German City Set To Make Linux A Norm For Citizens | Hacker News Reader

German City Set To Make Linux A Norm For Citizens

efytimes.com

127 pointsmariuz74 comments

"Lubuntu can comfortably run on as little as 256MB of RAM."

It can although I'd call it jogging rather than running. It can work on a P3 coppermine class laptop very nicely. However, a stock Lubuntu live CD does not come with LibreOffice.

Gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet, but Abiword normally does not have built in facilities for mathematical formulas, or for making drawings. There appears [1] to be no presentation application.

I hope the City are making some training materials available along with advice on installing LibreOffice. LO will jog on a 900MHz p3/256Mb one application at a time.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/Setup#Applications

Edit: I should say on P4 upwards or a Centrino laptop with 512Mb it will fly, and run LO fine with multiple applications.

I think at this point the apps themselves have a bigger impact than the OS. Websites can easily take 50-100 MB of RAM these days, each. Open a few of those, and you can already slow down your PC with low RAM.

All of these "low-end" operating systems should have at least 1 GB of RAM as the bare minimum, and something with a more modern OS like Ubuntu or Windows 7 should use at least 2 GB of RAM, otherwise you have the same problem.

Eh, just run Lynx...

What sorts of websites are we talking about here? I understand that some websites have to transfer a couple of megabytes to be displayed (though most of that is media content anyway) but how does that end up occupying 100MB of RAM? That's roughly an order of magnitude more than I'd like a website to take, except for when we're talking streaming media obviously.

Looking at Chrome's Task Manager: my Gmail tab weighs in at 255 MB. Facebook is #2, at 168 MB. All that client-side JS gets pretty heavy.

Interestingly, #3 is the home page of an old blogspot.com blog. It's mostly just text and a few inline images, and it still somehow manages to occupy 132 MB of RAM.

I'm guessing this is either because of chrome's sandboxed tabs or the amount of RAM you have on your computer (or a combination of both).

Firefox is lighter on the RAM usage these days especially with more tabs because of the sandboxing.

I use a web IM client, it can easily consume hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes if left open for a few days, and that is just to send small snippets of text back and forth!

About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes.

(Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)

About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes.

(Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)

I think it's just general overhead, since I have similar figures when starting FF fresh with no tabs.

If you look at "window-objects" under explicit allocations, you can see the memory for individual pages; the page of your parent comment weighs 2.2 MB for me.

But that's without history... when you click links, it will keep the previous pages cached, and I think that is what can really eat a lot of memory real quick. But I would also hope that memory gets released without much of a fuss? I don't know that, but if the RAM is made available when system resources get low, I'd say cache away, since unused RAM just eats electricity for nothing :P

Just check your processes tab in Windows. Some sites even go over 100 MB.

Quite sincerely, I just tried switching to Ubuntu 13.04 (from Win7) on my gaming machine (4GB Ram, some Nvidia card that I can play BF3 very well), and it doesn't "Run" like Windows either.

Chrome is slow to start, videos don't load properly, ejecting the pendrive fails...

Did you get the proprietary drivers for that Nvidia card?

They can't legally be included in the distro itself, you have to go get them, which is a shame.

The situation described by GP is so ridiculous that it's unlikely to be true, which is why I wouldn't recommend anyone to waste their time trying to solve the mentioned "problems".

I mean, really, why would anyone switch from Windows to Ubuntu on a gaming machine? Just think about it for a sec.

(Videos not loading or USB not working are issues the OEM are supposed to handle. The fact that someone like GP can't tell even the series of their GPU hints strongly toward them using a prebuilt computer - yet expecting to be able to work as their own Linux OEM, which one could argue is more difficult than being a Windows OEM.)

I installed ubuntu alongside windows on my alienware, and I'm quite happy with it, I only switch to windows to play dota 2 and amalur, for browsing, other games and miscellaneous tasks I use linux.

Well I did. So far I have close to 100 native games and I have been able to play a lot of recent games with playonlinux. So not bad at all. One of the few things missing is decent Everything clone for linux - something that reads directly from the journal and is able to find files instantly by names without useless indexing of the contents.

(I don't really care about the specific model of the board, because there are dozens to chose from. But I checked my email, its an Evga GTX650 1Gb DDR5. Oh, I avoided ATI because of past problems with Linux.)

Why Linux? Because coding (web stuff) on Windows sucks. Expandrive hasn't been working that well for me, makes explorer sluggish, etc.

Of course I didn't replace Windows - Ubuntu suggests you to install it along Windows (that part works really well these days).

See, the other day someone posted on HN that their Unity experience was bad because they had used a slow computer; I bought that idea and tried on the PC this time. (Then I went to XFCE, as usual. Which also failed on me, as I mentioned about the USB drive problem).

I should have videotaped myself installing and using Ubuntu - its just dozens of tiny UX mistakes that make me mad.

The problem is that everything has to work really well for a "power user" to use a computer happily. I can't believe someone that says the experience/aesthetics of Ubuntu matches that of OSX.

I absolutely don't want anyone to help me solve the problems (they were examples, there were dozens)[1] which you consider imaginary - my algorithm regarding Linux on the Desktop is to come back every 6 months and try it again).

(BTW, VLC works very well, I meant web based videos.)

[1] Small example: When I clicked "Install" on Synaptic, the button state didn't change until several seconds had passed, then the box asking for the root password pops up. By that time, I had already clicked it again several times.

Not just me:

https://twitter.com/Vryohpah/status/349126411845517312

Actually, opening this very tweet shows me squares instead of characters in some places. (It migh be "my fault" since I installed something called Infinality to improve font rendering. Oh well.)

Í'm not sure I checked that checkbox - thanks for the reminder.

Everybody has different hardware etc., but for what it's worth, OpenSUSE never let me down. So if you feel like you have another go in you before you completely give up on Linux, try that maybe.

As for the videos, if you aren't already, use VLC, it seems to have a trillion obscure codecs baked into it.. I would go so far to say if it doesn't play in VLC, there is either a problem elsewhere, or it's not a video file.

This reminds me that the i815 chipset is limited to 512MB RAM total, which was used in lots of P3 systems.

Installing LibreOffice on Lubuntu is so easy that even a caveman (me) can do it.

    1.) Open Synaptic Package Manager.
    2.) Enter Admin Password.
    3.) Type "LibreOffice" into the search field.
    4.) Follow the on screen prompts, clicking appropriately.

All of the various Lubuntu applications I've tried run quite well on my nearly 5 year old Atom N270(800MHz) 1GB RAM netbook.

Seriously, if a user has rudimentary experience with WinXP then Lubuntu will not be too much to assimilate, and the only caveats are proprietary applications, yet there exists workarounds for most, such as comphoilio's netflix-desktop - which uses a special version of wine to run Silverlight and its necessary components - to enable viewing of Netflix DRM content on Debian based systems.

http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/

Absolutely! But many of the target audience may have very little experience of installing software and may need a screen cam / leaflet along the lines of your instructions. Last time I tried Lubuntu, I had to manually install the appropriate spell checker for my language (en-gb). Many will want ms core fonts as well. I agree the whole thing is one side of A4 with a few scren shots.

PS: Atom based netbooks with 1Gb are much more capable than P3/256Mb, people with such netbooks will have no issues at all with Lubuntu.

I'm running ubuntustudio fine on this Samsung NC10.

"Abiword normally does not have built in facilities for mathematical formulas"

The Xerox Alto had this in 1982[1]. NINETEEN FREAKING EIGHTY TWO. How is it possible that any WYSIWYG word processor is allowed to ship without this?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw

Because AbiWords codebase is so painful, adding it is more trouble than it's worth.

I tried to port it to elementary with a new UI. Dear god.

There are some admirable intentions here, but most of the older people I know that this would theoretically serve best are infinitely better served by a light tablet. I want my grandma checking her e-mail and doing her reading in the most comfortable environment/seat in the house; I suspect this will lead to a lot greater usage/engagement. And portability means it's easier to ask for help.

Tablets, like mobiles generally sufferer from planned obsolescence. They are not meant to be used and receive updates for years and years, like people used XP.

I want my grandma to not have to relearn to yet another UI every two years. Canonical has commited to support the LTS releases for half a decade, which, while not coparable to XP, is for older folks still a better bet than anything the mobile world has to offer.

As I understand it, XP wasn't meant to do that either; the fact that it lasted so long was more of a series of mistakes on Microsoft's part in getting a replacement out the door. I'm happy to be corrected, though.

Even if Vista wasn't delayed, XP would have received security update support for at least 10 years after release.

Microsoft has insanely long support cycles for their products. Windows 8 will be supported until January 10, 2023. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/lifecycl...

> Tablets, like mobiles generally sufferer from planned obsolescence.

> I want my grandma to not have to relearn to yet another UI every two years.

Those two statements have little to do with each other. The current (and upcoming) version of iOS still works largely the same way as iPhone OS did 6 years a go.

Modern mobile OSes are easier to learn than desktop OSes and are less encumbered by malware. For someone who has never used a desktop computer or the Internet, starting off with a good tablet instead of a personal computer is a better choice.

> while not coparable to XP

Still, in the tech world, half a decade is pretty close to eternity anyway. XP sure had a long life.

>Tablets, like mobiles generally sufferer from planned obsolescence.

Elderly people suffer from planned obsolescence, too.

I don't think this is aimed at older people specifically?

While that’s true, over half of Munich’s consumers are aged 45 or higher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_Growth_of_Munich#Age...

45 isn't too old! At least I hope not or I'm screwed.

It's not 'elderly', but it is 'second half of life'

You're not wrong, but continue your thought process and think bigger picture.

If you do actual research on older computer users, you'll see that many prefer a desktop environment for the sole reason that they can get a monster monitor.

"But my Grandma!" you might say, and you might be right.

But expand your dataset and you'll start to understand why desktops and iMacs haven't become obsolete.

Lubuntu is a fantastic choice, I install it on all of my friends' old, crapped up, virus infested Windows XP computers and it has them running like new. The interface requires almost no adjusting to coming from XP, much less so than unity or xfce or even windows 8 for that matter. Throwing away old but functioning hardware should be a crime.

Yeah, except that the cost of power to run those machines can be significant. The most obvious difference would be reducing consumption by replacing a CRT monitor with an LCD. That should have minor effect on Ubuntu ... today ... maybe. But I do remember fighting to get a monitor configured a couple of years ago (before I moved to a Mac).

Are modern desktops more efficient than 10 years ago? Hard for me to say although Intel has a paper that says that Energy Star and other measures make a big difference.

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to swap the old desktop for a modern laptop. You'd gain all kinds of energy savings - LCD screen, automatic sleeping, etc.

Wait... That's what I am paying my taxes for? That's where my money goes?

I am NOT against Linux being more widely used. And I like the idea that the city uses Linux to save money & more efficient.

But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business

"But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business"

Not sure where you are from, but in Europe/UK local governments do get involved in promoting what might be described as lifestyle choices. E.g. smoking cessation, getting more exercise, healthy eating, making recycled furniture available cheap to poor people by establishing and promoting 'social enterprises' as we call them in the uk.

I see the free CDs as that really, just saying 'there is an alternative to chucking your old PC away, just try this and see if it is enough for you'. Not so much pushing linux from any political/anti-microsoft position, just saying you don't have to spend (more) money.

Yes. Less waste, and in theory users will be given more secure and up to date software experience, which should provide safety and confidence for online shopping, for more tasty taxable purchases.

+1 for environment +1 for Capitalism

EDIT: last +1 for education, and employment. No need to get a new fancy computer to do your homework or write a CV.

Not to mention reduction in costs for local and national government if people can fill in forms online as opposed to paper or going to an office...

But that would require the local government to allow forms to be submitted online. Which mine hasn't :(

UK: big push to get 'open government' going and my local council has a big advertising campaign getting people to use their web pages. Not always online, some services mainly call centre based.

I imagine this will vary widely by country

The CDs may be free to the recipients, but they were not zero cost. The money to procure them came from somewhere.

Yes, of course. My local government spends quite a lot on marketing and publicising the social enterprises I mentioned in grandparent post.

A few thousand CDs won't cost that much. Canonical themselves supply Ubuntu CDs for £80 per 100. I'd imagine it gets a lot cheaper per 1000.

You can pay £900 to advertise a job in our local paper, and that is for a 10cm two column advert with two insertions. I had to pay £100 to move a piano not so long ago (specialist private mover).

Of course not, but CDs are incredibly cheap if produced in great numbers. And as a German I can only agree with keithpeter. It's perfectly normal for local government to spend tax-money outside of "classic" duties to promote a public issue. Especially something with an environmental background.

Something else you should keep in mind is, that Munich is pushing towards electronic bureaucracy, which would require access to a PC by everyone.

Perfectly normal is an observation of frequency of occurrence, and one I won't dispute. "hiddenfeatures" was complaining that this was (to paraphrase with words from your observation) "perfectly normal", which he found odd in that his tax money was promoting this, when he didn't see this as a government function.

"keithpeter" referenced that in Europe/UK (and I will confirm that various jurisdictions in the US of A do so as well) local governments promote all sorts of pet social projects. At this point "keithpeter" referenced free CDs.

That's when I pointed out the CDs were not free to produce which was "hiddenfeatures" point about tax money going to promote a product.

Now, I'm not sure where "hiddenfeatures" is from, but I am from the US of A, and things like this do happen here as well, and some people don't like it for a variety of reasons. Constitutionalists, for instance can't find Linux promotion in any of the original Articles, nor in any Amendments.

For me anytime I see even small amounts of money spent I compare it to what I've been taxed for the year and calculate how much of my money went to support the program. If its less than I have been taxed, I can claim to have completely funded the program, if it's more, then I can calculate how many years I had to work to completely fund this a program. If it's far more than I can be taxed in a lifetime, I try to calculate how many people like me will have all of their lifetime tax money poured into said program.

> "For me anytime I see even small amounts of money spent I compare it to what I've been taxed for the year and calculate how much of my money went to support the program."

Does your analysis include any estimate of corresponding benefits, specifically reduction in costs down the line?

Yes, I calculate benefits when I spend my money. When the government spends my money I ask why, if its because the government will then spend less of my money on something else, I ask why is the government doing the other thing to begin with.

I'm pretty sure blood won't run in the streets and mass murderers won't roam with impunity if we don't install Linux on our old boxes.

I'm all for the government being limited to fewer things, so the political will has less to argue about, and we can all get back to talking about the weather and arguing about religion.

The intention of the city is not to push its citizens to use Linux. They just want you to install Linux instead of disposing your old PC because it's not capable of running a newer version of Windows than XP.

Sources (German):

- Original motion: http://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII2/RII/DOK/ANTRAG/2927956.pdf

- News article: http://www.heise.de/open/meldung/Muenchen-will-Windows-Ausst...

An indirect benefit is teaching the younger generation to be more proficient with linux.

Many of these old PCs can be used as hand-me-downs for young kids. Some of these kids will eventually work for the city and contribute to existing infrastructure. Also, let's not forget economies of scale (ie. labor, ecosystem, etc) to further reduce costs.

Makes sense to me. Think of this as dogfooding.

As I was reminded in another comment many Atom based 1Gb netbooks were sold with XP and a 160Gb hard drive. Such a machine can run ubuntustudio well, and allow a young person to do quite a lot with audio, images and some low-fi video.

> But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business

Why not? The goverment standardizes everything else, from screws to seat belts to yogurts, why not stop the crazy update-planned-obsolescence cycle pushed by commercial entities and agree on a "standard UI" for normal people?

The amount of unnecessary changes in UIs has become unbearably crazy. And since those changes are forced from all sides, there is no way to vote with your wallet.

Whoever wants to constantly relearn the same stuff over and over and over, and today relearn the Ribbon, tomorrow Metro, and so on, is free to do it. But normal, everyday folks should not have to deal with this shit. Computers are supposed to be boring, everyday tools to accomplish everyday tasks, not fashion statements.

If the commercial world is not willing or able to keep computers useful tools, the goverment has to step in and slow down the amount of changes and prevent the giant waste of tediously gathered know-how.

Most standards are not set by the government, they're set by professional organizations. See ANSI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_National_Standards_Ins...

Safety standards ARE often set by the government, but more general standards mostly are not.

By the way, the position you're arguing for is literally the opposite of innovation. Imagine if, after Apple unveiled the iPhone, the government had discouraged its adoption because it removed people's hard-won knowledge of using Motorola flip phones. I guess Motorola would have been happy!

> the position you're arguing for is literally the opposite of innovation.

So what? I dont see any innovation here. It is haute couture like change for changes sake masqueraded as innovation.

Computers have become too important tools to allow a few key players to enforce a crazy planned obsolescence cycle.

> Imagine if, after Apple unveiled the iPhone

I was not talking about toys.

I'm not sure that we want to short-circuit competition in the industry with one of the highest rates of innovation over the past 20 years. If we had followed this strategy, we'd all still be using Windows 3.1.

> Whoever wants to constantly relearn the same stuff over and over and over, and today relearn the Ribbon, tomorrow Metro, and so on, is free to do it. But normal, everyday folks should not have to deal with this shit

I like and use Linux. But I wouldn't say that it is great at providing a stable user interface. Things keep changing in in as many arbitrary ways as it does with Windows, perhaps even more.

> Why not?

That is exactly the WRONG question. Government power & influence needs to be restricted to the bare minimum necessary - for the security(!) of its citizen.

We can all clearly see what extensive government power leads to. Just wait for the HN front page to be flooded again with reports about Snowden/PRISM.

There are certain tasks that should be put in the hands of the government (ensuring the rule of law, national defense, making sure free elections happen) and others that have a good ROI (education / healthcare). But beyond that, it is just more power to the wrong institution.

Going completely 1984 here: Today they distribute Linux, tomorrow they distribute Linux with a Rootkit pre-installed.

Regarding UI changes: Boy... I hate those. 20 years of Moore's law have left us with incredibly powerful computers and we manage to waste all that raw power, those billions of CPU cycles per second on fancy UI. You are completely right - from a technical, educated standpoint.

BUT, that's not how the human brain works. For your average consumer the rule of thumb is "if it looks fresh, it is fresh". Plain & simple. They don't "get" that NTFS now supports transactions and that atomicity in file operations is like the holy grail and just completely awesome - but "Oh boy! That start button with lights up when I move the mouse over it!!!!"

Tell you what: Microsoft has that shit figured out - at least with every other version ;-)

Windows 8 is cratering new PC adoption -- many people, especially folks who are not technically adept, hate it.

So a German government decided to invest a small amount of money to help citizens utilize an alternative to insecure Windows XP.

Plenty of folks who are technically adept, dislike it as well.

It is terrible. Yesterday I had to go long ways to help a friend install skype on w8. The thing pushed her towards the metro version and microsoft account.

So i had to find a direct link to desktop installer. Every non IT user I have seen hates 8. Most of the ITs too.

seems like a great idea, but knowing how older people can cope with change I don't see this going so easily and nicely for them as the article makes it sound?

Anecdote: 2 of my family members over 50 years old had XP running with Office2003. I gave them Lubuntu and it took them literally months to adapt. For an IT guy it's off course all alike, but actually it isn't. Especially not if it already took you years to master Xp/Office in the first place.

Apart from that, while I applaud them wanting to reuse old hardware, it seems most pc hardware lives for 10-15 years max. So I hope theay are prepared for that with appropriate backup systsems so they can recover all the systems that will eventually, sooner than later, shut down.

counter anecdotes: my 73 year old grandma switched to Linux mint 9 months ago and loves it. and my 21 year old cousin tried the same and ran back to Windows after days.

I'm not much of a Linux user (I only check out some distros once in a while), but I found Linux Mint Cinnamon to be extremely intuitive, and I "got it" right away. I actually thought it was easier to use than Windows 7, and I use Windows 7 all the time.

I also think Zorin OS is looking great, and it seems like a very nice OS for those moving from Windows 7, especially.

http://zorin-os.com/

The issue is, for a person as old as your grandmother, learning even the barebones of how to use a computer can be a novel experience because they have had a very small chunk of their entire life to attempt it. This is following having access to many other modern forms of entertainment for far longer.

Whereas, in the case of the young cousin, they grew up with tech like this and having to relearn something that is basically the same system but with a different coat of paint and more inconveniences is a hassle.

My olds have no idea what they are doing and have to relearn it every time it gets turned on anyway.

From experience working with end users over the last 20 years this is normal whatever your age for non-technical users. Discoverability is more important than absolute consistency.

I would suggest the Trisquel distro, which is completely free software (it's officially sponsored by the FSF) and IMHO the desktop is more user friendly than Lubuntu. http://trisquel.info/

Some of the primary things people use computers for are watching flash videos and listening to mp3s and I would rather people use 99% Free software and 1% proprietary software than the other way around because someone zelously recommended to them a 100% Free Distro, which they found unusable and then switched back to windows. One of my worst experiences when starting out with Linux was installing Debian on a laptop, when I was without ethernet, because it didn't come with the proprietary wifi driver I needed, I don't wish to subject a non-technical person to that.

tried this recently on a macbook air without an ethernet port - it's actually not even as simple as downloading the relevant .deb on a flash drive and moving it over, as the default .deb will, sometimes, insist on downloading the actual firmware blob from the manufacturer during the install process! I refuse to pay for a USB ethernet adapter which I will use once, so I'm sticking with virtual machines for now.

I agree, normal humans simply don't put up with this stuff - in the end, even I didn't!

The title is misleading: the city wants to distribute around 2000 linux CDs at events -- that's hardly making it a norm.

Incredible initiative! Where can I donate :)

2013: Year of the Linux desktop

Another counterexample of the Hun typecast as being regimented and dutifully obsequious, and further reinforcing evidence that Jerry is brilliant and formidable.

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