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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure?

Linux and OpenOffice. I think one of the major concerns at the time was that OpenOffice didn't work well with all the Excel and Word documents they needed to open, so people opted out and installed Windows instead. To the regular office worker, it didn't matter much if the computer ran Linux or Windows, as long as it worked.

To the IT admin, it might have been more work to administer thousands of Linux machines, due to the slightly less mature environment.

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> Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure?

No, it was reversed for political reasons. The majority of users were happy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Yups. From another thread:

> It got rolled back after they elected [a] mayor who got Microsoft to move their German headquarters to Munich.

I keep reading that all the time in tech forums, and it's just so far off the truth.

It always baffles me how we tech people lose sight of a product's quality and usability the moment it's a FOSS product. We feature new products here on HN everyday, which is "like X but better", and it gets lots of upvotes in the style of "OMG finally someone builds something better".

But then you have a FOSS initiative, and because of FOSS, we turn two blind eyes?

People in an administration don't care about FOSS or not FOSS. And they shouldn't. Their job is to solve other problems. IT and software is there to serve the administration. If, as a user, I can't get my actual job done, or only with much more hassle than before, then that's all that matters.

If we want FOSS to succeed in administrations, we have to put the same product hat on that we wear when we look at all the other software showcased here on HN. And Limux (that was the project's name) just brutally failed here.

My favorite part about that whole story is how Steve Ballmer, back then VP of MS, and even Bill Gates personally visited Munich to have a talk with the people involved, to convince them how much of a mistake it would be [0]

[0] https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck...

> Didn't Munich do this like 20 years ago and it was a complete failure?

Yes, but the failure was basically manufactured. You cannot keep every process as it was before and just install Linux/libre office, yet that is what they did.

Their current processes are optimized for windows to a degree that usage of the Microsoft office suite is part of the training they undergo.

Switching at this point would be a multi-year process that cannot be rushed. Each task needs to be evaluated separately and a new solution has to be tested and likely engineered from the ground up.

The problem with Munich was lobbyism, they were almost done with porting all their systems.

> Their current processes are optimized for windows to a degree that usage of the Microsoft office suite is part of the training they undergo.

Isn't it just regular office software? What processes do you have for dealing with spreadsheets and text documents?

Did it fail? https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... (2020)

It wasn't a complete failure, more the opposite, a great success. Until Microsoft moved their HQ to Munich and some old conservatives started complaining about some miniscule problems. Of course, there were issues, every software has issues. And Bavaria's IT is very problematic in general, having many issues overall. But those were all solvable, at a cheaper price than the rollback to Windows had cost at the end.

And fun fact: now 4 Years later, after the reigning political party has changed, they are switching back to Open Source and probably Linux.

I'd say success, period. Not in migrating to one software or the other (who cares), but in migrating a large company's national headquarters to your city.

> To the IT admin, it might have been more work to administer thousands of Linux machines, due to the slightly less mature environment.

Perhaps they weren't used to non-GUI automation.

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