German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#201

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 8:42 PM UTC

winter_blue wrote: post #133

xur17 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter point, I've been working with Linux for the last 20 or so years, and I've gotten quite used it its quirks. It would take a lot to get me to switch at this point - I vastly prefer using it to both Windows and OSX (I used a OSX machine for 4 years at my last job, and have used Windows off and on). If Windows was free, and Linux cost $200, I'd still go with Linux. I guess my point is that a lot of the reaso…

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…

[deleted]

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#202

Post by chinesempire » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 8:45 PM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #194

asjw wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

So you are taking responsibility for your country's wrongdoings?

I am from Rome, a place with quite the history, it's not that bad either.

Hironically the best Major that my city remembers (regardless of the political ideology) is Luigi Petroselli, elected in 1979, in office until the day of his death and a member of the Italian communist party since 1950, when he was 18...

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#203

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

Vee vill succeed 'coz vee häff https://www.dataport.de/who-we-are/

Hugh!

edit: Especially https://www.dataport.de/was-wir-bewegen/portfolio/projekt-ph...

disclaimer: No affiliation apart from being resident of said town. https://www.hamburg.com/residents/about/11853222/government/

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#204

Post by brnt » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

INTPenis wrote: post #81

heisenbit wrote: post #15

Much more important: Schools are moving to Office 365 in a rush in face of Covid-19. There are data protection concerns but a crisis can shift priorities so it seems.

Not just schools, what scares me is that healthcare is moving to the cloud. I know from an insider that one of the largest areas of Sweden, at least one, has been moving to office365. While conscious people inside the very same organisation have been trying to prevent the move of data into the hands of a foreign company. And at the same time large telcos with a lot of government clients have also moved to office365 b…

Here in NL its very lucrative, healthcare software and consulting. All they care about is externalising responsibility. As long as they can blame another party, their ass is covered and therefore their work done.

It's soul crushing.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#205

Post by MayeulC » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #65

chrisseaton wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the big deal about AD? A directory of your employees? What's so important about that? (I don't work in corporate IT I genuinely don't know.)

AD allows admins to apply policy (settings) to every machine in the organization at once. And to make sure the users don't change them. The policies cover pretty much everything, and can be applied as strictly or loosely as you want. There really isn't an equivalent for Linux. You can set up Linux equivalents for bits and pieces of it, but the all in one solution that you can just drop down on the network and hand ov…

Well, I'm pretty sure there are some lesser known solutions out there. I've just learned about `guix deploy` for instance, which could make such a thing doable, and might be even easier to maintain in the long run. No pretty GUIs for now, though, and it configuring a setup seems to require at least a good understanding of guix/scheme.

Give it a bit more adoption, though, with more examples, snippets and tools, and that specific solution could do wonders. This is often a problem in the Open-Source world: little manpower, so works progresses slowly.

I'm pretty sure there are more (or less) obscure solutions.

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Invoking-guix... https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/towards-guix-for-devops/

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#206

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

xrisk wrote: post #91

axegon_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, aware of those... But... I wouldn't really use most of the countries on your list to set an example for the rest of the world, if you know what I mean...

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#207

Post by mamon » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

the-dude wrote: post #175

reitanqild wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

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Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#208

Post by chrisseaton » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

Spearchucker wrote: post #68

chrisseaton wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the big deal about AD? A directory of your employees? What's so important about that? (I don't work in corporate IT I genuinely don't know.)

AD is a directory of EVERYTHING. From users to groups, departments, divisions, printers, to remote access, device management, email, file shares... Many third party apps use it for either or both of authN and authR. You can use it to federate identities. It is vast in its scope and its reign is without equal.

These things all seem less and less important, though?

Don't most modern companies have web services for their internal apps? I don't have AD - I have an SSO web login for a variety of web sites and SAS products.

Who uses a printer these days?

File shares? That's Dropbox or Google Drive now.

Email? In your browser.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#209

Post by cycloptic » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #197

terminalcommand wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux software is usually distributed as source code, so I think the comparison does not suit very well. It's the package maintainers' duty to compatible, tested, secure binaries for you. But I imagine this sword cuts both ways. If you are a commercial app developer who wants to keep its source code to itself, maintaining binary packages for each distro and testing it could cost a significant amount.

You don't even need to resort to commercial apps. A lot of older and niche software simply isn't in the repo. In Windows land you can download a binary and it will almost certainly run, and 10 years of updates later it will still almost certainly still run. In Linux land you'll probably have to compile it yourself. And 10 years from now you will probably have to make changes to C files manually because APIs have been…

You don't have to compile it yourself. You just do the same thing you would do with windows: keep old versions of the OS around and run them in a VM. (Running them in a container is also potentially an option which is not available on Windows) In some cases the old packages for library dependencies are still available too. For example see here for the packages from old debian versions: https://www.debian.org/distrib/archive

Recompiling is just another option you have in case nothing else works, and it's an option that you do not have on windows. If you really REALLY don't want to recompile then I would suggest you start mirroring some of those old distros/packages yourself so that you can guarantee they will remain available to you. It would probably be prudent to keep the source packages around as well just in case you need them.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#210

Post by jandrese » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #205

jandrese wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AD allows admins to apply policy (settings) to every machine in the organization at once. And to make sure the users don't change them. The policies cover pretty much everything, and can be applied as strictly or loosely as you want. There really isn't an equivalent for Linux. You can set up Linux equivalents for bits and pieces of it, but the all in one solution that you can just drop down on the network and hand ov…

Well, I'm pretty sure there are some lesser known solutions out there. I've just learned about `guix deploy` for instance, which could make such a thing doable, and might be even easier to maintain in the long run. No pretty GUIs for now, though, and it configuring a setup seems to require at least a good understanding of guix/scheme. Give it a bit more adoption, though, with more examples, snippets and tools, and th…

This is an example of a tool that solves only a slice of the problem and requires a wizard to operate it.

Plus, it doesn't seem well suited to changing configuration on already deployed machines. If corporate comes and tells you all users must have their machines configured to automatically lock the screen after 5 minutes idle and enable some password requirements this tool would struggle.