German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating | Hacker News Reader

German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating

arstechnica.com

43 pointsrbanffy27 comments

That's what whole Europe should do already years ago because considering all the data mining Microsoft conducts in their products it become quite dangerous to use anything they released in nearly a decade.

In 2015 Munich reverted their decision from 2004 about migrating to Linux (they opted for an Ubuntu derivative) and OpenOffice [1][2], so let's hope that the Schleswig-Holstein government will stick to open source solutions this time for good and that will become a trend worth following.

[1] - https://onmsft.com/news/german-city-that-ditched-windows-for...

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20150821225906/https://www.techr...

The first article seems to be very pro-Microsoft and doesn't mention how Ballmer lobbied Munich hard to return to the Microsoft system, including offering steep discounts and promising to open an MS headquarter in Munich. I wonder how nice the dinner the 2 mentioned politicians got.

This site admittedly looks like a conspiracy site, but it says onmsft.com is a bogus site: https://techwrongs.org/o/2015/08/24/sabine-pfeiler-and-otto-...

I do remember this story about Munich going for open source and then switching back but I don't recall any side story about MS lobbying for opening headquarter in the city or offering discounts. That's what brave search served me when I enter the keywords so excuse me for choosing the source - sadly, the sites that do PR for the companies pretending to serve news, leaks, reviews are all around us.

And honestly, it's not really surprising that MS lobbied - they managed to do the same in Poland too many times in the past. My sister starting computer classes in the high school was given a pamphlet with instruction how to register an account in (back then) Windows Live ecosystem, how to use mail and create a blog there, and how great SkyDrive is for storing your files.

This is also related to M$ providing windoze source to China, in order for china to be able to implement their own encryption (allowing gov backdoor).

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/china-to-view-window...

In addition ot governments' concern for security, I'm am amazed that corps happily use s/w tools that routinely exfiltrate data. This includes gmail, outlook, teams, ST's CubeIDE, cloud storage and many many more.

If you were a company that was a majotr competitor to M$, would you be OK hosting your executive strategy meetings on a M$ or Goggle meeting platform? When the EULA says they can mine your meeting?

And offering these tools in schools (where "free" licenses are provided) only locks the next generation of users, including s/w engineering students, into the M$ platform. It's basically tax payer funded M$ training. I'm shocked (shocked I say) at the number of young s/w engineers I work with who are hopeless outside of a windows desktop.

As you mention, I also certainly hope that the current conversion away from M$ will sustain, and influence other agencies and companies to migrate away...

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m

In the meanwhile, in the Philippines, I had to buy Microsoft Office for my company's treasurer who, so far, used LibreOffice successfully. The reason is that the only officially approved application for submitting the "alphalist" of withheld taxes to the tax agency (BIR) has a hard dependency on Excel for printing (instead of printing, it launches Excel with some pre-populated spreadsheet), and auditors require a hard copy.

P.S. Without this "export to Excel for printing" functionality (EDIT: and maybe something else, too, I have not tested all the buttons), the app also works in Wine.

This is the kinda thing that makes me nervous. My brother asked me about my Linux workstation and said he wanted to try it after I explained why I like Linux. After a month, and tons of tech issues, he was back on Windows. I've only seen it work at tech companies and, for what it's worth, they were all using Google workspaces.

Specific hardware and software versions that you test first should be fine. They do the same thing with any other OS, so I'd hope they do that here.

Operating systems, and enterprise solutions, are complex ecosystems. You never know what you'll need, and find that a lot of basic stuff doesn't work properly. For example, with 30k people, you know they have graphic designers. Hopefully they don't get forced to learn inkscape and gimp, so they're already out. What about the millions of conferencing applications that people use? Personally, I've had many embarrassing failures with Zoom and Webex on Linux. What if you need to do an external presentation? Hope you don't have any compatibility issues with the projectors(real story T_T). Of course I still wish them luck as I would prefer a Linux based world, but let's not pretend this won't be a bumpy ride.

I'm not sure why your hoping that people won't use and support s/w that is developed FOR the end user, not for a corps profit?

Your perspective is indicative of a very narrow view of the world caused by being raised in a M$ ecosystem...

If you're referring to the ink scape / gimp comment, that's because it's not realistic to expect that of your graphic designers / artists. The FOSS editors lack many critical features these professionals want. Even if they don't need those features, you'll be hurting their career by making them learn a whole new program that won't be a transferable skill outside of this job. Imagine your job decided to use an old IBM mainframe, and made you learn PL/I and z/OS. It's not like LibreOffice to Office, which are nearly drop in replacements for most people.

> The FOSS editors lack many critical features these professionals want.

The main issue with these features is that they're numerous and the specific set of features that each individual needs is different, so the projects can't just instantaneously add support for them all but adding support for any given one is only a modest effort.

Large institutions have software developers and the programs are open source. That means you can reasonably add the features that your people need. And as those features get upstreamed the projects improve overall.

> Even if they don't need those features, you'll be hurting their career by making them learn a whole new program that won't be a transferable skill outside of this job.

The programs are free, and also run on Windows and Mac, so they could continue using them in their new job too. Especially now that they have the features needed in their subspecialty.

If what you said was true or viable we would already see these programs flourish. Tell me, why hasn't a company like Google supported gimp? They have a lot of artists and support a ton of other projects.

In order for it to work you have to actually do it. How much in donations or patches has Google put into GIMP?

The reason they don't is because it would not be cost effective, and their artists don't even want it. You need the artists to accept these tools first.

> The reason they don't is because it would not be cost effective

Google is a trillion dollar company. Their annual revenue is larger than the GDP of more than a hundred countries. A million dollars is pocket lint and they have a billion users to amortize it over.

> their artists don't even want it. You need the artists to accept these tools first.

They don't want it because it lacks features they want. Give them access to a developer who can add any feature they ask for and see what happens.

I havnt seen people using dollar signs for MS since I was a small child. Are you a child?

The designers and meeting software part is a fair point, I agree! It will definitely be bumpy.

Not the first German government to do this. Here's something about München in 2020, I think there's been others: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

LibreOffice is fine, but IMO the main appeal of Office is all of the collaborative tools: realtime collaboration on documents, SharePoint/document sharing, OneDrive, Teams integration, etc.

How does that work on Linux+LibreOffice?

It’s nice to see that they looked at previous attempts and do not underestimate (or at least are aware of) the insane complexity of this move. I’m really curious about their migration plan details, knowledge bases and all other supportive structures involved. Documenting this openly could be an immense help for both this and future migrations.

[dupe] why wasting our time OP?

Lots of earlier discussion on the official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928173

Now with the money they are saving on licenses they should spend that to improve those open source projects.

Also public money, public code.

> Schrödter also claimed that the move would help with the state's budget by diverting money from licensing fees to "real programming services from our domestic digital economy" that could also create local jobs.

> hleswig-Holstein is also developing an open source directory service to replace Microsoft's Active Directory

Colour me intrigued - but don't we already have this with FreeIPA?

Yeah, I don't see what this is going to different. I mean at the end of the day, we have LDAP then you just package all the other fun bits around it kerberos, sssd, dns, cert management etc.

And after that, an information security auditor from a cyber insurance company comes and says: "sorry, you have to delete all of that, our automation that checks for insecure settings only supports the real AD".

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