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Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows?

It just seems odd to me given my good experience switching my fairly computer illiterate parents over to Linux previously.

To be fair they presently use Mac, but I found the Linux switch a great advantage initially as I ended up with much less tech support dealing with anti-virus software, clicking links they shouldn't, malware etc.

If I were to speculate a key problem is that so many people treat MS Word as the standard format for exchanging written documents. Computer illiterate people very frequently send emails with their main info written in MS Word. They seem to have no idea that you can format your emails from a regular email client.

Or how many people bundle images by pasting them into powerpoint rather than just zipping them?

It would be interesting to know whether these are the sort of problems causing a desire for a switch back to Windows or whether there are real legitimate reasons.

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I've moved places from 0% Linux to around 70% Linux, but the obstacles on the road to 100% in non-tech companies are tough:

- Office VBA: OpenOffice is good enough for people who just make docs and spreadsheets, but some of the more savvy folk (usually in finance and engineering) use MS Office VBA as a development platform. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it for them.

- Old stuff: Critical sensors, HVAC systems, fuel management systems, etc. that have proprietary windows-only clients. Some work well enough in Wine, others don't.

- 3rd-party support contracts: A lot of places rent their copiers, and even though those copiers have Linux print drivers, the support that is bundled into the contract is windows-only, so you're on your own with Linux.

- AD / Group Policy Deployment: Samba4 is closer, but without windows desktops on the client-end, it's still no substitute for the one-ring-to-control-them-all nature of a bunch of windows boxes under AD, and I'm not just talking SSO.

I think the key-problem with windows is that most users--even in a lot of AD-controlled corporate settings--are full administrators. If you can drop everyone down to limited-user status, it greatly improves things. Not to Linux levels, but still a lot better.

> Critical sensors, HVAC systems, fuel management systems, etc. that have proprietary windows-only clients. Some work well enough in Wine, others don't.

No joke. Around mid 2000's worked at a scientific lab part time. We still had Windows 3.1 machines in there because measurement equipment (sensors) had older DOS based drivers. So would run the experiments then had to use floppies to shuffle results around.

wow, is emulation not an option at that stage?

It talked to real hardware so it wasn't. There was also an effect of professors doing the same thing for many, many years and after a while they simply stop following the latest and most current things in technology.

When I was on contract at the Illinois EPA around 2008, there was exactly one computer that could program the dataloggers used to monitor air quality around the state. It was the slowest computer at the IEPA, and it was still too fast to reliably program our dataloggers. It took about 3 minutes to send the configuration to the datalogger (over a serial port), and running the software had roughly a 60% chance of corrupting the transfer.

The first Windows-based software I ever shipped was for programming ESC dataloggers. Last I heard, it was still in use by the IEPA Bureau of Air.

McLaren P1 requires an ancient Compaq laptop to service, because nothing else will connect to the car.

http://jalopnik.com/this-ancient-laptop-is-the-only-key-to-t...

*McLaren F1

VBA: LibreOffice can run Python macros. Granted, the rewrite from VBA to Python is necessary, but the possibility is there and in the long term, Python is much nicer to work with than VBA.

AD: Have a look into FreeIPA. It is Active Directory equivalent for Linux and Unix systems (but not Group Policy). Centralized updates are done using Spacewalk/Satellite.

Old stuff: that's the thing with old stuff. Going forward, these things are undergoing a change to web and snmp interfaces. I'm currently looking into thermometers and moisture meters, and this is the standard.

3rd party support contracts: you don't have to accept the stock contract, ask for changes that you need. The providers are not going to say you no, it's just not there because most companies are not asking for it, so they won't be proactive in providing that.

Having to rewrite any macros for any reason is a no go. You may as well have just stopped there.

Depends on the company. Some have no problem replacing it with something else, some do.

IME the process usually involves finding a lot of bugs and users generally want the bugs ported too.

+1 on VBA... I don't care so much for it, but I've seen some truly amazing and impressive feats in Excel + VBA. And while I'm sure it could be done with Python in LO, the rewrite for a lot of people would be limiting.

That said, I'm surprised they wouldn't try to support Office via Wine for those users that needed it. Also, for information exchange, the defaults for LO changed to MS Office formats for a given organization... though that still has some issues.

> Does anyone have some examples of the practical problems they experience using Linux, which can't easily be solved in any other way than going to Windows?

I worked there. The biggest problems back a few years ago:

1) So-called "Fachverfahren", basically software for stuff like managing drivers' licenses or other bureaucratic procedures, is written and supplied for Windows only. Often enough that meant Munich had to pay a boatload of money for a Linux port. Or the software HAD a Linux port, but for RHEL or other "enterprise linux" crap distros - which meant using stuff like "alien" or, worse, manual repackaging to make them compatible with Ubuntu. Yay for version hell - statically linked programs were an exception.

2) DRIVERS. There's a lot of custom hardware - special printers for printing on documents like ID cards, fingerprint readers for the new national ID cards, RFID readers with support for said ID cards... you won't believe how much stuff there is. And all of this needs to have Linux drivers and tooling.

3) Employee training. Back in my days KDE was used (and I believe it still is), but it's different enough from Windows that people need training. And there's 35k of employees, most of which don't have any IT experience outside from their Windows computer at home.

4) The computers themselves. Let's just say that the computers in any public agency are almost always horribly outdated. Many users complain(ed) about the speed of LiMux, which mostly was caused by old or underpowered (esp. RAM, given that OpenOffice and Firefox are really really memory hungry) systems.

5) Networking. Depends on the building and agency, of course, but e.g. my school was connected via a 16 mbit uplink, over which the entire Internet traffic went...

I believe the biggest problem LiMux had and still has is a lack of proper funding - especially for hardware.

Adding to that, a couple of months ago they had to close the KVR, the office where you have to register yourself, your car and basically have all your contacts with German bureaucracy down for a couple of days due to IT issues.

As far as I know, your points 1) and 2) are the main issues. Having to work myself with software talking to Windows hardware drivers from MacOS via Parallels, I can understand the problems of this additional complexity.

It's not just IT issues (the IT crashes down not that often, don't let the media fool you!). It's massive staffing issues. There are way too few people employed at the public service desks, and it's easier to hide this by blaming IT. This was the case years ago, and it still is.

The lack of staff is especially a problem as the employees have to be trained in a lot of different areas of law and procedures (because the Bürgerbüros/KVR are quite generic and offer all different kinds of services), so you can't just shift employees around... and Munich has the added problem of extremely high living costs combined with extremely low, un-competitive pay.

> It's massive staffing issues. There are way too few people employed at the public service desks, and it's easier to hide this by blaming IT. This was the case years ago, and it still is.

Thank you for confirming my suspicions, fellow Munich-dweller.

While the mayor's office even publicly admit that the staffing situation is atrocious, they probably can't resist to pass at least some of the blame.

There's the huge issue in Munich that the city cannot pay much more than has been agreed upon country-wide, it's all according to TVL. So in a city as expensive as Munich and with such a low unemployment rate, why would anyone start working for the city and not just choose a company? That's even more difficult for IT and other academic personnel.

Back in the days there was the saying that if you had a training/education that is useful in the private sector you 'd be either a moron or an hopeless idealist if you worked for the public sector - no matter if for the city, the Stadtwerke (utility company), firefighters, cops... only the cops and teachers get a "Münchenzuschlag" to compensate for higher cost of living. Then again it isn't nearly enough to fill the difference.

You're right.

But they also deliberately shrunk the staff levels a few years ago to save money.

It sounds like 1) could've been partially avoided by going with an RPM-based distro.

4) and 5) would've been problematic on Windows, too (in fact, Windows would've struggled even more with 4).

Hopefully 2, 3, and the remainder of 1 will continue to improve, but they are indeed obstacles even today (users tend to get frustrated with Linux's "quirks", and the driver situation is still abysmal for printers and scanners, which are vital in offices; Wine is getting good enough to be a viable solution in some situations, but it's by no means a universal solution at this point).

I have an Ubuntu dev box for GPGPU computing, the UI sometimes completely freezes. Maybe it's NVIDIA's drivers. I've also noticed that some software that has automatic updates doesn't automatically update by default (Chrome? Firefox? I can't remember right now).

In 2014, dual monitors didn't work by default and I had to find some command to put in my startup scripts. Maybe this is better now, but that wasn't that long ago.

Package managers seem to be trying to straddle the world of library management for C/++ development and app stores at the same time, doing a subpar job at both IMO.

I get the impression that needing to fiddle with the system is seen as normal in Linux-land, when it's really not.

I'm guessing you went with the open source drivers that have transitioned from horrible to merely inferior without much help from nvidia. The official drivers from nvidia, which you would install as a matter of course with windows, both work better and come with a gui to configure your settings and multiple monitors.

If (s)he uses the box for GPGPU computing, you can be pretty sure that they are using nVidias drivers. (CUDA doesn't work when the Nouveau drivers are loaded.)

Fwiw, I used the Nvidia drivers.

But the fact that users are presented with a choice and have the opportunity to screw things up sort of shows the misalignment between Linux and the general public.

The general public wants and needs a computer they can't screw up, not something endlessly configurable.

For most people, if things don't work out of the box, they might as well not work at all. Many people don't even know drivers exist because they've never had to manually install them.

If you do GPU computing you can obviously expect your UI to freeze. Consumer level GPU's don't have (generally) interruptible behaviour, so the scheduling is between command buffer submissions and the same GPU is used to run your desktop and display server. So if you have a cuda kernel that runs for a long time for example everything else is blocked. Even worse if you have an infinite loop in your kernel ;)

Dunno... I manage to use nvenc for transcodes in windows without the UI freezing. I had similar issues with multiple monitors the last I tried... off server my htpc runs ubuntu, and I swear at least once a month I consider switching it back to windows (gigabyte brix hardware, all intel, like nuc), and the hdmi audio driver via intel/ubuntu is a consistent source of pain.

I love it for server-side workloads headless... but UI on linux still isn't nearly as consistent as it is on even windows, let alone mac.

What you can read about the topic in Germany is that the switch had a lot of ideology behind it and after more than 13 years people are still unhappy.

You have to consider this is an administration of one of the largest cities in Germany with lot's of custom processes and tools. Also workers there vary from their IT background and I guess most are not power users.

Their approach was basically eliminate Windows everywhere and tell everyone Linux is better.

They even gave everyone notebooks with with their own flavor of Ubuntu and KDE4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) and more or less forced them to use this. They were using Kolab - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab and while I appreciate the effort if they really forced all users to use KDE Kontact with KDE4 I can understand that frustration was there. In my experience it's a UI nightmare and source of endless bugs. There is a difference between using out of personal interest or depending on it for work.

Their OpenOffice addons called WollMux was written in Java and at least judging from the screenshots is also an UI nightmare.

There was also criticism that the project was badly managed in parts and incompetence in the IT could have played a role.

These are all rumours, but it's believable.

Add to this that basically everyone else uses Outlook and MS Office and consider the difficulties when opening .docx stuff in LibreOffice and you can guess where the frustration might come from.

Another aspect is that Microsoft has quite a good story and technology with .NET and Active Directory / Group Policy and Powershell as well as .NET Integration to Office. Everything is accessible and .NET devs are plenty. Linux is more or less a wild garden of different solutions of different quality. This might contribute to the problems as more effort is needed to bring the software up to scratch. It's not something that is nice to hear but I can imagine that in the reality of public administration this stuff matters.

These might be reasons besides the political aspect of it. The polical stuff has some conspiracy touch to it and while I can image that a successful Linux toolkit for public administration that works well enough and can be deployed would easily kill Microsoft in that sector it's also likely that the opensource software is just lacking in some key aspects. Maybe it's a mixture of both.

Regarding the problems: http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-flagship-munichs-u-turn-i...

"According to Kirschner, Munich's IT problems are not so much down to the use of free software as they are the result of poor management and organizational structure, a view backed up by Accenture's study."

Here is the full study (10MB PDF): https://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII/RII/DOK/SITZUNGSVORLAGE/4277...

Presumably management is exactly who was asked what to do about this problem. They came up with ...

1) replacing the free software with microsoft software

2) see 1

3) need a third option ?

4) see 1 again

Something should be replaced, that's for sure.

Interesting read. Looks like Linux / Free Software is not the problem in itself but a lack of updates and bad drivers / hardware support and MS office file formats broke their neck.

But they have an organisational structure where demands from users get stuck between departments and improvements/testing does not work. Fixes and updates are not delivered on time and contain new problems. There is infighting between departments that have to account for their needs and this leads to local modifications that cause problems.

Issues they found are printing, software bugs and problems displaying documents. Quite a big percentage (30-40%) still running KDE 3.5 and Ubuntu 10.04 with OpenOffice 2? 3?

They had no Windows concept until 2012 and before that every department that wanted to use Windows had to roll their own and that led to installations without AD and updates. They still run XP and 2000 on 30% of Windows machines.

They can also only pay below average and Munich is expensive so it's probably not a first choice for IT guys. Additionally they don't have a budget for new hardware.

"more or less forced them to use this"

Well, but that's how it works, isn't it? I wish I could go to an employer and say "Please remove that horrible MS Office 2013 from my computer, it is a steaming pile of orc manure, and I will not be forced to use it!", but that's just not how companies (or bureaucracies) work.

Depends on the company.

On one of my previous jobs my employer wanted to give me a macbook pro.

My view of OSX and Apple in general is very close to your view of MS Office 2013. I told them “let me try virtualization first”, inserted more RAM to my own Windows laptop, and used VmWare virtual machine for iOS development for the next couple of years.

Good on you! :)

My main customer insists all work be done on a company computer, using only company-approved software, installed by company admins. And don't even think about desecrating the machine by inserting a non-company USB stick!

Which is, admittedly, quite good from a security standpoint.

The level of bureaucracy varies greatly across companies. That company that allowed me to use my own hardware was a very small and privately held.

And even for larger companies with more bureaucracy, developers who do native code development often need to be local administrators on their PCs. To do my job, very often I need the permissions to install and upgrade software, debug stuff, install system services…

[This should be one level down, but last comment from Const-me has no reply button.]

Well I also do some native code development.

That's why I have been given a tool that grants me limited time local SU privileges, given I enter at least 3 words in the field for "reason", and a valid cost center ID. I kid you not: It seems that executing a piece of code that grants me time limited local SU privileges leads to some company-internal financial flow to the IT department!

Edit: Installing s/w, btw, is usually done by opening a ticket with IT. If the required s/w is approved by IT, it will be queued for installation in the company's own s/w and configuration management tool chain in a few hours.

Apparently, this message board gives commenters a couple of minutes to correct their comment. That’s why the “Reply” link only appears after some time.

About your administrator tool, yeah, that sucks.

I once worked in a company where the managers were paranoid about us leaking the source code of the game we developed. We all had 2 PCs, one for development, another one for the Internet, two physically-separate local networks, a one-way network share to copy stuff (read-write from the online LAN, read-only from the offline LAN), and a KVM switches so we only needed a single display + keyboard.

It was very inconvenient, e.g. unable to copy-paste stuff from stackoverflow.

Wow, that's an impressive levels of paranoia! :)

I used to have to do w/o the web for the longest time - but fortunately not w/o email!

So in desperate cases I used my telephone for web access and copy/pasted stuff into an email to myself@company.

In the mean time I do have web access there, but I had to ask the head of department to e-sign his approval on the application. Fortunately, he's a cool and reasonably guy and signed it no questions asked.

>I once worked in a company where the managers were paranoid about us leaking the source code of the game we developed.

Not necessarily unwarranted; I still remember the leak of the source code for Half-Life 2 making headlines back in 2003.

https://games.slashdot.org/story/03/10/02/1547218/half-life-...

(Good grief, has it really been that long since Half-Life 2? I feel old.)

Well, I’m old as well. I was working at that company in 2004-2005. Very likely, that Valve leak was the very reason for their paranoia.

Hackintosh style which isn't legal BTW. It works well though.

"Linux is more or less a wild garden of different solutions"

Exactly my experience. I use Windows at work (lots of .Net) and Linux on side projects (Python mostly). When I get into a bind on Windows, the solution is typically a Google search and couple clicks away. On Linux, I find the Google search results often return a plethora of similar solutions each branching with every distro and major version change. This means I'm often sorting through similar (but not exact) issues on forums and trying them out one by one and then cleaning up a mess of packages when it doesn't work out.

I have never had a good experience docking Linux laptops to a dock with multiple monitors attached. The behaviour changes from only lighting up one monitor to hard lockups on docking or suspending or something else, depending on kernel version and whim.

Randomly the keyboard attached to the dock doesn't initialize and I need to unplug and replug.

Unreliable docking is IMO an excellent reason not to use Linux on laptops. And most people use laptops these days because of work from home optionality.

This is with a mix of Dell and Lenovo laptops with Intel display chipsets, fwiw.

ThinkPads too?

Thinkpad x250 user here. When I dock with one monitor, my screen will occasionally freeze forcing me to reboot.

What OS are you using? I'm on an x260, I had issues on Ubuntu 14 and 16, but since moving to Fedora Workstation 25 I've had an extremely pleasant experience from a hardware/docking point of view.

Fedora has changed the game for me as well. I am a very happy user so far. Although sometimes i see some notifications about a software crash somewhere. I really enjoy my time on Gnome3, there are very few annoyances as compared to windows/osx. Although i feel osx is way more polished in terms of gestures/ui etc. windows had been an absolute nightmare since windows8.

I used to have this problem a TON, and it drove me absolutely batty.

One thing I've found that's drastically cut down on the frequency (possibly eliminated it? not sure) is this: Always wait ten seconds between display state changes. Waking the computer up from sleep? Wait ten seconds before you dock it or connect an external monitor. Undocking it? Wait ten seconds before putting it to sleep.

Also: never make more than one state change at a time. For example, don't put the computer to sleep while docked, then undock it. Undock it first, wait ten seconds, then put it to sleep.

YMMV, but like I said: I think this has eliminated this problem for me. I've been using this process for some months now, and I'm doing much better at the uptime game (28 days since my last restart, right now).

>Always wait ten seconds between display state changes

Yes, that's a good thumb rule when dealing with hardware+software. Not just for displays either. Seen many cases of it. I have a USB modem for mobile Net, for which I wait for a few seconds after it shows the login dialog, to make sure it has fully initialized, even though the dialog seems to indicate it is ready. If I click Connect in the dialog a few seconds too early, it connects but often then the speed comes down to zero quickly. Disconnecting, closing the dialog, removing the modem, waiting 5 seconds, plugging it back in, waiting for the dialog to come up again, and then waiting an extra 5 or so seconds, fixes the issue.

Remember issues like this from my system engineer days too (Unix and related support to customers in the field). Once a Unix minicomputer was not booting. (Was working for a large Indian Unix hardware vendor then - India got Unix early and became a Unix country, because of an RBI mandate on bank computerization.) This was at a hospital and they had a lot of critical patient and billing data on it. Backups could have been restored after changing the hard disk, but that would mean machine downtime on a live hospital system. Maybe a lot of time to get a replacement hard disk too, from head office.

Others had tried - hardware engineers. I was called in (I was a system engineer, aka software troubleshooter). Tried rebooting. Did not work - hung before kernel boot messages. Rebooted again. No luck. Did it again. Nope. Others said, drop it, lets try something else. I said - wait. Rebooted it again. It came up fine. End of story :)

Of course, I did a lot of other (and some harder) kinds of troubleshooting stuff in that role too, not just rebooting boxes :) But the point is that this kind of experience and common sense often worked when sometimes other things didn't. So it takes all kinds of skills ...

>Also: never make more than one state change at a time.

Yes, good point, and a fundamental tenet of troubleshooting in general. Also to make each change reversible, as far as possible. You can bork a system by one innocent / ignorant change to a config file in /etc, for example. A lot of us learned it on our own (sometimes the hard way, ha ha, got a few stories there), later I also saw it mentioned in an early part of the O'Reilly book Unix System Administration by Aileen Frisch. Very good book, as is another book (thick one) by Nemeth et al - the Unix System Administration Handbook (later there was a Linux edition too).

I use a Thinkpad X1 Carbon for work and when I unplug the external monitor I never know if it's going to sleep or just freeze.

I've had absolutely no trouble with my HP Elitebook (a few years old) and it's dock. I can even run two external displays and the internal one simultaneously.

To be fare it's pretty rubbish on Windows as well, in particular if you have different resolutions on each screen. I have to reboot at least twice to get everything working.

I find that mac tends to do the best in terms of connecting/disconnecting external monitors. If only Apple would bless a decent dock design.

Also have issues booting up my mbp with multiple displays attached. Usually have to unplug or replug them about 1 in 3 bootups because it's decided to use the wrong resolution or not use one of the monitors.

Also whoever's decision it was that if you drop the right 10px at the left edge of the screen, it should only show those 10px and not overlap onto the neighbouring screen by default obviously does not use double monitors.

Random behavior when using the dock is pretty standard on my Lenovo running windows as well, though. Pretty much exactly those problems you are describing.

Try that with osx. But seriously. My wayland gnome 3 combination finally made this a absolute non issue.

I once worked at a largish corp with large *nix user contingent. We had Dell laptops and docks and I don't remember having problems you described.

However, the IT support had a list of 'recommended' distros (Ubuntu LTS if memory serves) and kernels and they preferred very much if you stuck to those.

Honestly as a sysadmin who has been trying to push FOSS in the workplace, I can say the number one barrier is simply lack of neuralplasticity in older people and an unwillingness to learn new things. Combined with a lack of backing from management, it's a recipe for an overworked IT team that is probably already getting crapped on politcally and budgetarily, which is what I suspect has happened in Munich. While I think in most cases technically Linux can meet the needs of the workplace, it's the cultural grip of Windows that is the most difficult to break.

This is why I see the dominance of Windows as a problem that should be dealt with on the political level.

My hope for Europe is lost in this regard, but I think Russia or China could come up with something interesting.

The thing that astounds me the most is that it's the single clearest example of a monopoly in history. There really is no better example of a monopoly in any industry ever. Microsoft had >95% of desktops running Windows, and the many various government organisations all over the world tasked with preventing and dealing with these sorts of monopolies did nothing.

In all fairness, there is hardly anything to be done about it. You just can't come up with a full MS Office replacement fast enough to be relevant.

Short of completely dismantling Microsoft, or even seizing their assets by governments (two options I don't approve of), I don't see a way to break that monopoly as long as this kind of Office Software is relevant.

Exactly. An industry with a high barrier to entry is prone to becoming a monopoly.

This is why I think governments should fund libre alternative projects substantially and long-term. It is a matter of national interest.

LibreOffice Calc is missing features that are required by many users? The government should pay for it to be developed.

The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly.

Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me.

Most politicians are old and most old people don't understand computers, the internet and it's consequences. They don't get what is at stake. I still hope that some day people will get elected in Europe that understand theses issues.

The issue here, is that even as LO is firming up, the masses are moving to google docs and o365's online options... Which does reduce some barriers to switching, but introduces other development costs. MS is really good at making software, maybe not the best at UI/UX, but meeting needs in a relatively short period of time compared to competitors. o365 seems at first glance to be a bit better than google docs, and MS was pretty late to the party there.

Government can very rarely outpace private business in terms of getting things like this done.

The government can fund private business developing free software to outpace another private business.

For example Continuum Analytics is partly funded by public sources to work on open data science, competing against commercial offerings from SAS, for example. The Blender Foundation has some public funding for developing new features for the Blender 3D software suite, partly through public film funding.

>The government can fund private business developing free software to outpace another private business.

Why? Governments are the only ones with the tools to actually deal with monopolies properly without competing with them: breaking them up, fining them extremely fiercely, etc.

>Government can very rarely outpace private business in terms of getting things like this done.

That's not really true, it's never ever really been true. It's capitalist propaganda that 'the Government is useless', and it's mainly propped up by extremely liberal governments (Republicans and Democrats, for example) that make the Government useless on purpose then say 'hey look the Government sucks'.

Not that it should ever need to be Government writing software to compete against Microsoft. Governments have much, much better tools for dealing with monopolies than trying to outcompete them. They're the only ones that have those tools. They should use them aggressively.

I'm not saying that governments don't have a place. Enforcing the law (including judicial sentencing), providing a common defense, and ensuring essential infrastructure are top among them.

I'm not entirely in favor of governments competing with business... or propping them up. They should only interfere when there is a lack of opportunity to compete, either with unfair practices, or coercion.

Also, is there something wrong with capitalism? Note: that what we have is not really or nearly a free market, and that patent/copyright protections really need to be adjust to move in that direction.

Governments neither need to nor should fund free software. The US Government should have fined Microsoft at least $10billion for their monopolistic business practices when they had 95% of the desktop OS market, then dismantled the company into its constituent parts, then used that fine to set up a fund to fund innovative software development companies.

Instead, they... did nothing. Classic US government.

>The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly.

It's not expensive at all, no. It's the opposite of expensive. Microsoft has done countless things that are completely explicitly illegal to do, that are very anti-competitive. They should have been fined billions and broken up a decade or more ago. No lawsuits, no juries, just the FTC doing what it was made to do.

>Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me.

I have no idea how you think it's okay to blame the EU for 'protecting farmers' while not blaming the US for its much more pervasive farmer protectionism and subsidies (including paying people not to farm their land) and not dealing with Microsoft themselves, an American company.

>Most politicians are old and most old people don't understand computers, the internet and it's consequences. They don't get what is at stake. I still hope that some day people will get elected in Europe that understand theses issues.

Saying that 'politicians are old and don't understand computers' might have made sense three decades ago, but it makes less and less sense today. Politicians today grew up with computers.

"Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me."

To be fair, food is a bit more important than software :)

Otherwise, I agree. This absolutely needs to be a public policy issue. Movements like the Pirate Party are a step in the right direction, and hopefully victories like in Iceland will prove to be more than just one-off occurrences.

No, an industry with a company that has a very long history of extremely anticompetitive practices is prone to becoming a monopoly. There's nothing inherently pro-monopoly about office software or operating system software. There is something inherently pro-monopoly about Microsoft.

Dismantling Microsoft would absolutely be the correct response. That's what they did to Bell or AT&T or whatever they were called, and it was a good thing.

Break up Microsoft into a company that makes Office, a company that makes Windows and a company that does .NET.

Hell, Microsoft already internally operates like that anyway. Might as well take it to its logical conclusion :)

I purchased a Dell laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed on it. It's been a painful experience. The hardware is what I wanted, but Ubuntu is a constant problem. There are constant errors popping up alerts about various issues. Fully utilizing my keyboard is an issue (super key is not usable at the moment). But the biggest issue currently is not being able to use an external monitor with it because of DPI issues. The resolution of my laptop is 4k, but the monitors I want to attach don't have the same high DPI. This means the resolution gets all wanky bewteen the two, making it problematic to use.

I remember setting up a 3-head system back in the day custom coding my own XFree86 Config file by hand. That was about 15 years ago. Frankly, it doesn't feel like things have improved much. And I have less desire to hand code things that, frankly, should be sorted out by now for a desktop OS.

The Dell comes with a package to prevent the windows key working. Don't know why. A search and one command and you'll be using the the windows key properly.

Perhaps specialties in large urban govt bureacracies (like GIS, facilities maintenance, etc.) often require many Windows-only apps and drivers from vendors whom can't justify Linux development (Mac would probably be first).

Having IT supported a similar type heterogenous mix of departments in big name Ivy academia, it's typically workable productivity/interop to have each group of users to standardize on the same OS... usually either Window or Mac but not both (because of app compatibility, even between same vendor isn't always 100%: filename character set, fonts, so on.)

When I read the quote, "highest possible compatibility", I recalled the problems I had in my Microsoft-dominant office after I shared some files I edited at home using libre-office. No one was ever prevented from working on the files I saved, but my xls exports from libre-office were annoyingly affected.

I wonder if it's not just the sort of annecdote between techies and non-techies which makes the difference. I think a non-techie will ascribe too much weight to their user-experience (a file doesn't display the same when sharing files) and conclude the file is somehow corrupt or unreliable.

At best, I suspect office workers, whose work is absolutely and entirely within the realm of email, text docs and spreadsheets, don't have the patience to deal with these irreularities.

Or, at worst, in a hard-driving efficiency oriented workplace minor inconveniences add up. I tend to favor CSV to xls to begin with, but this clearly adds additional steps when I utilize functions which can only be saved natively.

For myself, I'm inured to these inconveniences from web and software development and ignore the efficency costs in some office-task-contexts (txt, csv, email) because I'm already committed to working with specific workflows.

Random example, aside from the Microsoft Office-incompatibilites: For producing a passport they have to use software by the federal agency which talks to a fingerprint reader. The municipality has no choice what is used there.

This is mostly a political thing, rather than them having any real problems.

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