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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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Hint: the PCs, keyboard, mice, screens - everything WAY outdated.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, netwo…

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

#62
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I wouldn't assume whoever designed the specific desktop implementation and the software these people run is completely naïve about their workflows. > You ask how to do something and you get variations of "don't do that". I usually add "do [something appropriate] instead, which will solve the problem and not introduce a [horrific IT risk]".

Except that, again, you're making assumptions. You're assuming you know why they are trying to do what they're asking about, that they haven't rejected the 'more appropriate' solutions for reasons that are quite possibly outside their control. I have been in this situation a fair amount and it is like pulling teeth to get some people to answer a simple question.

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

#64
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The software is proprietary, but the actual files use a variant of an open ISO/IEC/ECMA standard.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

IIRC, it is essentially impossible to correctly implement parts of OOXML without reverse-engineering the Office suite. The standard does not provide enough information.

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, 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, Thunderbird is not much behind it, and OpenOffice and SAP GUI are Java crap which means a tendency to leak memory the longer you have it running and general downsides of simply being Java. The machines swapped like hell, and SATA disks were not a given.

In addition, web sites themselves have grown in resource usage in an exponential way. HN and Fefes Blog are the only two websites I know that I can use even when my data allowance on my phone is finished and I'm throttled to 56k. Everything other? Forget it. And it's not just data usage, it's also RAM and CPU usage, e.g. due to ads and dozens of trackers.

> network config

Actually, it's not the config that's the bottleneck - it's the uplinks and crosslinks between the dozens of city buildings which includes the schools - mine, for example, was linked to the central DC with a 10/10 fiber 14 years ago and still was when I left the school 6 years ago, you can guess how much "fun" that is to use...

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

#67

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

Rolling your own distro is a sensible thing to do for a big installation. Thanks to open source, you can take an existing distro (Ubuntu, in this case) and modify it, until it suits your needs. Some people prefer to call such a thing »spin« or »blend«.

Then the distro has noone to maintain it, none of the software is supported on it and it lacks the most basic drivers.

Rolling their own distro was a terrible idea.

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

#68
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's funny, I read: "AFAIK Accenture engineers were handling linux administration of Munich municipality" as confirmation that hiring half-competent team of Linux admins is difficult. But I confess to being biased to the corners of Accenture that I've been previously exposed to...

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

#69
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#70
post #49
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…

Costs are as follow: - 14 Mio € for personal costs - 24 Mio € for consulting (not sure why that is that high?!) - 13,4 Mio € for it@M services (support, hardware installation, etc it@M is the it company that manages the project) - 4,8 Mio € for HARDWARE - 29,9 Mio € for Licenses (Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software delivery, License-, Print-, and Profile Management, identity management and extension of the…

I've worked in industry long enough to suspect that there's an excellent chance that any quoted numbers are so adjusted by whoever is most politically powerful that my intuition is to just shrug my shoulders and move on to the next article. Dishonesty is so prevalent in so many "news" articles today a person should just read things and have a little chuckle before going about their day.
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