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Comment by theyeti | Hacker News Reader

This may come as a bit skeptical, but IMHO the large scale adaptation of a Linux distro in Indian state departments seems a long way to. The lack of Linux operational training to the personnel along with replacement costs may call for an early demise to the plan to switch to Linux. While it does sound promising, the average government clerk in India, is computer literate in terms of Microsoft Office suite. Replacement of MS Office with Libre/Open Office suite itself is a big hurdle which in terms of usability is still in its early days. In addition, most systems on government offices I've seen run IE8 as their primary browsers, running applications "designed for IE only". I believe that if the switch to a Linux distro is to be made, the government should start with replacing leagcy windows software with their open source, linux compatible counterparts, before making the big move.

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I was also skeptical till I noticed 2 huge deployments 1.Cafe Cofee Day is India's largest chain of cafes, sort of India's Starbucks. Their billing machines seem to be a custom Linux that boots into a console application (tastefully made)that's used for billing, taking orders at the counter, upload data etc. 2. Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India the country's largest Insurance company with thousands of branches has rolled out Linux desktops a couple of years back.

I would just like to add that in some cases linux can be better than windows at emulating old dos applications. I believe some large companies write application code based in the console because they stream the applications from some central server and not having a GUI puts less stress on the network, this is especially true for older companies. I worked at a call center for a while and we used multiple ancient dos applications running on windows xp to fill orders. The only other thing the desktops were used for was logging into your personal account and approving hours and looking at your schedule, which was done through some web app.

There are significant training cost assoc with windows 7,8, and later office vers as well. Xubuntu might be closer to XP in many respects.

There isn't much of a training cost associated with upgrading to Windows 7. The Start Button has been replaced with a round icon, true, but it's in the same position and the start menu, itself, operates much as the one in Windows XP. Upgrading to Windows 8, yes, is a much more involved process and would involve much more user training.

But, really, that's just sidestepping the issue. The real issue is that user documents are in Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint formats, and, despite improvements, Open/Libre Office support for those documents is not nearly good enough to support moving to Linux full time.

This actually leads to another question I've had. We see all these announcements about cities, states, and regional governments moving to Linux. Of those, how many actually go through with the move? How many have stuck with Linux 2 years out? 5 years out? It's impossible to say whether Linux is actually viable on the (corporate) desktop without knowing if these Linux migrations ever actually take place, and, if they take place, whether Linux manages to stick, or if there's another migration back to Windows once it becomes clear that Linux doesn't yet do the job for end-users.

> How many have stuck with Linux 2 years out? 5 years out?

IT@School (see another comment for details) seems to have stuck with it for at least 6 years, to go by the retrospective on their webpage [1]. And they show no signs of migrating back to Windows yet.

It may have helped that in this case, there was (AFAIK) no widespread officially sanctioned use of Windows for governmental purposes to start with. I don't think MS could get their foot in the door in any meaningful way before the FOSS spirit took over. I do faintly remember MS trying to lure the government with nominally priced e-governance offers, though.

[1] https://www.itschool.gov.in/glance.php#8

(Edit: spelling)

I don't think that is true, especially for Windows 7. But there are other issues to consider. Windows 7 is from 2009 and is still supported until 2020 (!). There is no Linux distribution outside RHEL and probably SLES that provides such long support cycles.

And even the comparison with RHEL is not really fair. New applications will continue to be compatible with Windows 7 for many years, while with RHEL you are mostly stuck with what you get with a particular version. EPEL et al. do provide some relief.

Suggesting that Xubuntu is a viable replacement is disingenuous - Xubuntu 12.04 LTS is supported until 2015. Let's take vanilla Ubuntu 12.04 for the sake of the argument. It's supported until 2017. A large organisation will not deploy a new system when it is released (many organisations are migrating to Windows 7 four or five years after the release). So, let's say that they deploy it now. That's only good for three years of support. So, in three years you have to redo the whole migration. Users have to be retrained now for GNOME 2 and in 2017 for Unity. You see where it is going, it is a mess.

Of course, then there is the issue that many existing Windows software doesn't work on Linux, compatibility of LibreOffice with Office documents, etc.

Linux on the enterprise desktop is usually not a viable option, except if you already have good infrastructure to support and maintain it (e.g. Google), or for a subset of users (e.g. developers).

> supported until 2020 (!). There is no Linux distribution outside RHEL

The RHEL derivates such as CentOS or Scientific Linux provide such long support.

> that many existing Windows software doesn't work on Linux, compatibility of LibreOffice with Office documents, etc

There is Wine which allows to run Windows programs on Linux just fine. I am still using Office 2000. Compatibility is also problem with newer Windows and I would say that in long run Linux will be more compatible with WinXP than Windows themselfs. Microsoft seems very eager to drop old functions to boosts its sales.

You are also forgetting that upgrading Linux is usually much easier. MS is changing UI every version and it requires retraining users and administrators.

The RHEL derivates such as CentOS or Scientific Linux provide such long support.

By virtue of Red Hat. If Red Hat goes away, I'd be surprised if they can keep up that commitment. Besides that CentOS is now a Red Hat project.

There is Wine which allows to run Windows programs on Linux just fine. I am still using Office 2000.

Now try Office 2013. Last time I tried, not even CrossOver could run new Office versions without serious loss of functionality.

MS is changing UI every version and it requires retraining users and administrators.

Windows 7 is very similar to Windows XP. The same can't be said for e.g. GNOME 2 -> Unity or GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3.

>By virtue of Red Hat. If Red Hat goes away, I'd be surprised if they can keep up that commitment.

Why would Red Hat be going away?

>Now try Office 2013. Last time I tried, not even CrossOver could run new Office versions without serious loss of functionality.

Libreoffice exists, and is very adequate for a government agencies' typesetting needs.

>Windows 7 is very similar to Windows XP.

Windows 7 is also an old product that is being phased out in favor of 8 and 8.1.

>The same can't be said for e.g. GNOME 2 -> Unity or GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3.

What about GNOME 2 -> MATE or GNOME 2 -> Cinnamon?

> There is no Linux distribution outside RHEL and probably SLES that provides such long support cycles.

The article talks about an indian, debian based distribution called BOSS[1]. No doubt the company providing it will be more than happy to also provide long term support, or easy migrations as part of a huge support contract with the indian government.

[1]: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Operating_System_Solut...

But isn't the main problem with using an unsupported version of windows security vulnerabilities which are impossible to patch? This isn't true for Linux in any sense. If by "support" you mean tech support, then you don't really need an "official maintainer" for that.

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