Munich ends its long-running love affair with Linux

Microsoft just moved an office into Munich and now, over the objections of the municipal IT staff, the city is switching to Windows. Interesting.

"Love" affair is a bit of a misnomer. Munich forked most of their userland software in '03 and were surprised to find out that handling so much software maintenance on their own is a) expensive and b) leads to poor results.

IMO, LiMux was always doomed to fail, and it's a testament to the slowness of public institutions that it took this long to realize their mistake.

If the same project was undertaken now, with the lessons learned (no goddamn forks of entire desktop environments just because Janice in accounting wants her buttons in a different order!) it would give much better results.

I think I can understand some complaints about Linux because I use it as my main desktop OS since many years, but I want to fix two points:

- "compatibility headaches" is a problem caused by the usage of Microsoft office. Linux has no compatibility problem with itself or with standards.

- "apps and hardware that absolutely needed Microsoft's platform to run, and those were destined to stay". Since 2003, these products are 14 years old. It is hard to believe most of them could not have been renewed without this dependency.

I think that acceptance of Microsoft office proprietary format is the main cause of failure.

Stunned silence ensues while reality sinks in (:-D)

Can’t wait to read n-gate’s take on this.