximus1983 »

jacquesm wrote: post #202
maximus1983 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a flat out lie. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/13/munich_committee_sa... > Hübner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. > 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". > Hübner added, "in…

The hell it is. Really, if you want to argue this please at least do your homework and have a read on the effort MS put in to get into the good graces of the Munich authorities. I don't doubt that there were issues with 'different file formats', .docx and .xslx right up front (open standards that they are one wonders how there could have been an issue). https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...…

Yes different file formats are big deal. I've run into problems with just Doc files if they have forms embedded. I've had to deal with quite a lot from different councils in the UK.

A lot of gov / HR departments etc have embedded forms in things like word documents and PDFs. The same problem with alternative PDF viewers, they don't do PDF forms well if at all.

You don't know the requirements of the different departments and saying "this free alternative works fine when writing a doc" doesn't cover their use cases.

The Linux community like to think that Microsoft is the "big evil" that is trying to thwart them at every turn. I know quite a few people in Microsoft and they tell me that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

So sorry I think it is a conspiracy theory and as someone that earns his living processing documents from Office I know that incompatibilities exist between Libre Office (which is a fork of Open Office) and MS Office.

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#239

Post by maximus1983 »

sascha_sl wrote: post #201
maximus1983 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a flat out lie. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/13/munich_committee_sa... > Hübner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. > 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". > Hübner added, "in…

This is not flat out wrong, it's just the officially given reason. Not the entire story. The source is in German, but EN Wikipedia sums it up nicely: "In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD, wherein it is claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal wa…

So you link a biased source against Microsoft to prove that Microsoft were conspiring with the council. They're reason to exist is to make Microsoft look bad.
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