Munich confirms switch to Windows 10
techrepublic.com
techrepublic.com
However, I'll be the first to admit that MS Office simply blows Libre Office out of the water. I'm very good with Excel and Calc, but I'm many times slower with Calc. The hotkeys, variety of equations, and simple features simply aren't available in Calc. I know that if I'm say 3x slower, the cost associated with that across a year and across a team is going to outweigh the MS subscription.
There is nothing wrong with ceding the crown to the better product.
Part of the reason that LibreOffice is slow is that it was essentially debugged into existence. Michael Meeks from Collabra would often post to Planet Gnome about his optimization work. There is certainly hope looking forward. It is a lot faster than it used to be, and they will hopefully be enabling Multi-threading in Calc for LibreOffice 6.0.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOff...
IT team at a previous employer had to setup Windows VM for some sales folks (who otherwise loved Mac) because it was so bad.
Do you think that someone who has never touched computer except for Facebook, MS Office and emailing should know Lisp and UNIX environment?
(I doubt they are sitting around the conference table saying "Fuck! If only the Linux office suite had these seventeen keyboard shortcuts and the equation editor had these thirty-nine additional features, there would be no need to switch!")
Windows probably really does work better out of the box for their use cases and user base, but I doubt they could tell you why exactly.
What are the arguments supporting the switch, then? One would think they determined there are some features missing from the Linux based setup and found out that the Windows solution has those, then decided that they have to switch. If this wasn't the case, then what are they basing their decision on? Flipped a coin, or simply corruption, or what?
Besides, if they using Excel for finance stuff, they're doing it wrong anyway:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs...
This assuming they had a need that OSS Office didn't cover, of course.
Graphically, sure. But after not using MS Office for a few years, I really prefer LibreOffice. It does everything I need (and a lot more, actually) and I know where all the buttons are. Other than that it looks prettier, there is zero reason for me to use MS Office. (I can only think of reasons why I wouldn't want to use MS Office.)
And if MS Office is what you're going for, then it still runs in Wine. No need to convert the entire infrastructure.
When it comes to formatting in Word though, it should be worth noting that MS Word supports ODT files by now.
Mayor Reiter openly calls himself a "Microsoft fan". He got Microsoft to move their German HQ to Munich, which was a significant deal for the city. They then hired Accenture, an official MS partner company, to write an report on the city's IT problems. It concluded that LiMux administration is poorly coordinated between departments, and that was all the justification they needed to push for a migration back to Windows.
I am surprised this Techcrunch piece is so "balanced", including a parroting of the understated official cost estimates. This deal is a stupendous waste of taxpayers' money, and German-language news (at least those I've read) are much less subtle about it.
Same. Windows has all the Linux dev tools plus a huge host of tools that Linux devs can only dream of. The only thing I need/want Linux for is cloud deployment. If I'm deploying an Intranet server, Windows servers is what people want there.
It amazes me that Linux devs speak so highly of their own tools and yet they can't even build a decent desktop system that just works, that masses of people want to actually use. And devs are people too :)
The masses want to use Windows. To make the masses want Linux, it would have to be like Windows.
Microsoft and Apple both have slow and clunky UIs. I am actually more efficient on Gnome with extensions than either of the two.
Only use Mac OS and Windows for their compilers and application packaging with cross-platform code bases.
"Masses of, 1st world, people" are also the ones that don't understand or care about concepts such as security, privacy and true right to own. Never found the masses argument that supportive to a valid argument since group-think doesn't actually prevent problems but increases them.
> Never found the masses argument that supportive...
It is supportive when discussing things such as necessities. So, for instance, we can all agree that everybody needs to breathe air, right? Likewise, the masses (developers or otherwise) need stability in their OS (among many other things).
I use Ubuntu for everyday work and have no more problems (sometimes less) than my Mac and Windows co-workers.
Let me know when any real modern OS becomes "unstable". Aside from literal testing and beta releases modern platforms for Windows, MacOS, and linux based platforms are all relatively stable and show significant improvements over 10 years ago.
The only reason I can see for using a Microsoft based platform over any other platform is if you're heavily invested in VBA and macros. If you're not then there is no reason a company cannot use a GNU/linux based platform such as Ubuntu. LibreOffice, Google Apps, Zoho, Collabora/Nextcloud all provide platform agnostic tools that allow for easy use no matter what you're using.
You're working from a very old mindset of operating systems.
That's a euphoric way of saying that Linux desktop systems (the actual thing we're discussing) has nowhere near the same market share, but it's growing I swear!. And of course Linux fanatics can't help but mention how widely the kernel is used even if it's completely off-topic. Should we mention how widely Intel ME/Minix is installed too just for kicks?
> I use Ubuntu for everyday work and have no more problems...
That's cool. Some people also bike to work instead of driving a car and they don't have any problems with that either.
> Let me know when any real modern OS becomes "unstable".
Right now. Linux doesn't even have an ABI for drivers and just this year I think Linus promised a whole 6 years of stable interfaces for drivers. Furthermore, historically and currently, next to nobody makes serious commercial software for Linux desktop systems because of the wildly unstable environment. Look at any discussion thread comparing Linux to Windows or Mac and you'll find plenty of people complaining about Linux drivers, lack of software, unstable/unfit desktop UIs and general fragmentation.
> The only reason I can see for using a Microsoft based platform over any other platform is if you're heavily invested in VBA and macros...
Oh, I thought your opinion would have been completely different after reading the first couple of paragraphs. Let me guess, you also think that command line apps are better than GUIs right? Oh and you think that configuring your system by opening up text files and typing in free-form text is better than using a GUI too.
Obviously the city of Munich and just about every other city and business on earth disagrees with you because none of them want Linux on their desks.
> You're working from a very old mindset of operating systems.
Nope. Your ideas about the state of the Linux desktop are altogether fanciful.
Let's be honest. How do you beat MS Office using Linux solutions? Will your Excel documents with macros still work flawlessly? How would you replace Exchange? Maybe Thunderbird with what calendar solution? There are tons of material and training for everyday MS Office use and most people are already familiar with the details they need. For OpenOffice... not as much... OpenOffice isn't even really developed anymore as people switch to LibreOffice.
Users also tend to blame everything on Linux, whether related or not.
An yeah at the end of the day, interop with MS documents is not seamless.
@sz4kerto:
> ChromeOS proprietary
Why you pick this one of a list of many? ChromiumOS is open source, as is Android, as is RedHat or Ubuntu. But Windows is proprietary.
> Google spends a lot on lobbying, by the way, afaik more than what Microsoft is spending.
Really? Source please. The question is how much do they all spend lobbying for an OS? How much do they spend lobbying in Munich? (hint German HQ got relocated to Munich) You read like a employee.
Google spends a lot on lobbying, by the way, afaik more than what Microsoft is spending.
If someone flags your comment on HN, you can only post about 4 comments per day and news submit feature is "practically" disabled - HN displays a "slow down, don't submit so fast" Error message which of course makes little sense. Also your comments will start with a lower/negative value behind the scene, you will find your posts on the bottom even if it says 1 votes, and other comments with negative value may be above yours.
There is a lot of monitoring by companies contracted obviously by $$ going on, to shape PR and public opinion. Be it employees, fanboys, or paid PR drones, it doesn't matter, they are quite toxic to the community at large I would say. I would wish more moderation in regard, and the removal of the downvote- and flag-functionality for everyone (but moderators).
It's difficult to get funding to work on open source software. Governments are a natural source, but time and time again bribery fucks everything up.
It doesn't really work like that. If Microsoft fails, it will be slow. You don't go from 90% installed base to 0% installed base overnight. There is no point at which they still have enough customers to be too big to fail but don't have enough to continue operating.
But as businesses transition to something else, they have to pay the transition cost. Which is a lot higher when changing market conditions force you to transition unexpectedly than when you have the foresight to plan and get ahead of the curve.
Whether they're easier or harder to work with is maybe a topic for debate. My experience from working with them is that OXML tends to be easier to work with than ODF in simple cases, in part because of better open source library support on more languages, and more StackOverflow-type advice. (Yes, open source support for the Microsoft formats really is quite a bit better than for the OpenOffice ones these days.) But it also tends to be the one that produces really gnarly compound documents that are just impossible to make sense of.
I'm not sure that's because the format allows for more complexity, though, so much as because MS Office makes it easier for the kinds of people who use templates that look like spiral bound notebooks with Comic Sans type to create trouble.
If you taken a few more seconds to read, that is not what your parent comment said when they wrote "Other than ideology, there are few reasons not to use Office 365."
Such things no doubt exist, but internet users are overwhelmingly more likely to just invoke them ex nihilo when someone happens to post a view they don't like. This is toxic to discussion, so we don't allow it.
Training employees.
Maintaining the environment by addressing bugs.
Securing the environment.
Plus compatibility with proprietary formats isn’t 100%.
I’d still choose FOSS for many kinds of environments but it’s not free.
Your parent comment is referring to the following model:
1. Microsoft provides free or nearly-free licenses to schools. They don't charge the schools for software now, and they won't charge the schools for software later, because that would defeat the purpose of giving the software away. Renewal fees are not an issue anyone sane would worry about.
2. Incoming government workers already know how to use Microsoft software, because that's what they used at school. They complain if they're supposed to use something else.
Right. The presence of that threat is enough to discourage looking for alternatives. "we hear you've been looking into Linux and teaching Python instead of C#/.Net next year... sure would be a shame..."
Try searching for how to perform an arbitrary function in Word or Excel. Hundreds of hits, and probably 25% will solve your problem. Try the same search for Google Sheets or OpenOffice. Crickets was always my experience.
That's assuming you can't get in touch with the person who wrote it. Which you probably could quite easily do.
When I'm in "accomplish a task using a spreadsheet" or "write a document/prepare a presentation" mode, I'm probably not going to be inclined (nor have time) to go rathole on changing the source to the office application, recompiling, testing, doing my original task, and submitting a patch.
There was a time, many moons ago, when secretaries with zero IT knowledge learnt Wordstar key sequences and got very productive using the software; now keyboard usage is considered a highly technical skill among IT workers and rocket science among casual users.
It's just a market driven untraining; everyone can learn to understand and use FOSS, but it needs strong motivation.
Nowadays, Microsoft's Office suite was, is, and, all indicators suggest, will continue to be a bigger productivity multiplier than any of its competitors. For people who primarily work in office software, choosing something like it is the sensible default for any company whose primary motive is profit. Sure, it costs money, but the cost of the software is tiny compared to a skilled office worker's salary - small enough that I'd estimate it wouldn't have to make someone even 1% more productive to justify the retail price, let alone what it costs if you qualify for any sort of volume discount.
There are other motivating factors that could come into play, sure. But if we're talking places that have to pay for their labor (i.e., not home use) and make heavy use of office software, going with the one with the lowest TCO is a sensible default.
Same as with MS Office. I remember me and my parents doing trainings in MS Office, which wasn't exactly free either.
> Securing the environment.
Same as with MS Office.
> compatibility with proprietary formats isn't 100%.
MS Office' compatibility with open formats isn't 100%.
> Maintaining the environment by addressing bugs.
That is a win for MS Office. Now offset that against the license cost and vendor lock-in risk.
I know we conclude the same, namely choosing FOSS for many kinds of environments, but your post sounds a lot like there are many costs unique to FOSS while in reality there are lots of costs involved with both options.
Sure, you can swap Intel with AMD, but isn't that also foreign?
It's a little different for operating systems and all applications that run on top of it...
The home country of Microsoft still has big and active military bases in Germany and spies even on Germany's highest politicians. If they wanted they could pulverize Germany withhin minutes. You can't honestly say that the German government is really independent under these circumstances.
"Look, fellow Germans. We are called inudstry leader and powerhouse of Europe. We export lots of goods for money they owe us. So much that we can bankrupt other nations. Our politicians say that yes, we are a souvereign nation. At the same time we cannot protect our own borders. We give control to the EU and other nations. We let other countries fly attacks on countries we are not at war with from our own soil. We host weapons that could instantly pulverize our whole country. We are spied to up to the highest levels of government. Even down to the lowest levels we fail. We use software that we don't have the source to. Here is this little project of providing some sanity and some freedom. They use software that is actually open to look at and we are free to develop it to our needs. We can take these matters into our own hands and share our work with the world to create a part of a free and open society. Yet, we have kill this project. Not because it doesn't work. It works, just not as well as the foreign made closed software. It doesn't look as good. It is killed by some politicians who want to, yet again, give away some of our freedom to foreign corporations. They want to run the government like a company and they succeed as such. Being a company, not a government. Let's not be that stupid. Many countries have the same needs for office software. Let's work together on solutions that mutually benefit us. Let's try again. Maybe not in Munich but in the next city. Maybe not replacing everything at once but step by step creating open formats being able to run more and more open software. One day we will look back at this time as the dark ages where the latin bible (proprietary formats) could only be read by the clergy (closed software)."
But the Azure Cloud itself has a supported on-premises deployment, disconnected if you want - https://youtube.com/watch?v=qLIzMwgY_Cw so maybe there is an O365 in there too?
Free as in "free beer" isn't free. There are many costs beyond the cost of acquisition that are often overlooked.
Usability isn't nearly as good with the FOSS alternatives. Microsoft has a paid team of usability experts designing and testing the usability of features for many different user audiences, including disabled users who rely on special usability features.
People likely have some familiarity with Office applications, so training costs are lower. For the training employees need, there is a large wealth of training resources out there, from free to pricey.
There is also no question about being able to get support in the future, as Office as been around almost 30 years, and is going strong. Office has no real competitors in the marketplace, so as long as there is money to be made in selling word processors, spreadsheets and other office-centric desktop software, those document formats and applications will be supported.
Office has a very flexible plug-in architecture for customization by thousands of software devs who can develop for that.
Microsoft isn't naive to the needs of European governments, they have government editions of their software and cloud services to align their software with government regulations.
The foreign company argument isn't really meaningful these days. No country is an island (except island nations!). Everything in IT is dependent on foreign resources, PC parts from Asia, tech support from India, Software from US companies, cloud services, etc. If you don't want to have to rely on foreign companies, go back to typewriters.
With Apple desktop software you can pretty much copy & paste from A to B and never worry about the result looking bad. With MS I have to follow very specific workflows to get an acceptable result. I don't understand why this is still such a hassle after 25+ years of development. I'd love to have some of Office's advanced features (collaboration, referencing, most excel features, powerpoint's line and endpoint snapping), but with Pages/Keynote/Number's GUI and layouting engine.
Isn't that a sufficient reason? Other than ideology, there are few reasons not to kill someone and take his money, if there's no chance of being caught.
Proprietary software is immoral; that is IMHO a sufficient reason to forego it.
Nonsense.
As for non-subscription based software, you are simply delaying a pricing increase as the newer versions are needed eventually as new versions contain key features.
WRT key features: I'm still using Microsoft Office 2008. In ten years I have never once needed a feature it didn't have.
Compare this to money spent on licensing fee going straight to Microsoft.
It would go to some supa-duppa FOSS consulting company, or to yet another Berlin airport.
Now, the data is fully managed by a US company and may be peeked at. Or not. This is a reasonable concern when you put you sensitive information over there.
Similar to what China does.
Very weird - for my clients of dozens of companies, Google Docs dominates. Never saw even one client using Office 365 just heard someone negotiating with Microsoft.
I tried to use Linux desktop at least 5 times over the last years (again a few days ago on the home shared laptop).
It is ok-ish when I use the browser and IDEs (vcs, pycharm) but anything else is horrendous. I looked for an equivalent of ShareX, I felt like I was 25 again.
Linux desktop is on for the 86% if the train which only uses a browser ("Internet") but I doubt anything more specialized is reasonable. Not that Linux desktop is bad (though it is not good either), it's because there are no ports of that specialized software.
If someone is fully (apps, I mean) html5 then why not.
The KDE applications Kdevelop, Kdenlive and Krita has improved a lot the latest 1-2 years, providing a pretty great IDE, video editing and also painting application.
3D animation, modeling and texturing isn't too shabby either, with Maya, Houdini, Blender and 3D-Coat.
For ShareX, there are many alternatives for grabbing screenshots. A direct clone is ShareNix (video: http://www.hnng.moe/f/3CI)
If ShareX is what's stopping you, I think that you're mainly stuck with a Windows desktop habit.
Playing games is a social activity after all, especially for teenagers. If all of your Windows-using friends are playing Assassin's Creed: Origins, and you can't because there isn't a Linux version of it then those 2500+ games on Steam do not really matter to you.
While CS:GO might not be your thing it should be proof that the sitiation is improving.
90% of the game library or 95% of game performance Will not do it.
Until then, having a windows license even if only for gaming is a no brainer.
At the same time I run and ran hundreds of servers on Linux and I would never run anything serious on Windows Server. I am probably stuck with a Linux habit here.
Download the file from Github - check Start several commands out of the blue - no idea what to do. I call a friend, he tells me to start a terminal and type it over there - check.
(98,3% of the population which expected to swap Windows with Linux Desktop is now gone)
I am IT, the terminal is my friend.
I start ` sharenix` and get
(sharenix:2817): GModule-CRITICAL : g_module_close: assertion 'module != NULL' failed Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
So much for the clone and the experience.
Honestly - this is zillions of light years behind Windows.
And again: I run hundreds of servers on Linux (and my home server/router/fw). I hacked in 1994 some of the networking kernel (in pre-modules time) on a 386. So I am hardly a Linux hater.
Ugh. Stop it. Just stop it. It isn't the late 90s or early 2000s anymore. Hardly anyone uses a desktop computer just for the internet because that market is well served by phones and tablets. That segment of the market existed only for a brief time between the rising popularity of the internet and the invention of purpose built consumer devices for browsing the internet.
Linux Desktop community continues to prop up this strawman user because it is an easy target. Tell them something is wrong with how the OS works that's keeping people from wanting to use it and they'll point to their strawman and say "most people just browse the internet, and we can do that just fine, it must be something else!". Users hate your software? I'ts because they're drooling morons who don't understand it because they just use a computer to browse Facebook. It's a convenient ego-saving lie, like pretty much every excuse that comes out of the Linux desktop camp for why they aren't better. Excuses is what the Linux Desktop community is best at.
I could literally rant for hours about the problems with Linux as a desktop, but the short version is that it sucks because the community behind it sucks, and probably likes that it sucks because it allows them to feel smugly superior to all the "average" (read: drooling browser-only strawman) people.
Even when Linus himself bitches them out they don't pay attention:
"making binaries for Linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass. You don’t make binaries for Linux, you make binaries for Fedora 19, Fedora 20, maybe even RHEL5 from 10 years ago. You make binaries for Debian Stable…well actually no, you don't make binaries for Debian Stable because Debian Stable has libraries that are so old that anything built in the last century doesn’t work." --Linus Torvalds (DebConf 2014)
I have no clue how the "average person" uses a computer, but for me it really is all web. Hell, if I had consistent LTE on my laptop, I could very just spend the whole day in a full-screen firefox with a web-ssh connection to my work server for development.
If for no other reason, I will never suggest Linux as a desktop option to any of my non-IT-professional friends & family for this one reason.
Use case # -1 would be "owning a laptop." Linux continues to be finicky on laptops - even when all the hardware works, you still end up with rando issues like poor battery life and fans that never turn off due to imperfect laptop power management.
(That said, there is one version of Linux that has cracked both of these nuts for the case of people who really do just want to use the Web: Chrome OS. And I do recommend that to anyone I think it'll work for.)
Edit: apparently there's a sizable segment of the market that agrees with both of us!
> In the third quarter of 2016, Chromebooks made up 54% of computer shipments to K-12 classrooms in the United States, says IDC analyst Linn Huang. That market share figure even factors in iPads, which themselves have been successful in education.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3067267/how-chromebooks-aim-to-f...
I am super lucky that my browser, Visual Code Studio and the Jetbrain suite works on Linux Desktop.
My children downloaded Minecraft. Then double-clicked on it to start it. It opened an archive... WTF? How can a desktop environment can do that?
Then they asked me how to start the game their friends play (Star Wars something) . Sorry kids - Windows only.
So yes - people like me who have uber-restricted needs will be relatively fine - the others will be stuck. Try to get a complicated Excel sheet and open it on Linux, good luck.
The community comment makes no sense: there is no Windows community either so what to compare?
The browser platform makes the kernel completely irrelevant, ChromeOS is a very good example of it.
Also, bear in mind, if you're an organization with a proper modern firewall solution, you can detect and block unwanted network traffic at the edges of your network as well.
I remember reading that this common belief is wrong, but unfortunately I don't remember where/who claimed that. Did it recently change, perhaps?
It's so confusing to disable that a (admittedly self-proclaimed, but still) "security expert" got it wrong several times, and even after that it still continued sending data to Microsoft. It reminds me of the same scummy tricks used by spyware/adware in the past e.g. "do not disable for the best user experience", double-negative wording, etc.
I believe it's still (deliberately) really easy to pirate/crack Windows, so I could get the Enterprise edition if I wanted --- but I wouldn't want it even if it was legally free, just like all sorts of other malware and unwanted software.
But it is still entirely possible to disable all telemetry with it.
There are, however, a number of hacks that can trim that down even further. But being hacks they aren't guaranteed to always work--things frequently change.
Since writing the article mentioned a couple comments up I have tried completely ripping out all telemetry components from the install CD, which seems to be the most effective option. Tools such as Blackbird (http://www.getblackbird.net/) also are quite effective. Nonetheless, monitoring traffic still shows connections to Microsoft-controlled servers. There are so many ways Microsoft (and therefore possible governments) can gather--or at least infer--information about your system.
To completely protect yourself would require manually monitoring, selecting, and installing updates, manually updating certificate revocation lists, constantly watching for new settings (including firewall and hosts entries) that must be addressed, etc.
So no, it is not possible to completely disable all forms of Windows 10 telemetry without also committing to an unreasonable amount of work.
LDAP
> How do you centrally manage workstations?
SSH
This is how my school does it: there is a system user with an ssh key which they use for pushing updates and such (e.g. recently fail2ban was installed on all computers), and we can all log into any system using LDAP.
To have similar functionality you need a commercial directory solution.
Same goes for remote management SSH is how you connect to machines remotely not how you manage them.
Automation of Linux desktop again requires either a commercial product or a huge development undertaking.
The problem with Linux on the desktop is that if you get out of the Microsoft ecosystem you need products to centrally manage users, workstations, configuration and patch management and all of these usually require you to go for other enterprise solutions even if they are OpenSource in their core but still commercial in practice.
There are different solutions, such as Red Hat's Satellite:
https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/satellite
Or Canonical's Landscape:
https://landscape.canonical.com/
But a tech-savvy team could do the same with Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.
How would that even be possible? Are they going to rewrite all the GPL code?
It would be interesting to see if they're getting an unusually good deal. Though I suppose there might be ways to hide that if they wanted to.
Politicians never fail to disappoint, feels like.
That said, I often can't replace Windows due to legacy applications.
Regarding MS Office, some people buy iPhone. These people also seem to need their Microsoft Office.