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Comment by digitalWestie | Hacker News Reader

It's a few times over the years I've read about govs switching to linux like this. Anyone know how they got on?

Usually they get a good offer from Microsoft and drop the conversation. But this time it is not about pricing, but politics, so maybe they won't budge as easily.

is tempting to think they actually choose one of the several providers of office services, based in Europe, not some stupid attempt at moving non-technical people to linux...

They give up and switch to Windows (again).

The highest profile was in Munich where they did migrate >10,000 desktops to Linux and OpenOffice, but eventually they migrated back to Windows and Office:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Lower Saxony:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-scores-a-win-over-linu...

Vienna:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienux

Note that even when these projects succeed, the software users are running is invariably just Firefox, and often users have both a Windows and Linux PC side by side. There are no actual Linux apps being developed or maintained, in the sense of apps that use Linux APIs.

Speaking completely off the cuff here, but I suspect that as government applications move to be web-based, perhaps there could be another wave of Linux adoption since all it would take essentially is a functioning browser.

I am puzzled that they not already have moved to the web. Also speaking off the cuff: what are the main reasons for using word documents in government? If it is mostly communication with other parts of the government or the public, shouldn't this be email which requires very little functionality compared to word.

I can see niche cases, like laws where you want change tracking or very long reports but that does not seem to apply to most government employees. Somehow I feel I missing something big, maybe there is a lot of automation built around word documents?

yes, but then what was the point of moving if all functionality was on the web anyway?

Windows just isn't that expensive. If you're paying MS for Office 365 anyway then there's no real point in replacing the set of drivers used by the browser.

I assume it went as well as an acquaintance of mine found out. Wanted to go Linux and open source so dumped O365 and got Fastmail, libreoffice in to start with. His two office staff found rather quickly that they were up shit creek as they didn't know how to do anything and stuff didn't work quite how they expected it to. So they ended up switching back to O365 in under a couple of months. This was for a company that cuts out bits of foam and sells them.

A lot of computer users are drones. They have no conceptual idea or care about what they are doing. Moving stuff, even simple things, is crippling for productivity.

Now scale that up to hundreds or thousands of people. In local government people don't like to talk about the failures at all because there is fallout so we probably won't find the truth about what really happened but I suspect it wasn't all about politics and cash backhanders and MSFT investment.

If you really want to move off MSFT you will probably have to start again and run two completely isolated silos.

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