When Munich did this it never got to a majority of their desktops, is my recollection, it maxed out in the 40%s. Now we're going to do it all over again with a different, much poorer, German state?
I think transitioning to a different platform is mostly an organizational and political, rather than technical problem, and the main roadblock is educating users and altering processes to migrate away from MS Office.
That said, modern Linux distributions like NixOS or Guix could be great to manage large fleets of computers, keep them up-to-date, and upgrade things without fear. In my experience, that is the main technical issue administrations are experiencing.
And of course, running free software is great because it brings freedom to change things.
* A lot of software used by them is certainly Windows only (they will have to find alternatives, change their workflows or invest in some windows virtual machines)
* Windows tooling for organizations is much more mature. There's a reason virtually everyone uses AD.
* Linux is very focused on user freedoms. This is not usually important in the office. But freedom to configure things is a freedom to break thinks, and cause admin headache.
The problems are solvable, but it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Oh and I love nixos, and I always wonder how realistic would it be to use it in a company for management of thousands of desktop machines. Sounds like it would be perfect for it, but i don't know any stories.
The reason everyone uses AD is that you can have a functional Linux client in AD. But you cannot have a Windows client in any Linux-based LDAP+Kerberos setup.
The problem isn't that there isn't a good solution for Linux in big organisations, the problem is that Windows is only compatible with AD, nothing else, so the more compatible system (Linux) gets shoved into AD.
It's not very different from Bavaria or neighbouring areas such as Jylland or Lower Saxony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_house...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
> September 2006 — "Soft" migration begins.
> October 2013 — Over 15,000 LiMux PC-workstations (of about 18,000 workstations)
> December 2013 — Munich open-source switch was "completed successfully".
> September 2016 - Microsoft moves its German headquarters to Munich.
> November 2017 - The city council decided that LiMux will be replaced by a Windows-based infrastructure by the end of 2020. The costs for the migration are estimated to be around 90 million Euros.
> May 2020 - Newly elected politicians in Munich take a U-turn and implement a plan to go back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux.
They've still got a website up where they say some stuff about it, which itself is hosted MIT-licensed on GitHub with pretty regular commits:
> Our strategic guidelines also provide for this:
> > If economically and technologically or strategically sensible, LHM prioritizes the use of open source solutions, in particular to avoid company dependencies. LHM pursues this approach in both the application and infrastructure areas.
https://opensource.muenchen.de/use.html
https://github.com/it-at-m/opensource.muenchen.de/commits/ma...
Well, it's not just about "FOSS" or whatever, is it? As a German state, you're better off not relying on making payments to a North American company.
LibreOffice specifically was indeed decommissioned eventually in Munich (just within the last couple months!), though:
> LibreOffice was used as an office package as part of Limux until the end of 2023.
Though the Microsoft headquarters do make this seem like possibly a special situation, and as another commenter said, surely they don't need a national headquarters in every German state…
Munich Finally Starts to Embrace Linux, September 26, 2006
- https://slashdot.org/story/06/09/26/0236246/munich-finally-s...
Munich Reverses Course, May Ditch Linux For Microsoft, August 18, 2014
- https://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/08/18/2219253/munich-rev...
Of course, nowadays there are more *nix based GUI's in the world than Windows: between all of the various Apple products (XNU) and Android (Linux) you have the vast majority of the consumer GUI's in the world. Because most of us wasting our time in the linux slashdot forums missed how the world was actually going to change.
Any resemblance to us now sitting around on Hacker News is purely coincidental I'm sure.
Many, Many people use only mobile devices and the ones under 40 who still have computers have them for work.
Mobile devices may be well-suited for chatting and general entertainment but I seriously doubt that many people could do effective work - more than a couple quick changes - with the mobile versions of Word or Excel.