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German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

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Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#181

IIRC, the initial Munich Linux Project ("Limux") from 2004 I think was somewhat of a failure. They spent millions migrating dozens of different Windows applications, but found that certain offices (e.g. the land registry) kept using Windows applications for obscure hard-to-replace services and databases, leading to friction. Later they rolled back then entire migration just to re-announce a new Linux migration more r…

It failed in huge part due to Microsoft's dirty tactics: https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661372

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#182
post #167
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See general state of development/corruption for all ex-soviet countries versus the rest of the developed world.

You wouldn't call a president that by all means takes from the poor, and gives it to the rich, to himself, and to children as corrupt? How about many, many senators who are doing the exact same thing? How about a prime minister that does the same? There is just as much corruption in the developed world as there is in ex-Soviet countries.

I feel like taking from the poor and giving to cronies is a thing that also happened under communism (and a good chunk of contemporary 'socialist' states, and to a less horrifying extent, gas and water socialisms like Western Europe). This is a generally predictable outcome of state-led socialism, as predicted long before actual implementation of state socialism, by early socialists like Benjamin Tucker and others like Bastiat in the mid 19th century.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#183

I may very well be part of a minority, but after working with Windows for the last 20 or so years I got used to it's quirks. And yes, I actually like it. Windows 10 on a Dell Latitude or XPS is stable, fast and I can run everything under the sun. Office applications, very domain specific applications like the Adobe suite, uncountable useful utility software, cross platform tools like Gimp, Blender or Krita. And still…

> But all those arcane commandline wizardry and the configuration madness still irks me now and then I'll take this over the seemingly endless layers of GUI based configuration screens that Windows servers use. A text based configuration file is much easier to understand, and well, configure, imo.

It's better now that Windows has gone all-in on Powershell.

Now, I said "better" but still not "good" as the powershell APIs for many critical windows features are a nightmarish trashfire of multiple buggy overlapping implementations of the same thing, but they exist. It is now very possible to admin a Windows box from the console. And as much as Powershell is a bad programming language, it's a very powerful and expressive one that bridges the gap between shell scripting and full-fledged programming.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How has the USSR ended up in horror? What about Cuba? I will give you Vietnam though.

What about Chile, Contras, the KKK ... ?

What about the Videla's coup d'état supported by US that lead to hundreds of thousands of desaparecidos?

One cannot simply point the finger and judge, without taking responsibility for their own wrongdoings

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#185
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AD can be very roughly described as LDAP with a better interface, a consistent implementation and some proprietary extensions. You don’t need to fight with incompatible clients and have a decent UI. For the rest it is conceptually quite similar.

Schema versions in AD are problematic. Not every Windows Server version works with every Windows Client version. You always need to consult the support matrix, and for additional software like exchange that uses AD schema extensions, it gets even more complicated. So yes, if you are not strictly standardized to a single generation of Microsoft products, you do need to fight incompatible clients and servers

You can join any Windows 2k+ client to any version of Windows Server from 2000 onward, with the exception of Windows 10 to Windows 2000 Server, due to Win2k relying on SMBv1 for stuff. If you activate SMBv1 on Windows 10 it will join fine. Schema extensions are a different story, but I'm almost certain that nothing in that department has changed since Windows Server 2012. If you are doing a new Exchange install now and can't buy some upgrade licenses (or get an EA with Microsoft), you probably should be on Office 365 anyway.

There's issues with Windows Server, sure, but AD and its relatives aren't one of them.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#187

I may very well be part of a minority, but after working with Windows for the last 20 or so years I got used to it's quirks. And yes, I actually like it. Windows 10 on a Dell Latitude or XPS is stable, fast and I can run everything under the sun. Office applications, very domain specific applications like the Adobe suite, uncountable useful utility software, cross platform tools like Gimp, Blender or Krita. And still…

Regarding Visual Studio, have you used JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA? For many things, it's consistently years ahead of Visual Studio.

Well, if I had to program in Java I'd probably use IntelliJ :) Love everything coming from JetBrains. I'm a huge fan of Resharper. PyCharm and GoLand are top-notch.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, that's how I feel as well. I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2012 (i.e. whenever I can[1]), and it's going to be hard to get me to switch. A bit unrelated: In the beginning, I was on Ubuntu, and I almost got sick of it as the extremely ancient packages were driving me crazy. I had to have numerous PPAs just to get the latest versions of GCC, Clang, Inkscape, and various other tools. Even with all th…

Well, it's hard to replace a tool which worked for you since many years. You learn all it's tricks and you can build up your workflows around that tool. Maybe I just had some bad luck regarding Linux. I started with Suse, switch to Gentoo, then Ubuntu and Fedora and others inbetween. I remember the fights I had to take to make 3D acceleration work, strange problems with hardware, things which could not be solved easi…

This is it definitely my experience. Those of us who were stubborn to stick with Linux (or BSDs) learned it inside out. It is hard to switch habits after all those years. If all those sleepless nights trying to fix hardware problems were spent on learning the Winapi/NT kernel inside out, it could be hard to switch back.

What I found most interesting was that I saw a video of the creators of plan9 who were running it inside a Windows VM. At that time, I thought if those guys formerly working in the experimental OS division of Bell Labs are not bothering with Linux hardware support and simply using Windows, why shouldn't I. I forced myself to use Windows as a host and ran a Linux VM for development for 6 months or so, then I gave in again and formatted back to Linux.

The same stubbornness that led me use Linux for years also led me to switch to FreeBSD, because off-the-shelf Linuxes became so decent that no config was necessary. (I also jumped on the systemd hate train.) After switching computers and getting a modern one I couldn't use FreeBSD because of GPU support. Now it has support but I don't go back to FreeBSD. I got older and valued my time more. Debian is what I feel the most comfortable with and I shall use Debian for a while.

OTOH, I really also want to try NixOS and DragonFlyBSD as my daily drivers at least for a couple of months :).

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