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So the result after more than 10 years is: - not all desktops can be transitionend to Linux because of the required Windows only software. - some of the Linux desktops run Wine to support Windows applications. Which is a huge hacky configuration nightmare.

The project has seen huge delays and missed deadlines over its duration.

See http://web.archive.org/web/20120214072347/http://limuxwatch.... to get an idea of how long it took them to get anywhere and how often the goalposts were moved.

Many other city administrations canceled plans of switching to Linux because Munich had such a hard time making it happen.

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You make it sound as if the migration wasn't a success while the original article claims it to be more than successful. In my experience, switching over PC's to something like Ubuntu is no issue in most cases. So they had to set a up a few computers with windows/wine?? That's no reason to keep all your PCs windows. Plenty of government have it the other way around where they're running Linux on a few computers and windows on the rest.

Also, while you quote a few articles that show organizations "changing their mind" on Linux, there are plenty of articles that show governments and organizations still attempting a migration, most recently the entire Indian government (http://itsfoss.com/tamil-nadu-switches-linux/), The French switched 37,000 PCs to linux (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/01/french-nation...), Don't forget the Munich saved 10,000,000 Euros by switching to Linux. I could keep going.

In my experience Windows is not needed in 90% of cases and when it is it's for a skilled task that involves skilled workers. It's a fact that skilled workers do not make up even close to a majority of the work force. Also, Ubuntu is certified to run on 70% of desktop computers: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/ . One of the the manufacturers I work closely with is Dell and for the most part I haven't had any problems installing Linux on any business model Dell desktop that there is. Business models don't typically come with high end nVidia GPUs and other unnecessary hardware, so upgrading to Linux is no problem most of the time. On budget and typical business systems Linux seems to be the king of resume times and performance (at least in my experience). I've only used windows 8 on an employees laptop and from what I can tell, it wasn't made to perform well on his Toshiba to say the least. I've seen both windows 7 and windows 8 running very well on the right hardware though. The performance of windows on budget hardware (~75% of consumer) is mediocre at best. Can we stop pretending Linux has no use for anything?

The 10 million euro saving seems to have put the costs as solely the costs of 1) Upgrading to Windows 7 at the end of 2011 (lol) 2) Upgrading versions of Office 3) Upgrading PCs to be able to run Windows 7

They assumes all other costs are the same. Which confuses me a bit because they said they had consultants working to develop the underlying OS itself (so wouldn't you save the cost of those consultants if you're buying Windows?). But I don't mean to be begging the question, as there's no real reason to not trust them (but isn't there no real reason not to trust HP by the same token?).

Anyway, I can't read German so maybe I missed something. http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR... http://www.ris-muenchen.de/RII2/RII/ris_vorlagen_dokumente.j...

I'm not a huge fan of their numbers, but I guess if they hold up and people are 100% equally productive then it's fine. But really saving 10 million over the course of a 10 yr project for a city government the size of Munich doesn't seem that significant to me.

>You make it sound as if the migration wasn't a success while the original article claims it to be more than successful

Why does it have to be either a failure or more then successful? Why couldn't have just been a completed project that wasn't a huge success or failure. Honestly that the article doesn't mention any issues other then a handwavey "there have been hurdles", doesn't inspire me to think the article is the greatest in the world. But maybe I'm just cynical.

>they said they had consultants working to develop the underlying OS itself

I think a lot of people make the assumption that just because you're running windows you're not going to run into any road blocks that require hiring developers to extend this or that or create a plugin here or there. Of course you can't extend the windows OS, and why would you want to? Probably to optimize something. Why would you want to optimize something? Probably to make things run better. Why would you want things to run better? Probably because it saves money. So for all we know the development on LiMux may have been what saved them the money.

> In my experience, switching over PC's to something like Ubuntu is no issue in most cases.

If it's an issue or not depends on the software people use to do their work. If 90% of it is spent in a web app and the rest is e-mail plus the occasional presentation or letter, then yes it's not a huge issue. However many people in work environments depend on specialized applications that may not be available on linux. Then you not only have to change OSs but also end user applications.

I have been through a failed migration to Ubuntu from Windows. The new head of IT and CTO were huge linux nerds and wanted to transition promising huge cost savings. As it turns out LibreOffice plus Evolution could just not replace MS Office and Outlook. Our accountants refused after after a week of trying to use Calc instead of Excel. Sales and Marketing people found that Outlook had features that were not available anymore. A major internal FileMaker application was supposed to be replaced by a LAMP web application. That project languished for half a year before it was given up after it failed to become usable. It was never even attempted to replace the Exchange server. The designer never started to switch away from their Macs.

In the end it was decided that everyone could use the OS of their choice. So we now have mix of about 60% Windows, 30% Macs, 10% Linux on the desktop. The attempted migration cost the company a lot of money and time.

> haven't had any problems installing Linux on any business model Dell desktop

Installation is not the issue.

>Can we stop pretending Linux has no use for anything?

Nobody says that.

> performance

Firefox is faster on Windows than on Linux. Battery life usually also is better, though Macs are miles ahead there.

>Firefox is faster on Windows than on Linux.

Not on any of my computers. I have windows 8 installed on a separate partition on my laptop and have literally only used it to upgrade the system and I installed firefox to browse the web while I wait for updates.

This pristine OS that has almost never been used boots up fairly fast, but then when I login it takes 3 minutes to load the start screen. Then of course the first thing I want to do is go to my desktop, but guess what? The whole OS chokes when I click the button to bring it up. I've gotten use to giving windows 8 a "warm up" period of about ten minutes, but this still doesn't help. I go to open Firefox on the desktop and literally nothing happens for 3 minutes, I end up pressing the icon again, then I get 5 FF windows, 2 mcaffe pop-ups, some crap from dell, and oh look! more up-dates. This is on a brand new dell with integrated graphics and an intel core i5 with regular HDD. Linux doesn't have any of these problems. Now I'm sure you can tell me all the tricks to getting Windows to run faster, but if I wanted to spend all day configuring my OS I would use Arch.

How many people work in your company if you don't mind me asking? In my experience, a lot of companies that have thousands of computers are employing people who aren't important enough to have a company Outlook account. Believe it or not many companies still use dos (and train the employees to use a command line dos interface in 3 days).

Plenty of companies can switch to Linux, maybe not your 15 person start-up where everyone has a specialized task, but plenty of others can.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wi...

> Now I'm sure you can tell me all the tricks to getting Windows to run faster,

No, I can't. But it surely seems pretty slow.

>but if I wanted to spend all day configuring my OS I would use Arch.

> How many people work in your company if you don't mind me asking?

60 people, though I don't work there anymore.

That article is from 6 years ago though. In browser years that's 18.5 years ago.

Back when I used to dual boot, 2007, I would try playing UT2004 on Windows then on Ubuntu, it was always faster on Ubuntu. I even tried the Windows version on Wine on Ubuntu and it was faster. That's perception but a gamer's perception. When Valve ported Steam to Linux they found in their _initial_ port that it was...faster. They then found out why and were able to speed up the Windows version but the Linux version is still faster. If Firefox is slower on Linux this is a fault of Mozilla (remember the tolerant techies who fired a new CEO due to their intolerant thinking).

It was a few years back that FF was so sluggish in linux. (fast in Debian now) That was the time I tried Opera. The difference in bootup time was like night and day, and it was quicker rendering certain pages, but in the long run those pages were outnumbered by ones Opera was actually slower at.

Yes, that's a marketing trick Microsoft managed to pull with Windows 8.

"Look, Windows 8 boots in 15 seconds!" - until the lockscreen, and then it takes 2 minutes to load everything.

Wine is pretty good, and supports a surprising amount of windows applications. I am not sure why you call it a configuration nightmare. Have you tried Wine lately?

I have, it wasn't pretty... For simple apps, It seems to do well.. For anything complex, it's painful.

RTFA

> “We have a very limited Wine installation, because there’s always the need to save the configuration of Wine together with the application. They’re deeply dependent. If you change the version of Wine, you have to do something with the application, and vice-versa. We saw that we’d have to use 10 or 15 different configurations of Wine on the same machine in some cases

There are tools that will package a Wine installation together with the app.

This is nothing against Wine or Linux, but shows why organizations will choose Windows after a business analysis - fixed costs.

Wine like other Free or Open Source Software sends people down the rabbit hole because there is no single source of responsibility other than the individual user or organization themselves. You can't 'get Wine on the phone' when there's a problem and the business case for Wine developers to fix edge cases is comparatively weak compared to the business case at Microsoft.

To put it another way, there's a solution for experienced Wine users, but the government of Munich's business is not developing software expertise in regard to Wine. Solving problems with Wine doesn't scale to other parts of Linux. That same troubleshooting process has to be repeated again and again for other software with varying support documentation quality and community sympathy.

> You can't 'get Wine on the phone' when there's a problem

Actually you can: first item in the help page

http://www.winehq.org/help/

Of course if you meant "support on the phone for free" that's not gonna happen.

One option is reading the FAQ...114 line items all on a single page, and then going to the User Guide, and then the man pages and some online community forums, etc. and developing your own expertise. Maybe, after something between a few minutes and several months, a user will discover some of these tools to which the above post referred. But only maybe.

The other option is hiring a consultant.

A copy of Windows is $200. The reason for using Wine is running Windows programs. The business case for Wine becomes weak for many people pretty quick when time is money, e.g. how long does it take before the cost in cash and time associated with consultants costs more than Windows?

The quality of support for non-technical Linux users is why a company can make a business out of supporting Wine. Indeed, it's why RedHat can be a public company.

Stop trying to suggest that Windows applications - indeed, Windows itself - always work perfectly and never need support. The idea is laughable.

Companies make a lot of money as Microsoft Consultants you know.

I used Windows for the first time in 1988, briefly. From 1992 I've had an installation continuously. However, over the past three years or so, I've been increasingly using Linux and since the first of the year, but for TurboTax season and a few brief sessions, I have entirely transitioned.

The quality of Windows self-support is vastly superior to that of Linux. The quality of free support for Windows programs is vastly superior to that of FOSS when the problem is immediate and my level of expertise with the software is not high.

Yes, the answers to all questions about Emacs are in the manual, but it's six hundred fucking pages plus another twelve hundred on Lisp. Which isn't so much the problem as that googling for answers tends to return, RTFM.

That's the same for Wine. If you have 114 frequently asked questions, it suggests that maybe the product could be improved. Or at least the documentation. I'm not picking on Wine. But using Wine for most people is an ideological statement. It's going to church and professing their faith. It's jumping through hoops if what matters is running Windows applications - you can buy a used computer running Windows for $150 plus shipping allday anyday everyday.

The only viable FOSS business model is providing support. RedHat's yearly per user charge is almost the retail cost of Windows. And that's as mainstream as FOSS gets.

Consultants for both Windows and FOSS make their money B2B. Wine is marketed to end users as a solution to ordinary problems. But there's no infrastructure to support such users. That's the problem MicroSoft solved. They focus on B2B level support and provide it in the consumer sector. It's what allowed them to scale.

Don't misunderstand me. I deeply respect Stallman's philosophy and admire his accomplishments. But that doesn't require me to hate Gates or MicroSoft. He and the company he founded did more to put a computer on every desk and in every home than anyone else. I wouldn't be running Linux or using Emacs but for the commercial success of Windows.

I first used Windows around 1992 - Versions 3.0 and 3.1 - and I've used and supported (or at least, helped people with) every version since. I've also been using Linux since 1994.

> The quality of Windows self-support is vastly superior to that of Linux.

No, it really isn't. I've had a much better response to requests for information on FOSS than I've had on proprietary software.

> Yes, the answers to all questions about Emacs ...

So you'd have exactly the same problems running Emacs on Windows. You may not have seen thousand page manuals for proprietary Windows software, but I certainly have. Worse, it's usually that terrible documentation that tells you "You can do X to perform Y" but without any indication how to do X.

> That's the same for Wine. If you have 114 frequently asked questions, it suggests that maybe the product could be improved.

They're providing an implementation of Windows. If you think there aren't more than 114 questions about Windows, you've not been paying attention!

> you can buy a used computer running Windows for $150 plus shipping allday anyday everyday.

At which point you've switched from having an up-to-date, solid, repeatable installation to having a buggy, out-of-date version running on failing hardware.

> RedHat's yearly per user charge is almost the retail cost of Windows.

Support with a MS Partner is far more than the retail cost of Windows.

> He and the company he founded did more to put a computer on every desk and in every home than anyone else

So Microsoft PR keeps claiming, but I remember people using computers in the home well before the Windows/PC monoculture took over. It was a massive step backwards when it did.

I also haven't forgotten Microsoft's attempts to destroy FOSS (see the Halloween Documents for more) nor have I forgotten that Microsoft attempted their FUD tactics on the Internet itself, in an attempt to push their Microsoft Network.

Thankfully they failed in that, otherwise we'd all be using Microsoft approved Pages today instead of the WWW and I'd have people telling me how we should be thankful that Microsoft put global communication in every home!

Back in the UseNet of the late 1990's, I always thought of this technique as "the pick-apart", and I found it a great technique for winning a battle of rhetoric. Fragmenting the discussion into 'sound bites' reduces coherence and allows for a series of disconnected snarky rebuttals. Snarky rebuttals being much cheaper to produce than a reasoned and thoughtful reply.

Of course the objective is to devolve a conversation - for the pick-apart is a form of trolling for flame wars. It's power stems from the frustration it instills in one's opponents via low quality arguments based on deliberate misinterpretation across many fronts and the fact that the number of fronts multiplies with a thoughtful response - i.e. when trolling the pick-apart is applied recursively. [1]

One can identify troll sign in the pick-apart because there is no priority to the counterpoints. The perfect pick-apart disputes each sentence rather than the overall ideas. Even at the micro-level, there's nothing but contradiction - just unsupported assertions of whatever happens to be opposite the most convenient reading of each sentence in isolation.

Now in fairness, the pick-apart is often a high quality post on most of the internet, because it at least entails some effort at writing [I forgot to mention one of the ways it wins arguments is simply by leveraging one's ability to out-type their opponent] and produces a maximum of snark. Snark being the primary coin of internet chat as entertainment.

Anyway, here on HN pick-aparts are pretty much noise due to the generally higher standard of quality found in the comments and the general distaste for trolling. Consider this editorial feedback, with the honest intent of improving your writing technique.

Good luck.

[1] The classic insurgent strategy in a Blotto Game is to open up additional fronts against any opponent with superior resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotto_games

Oh please. Spare me your patronising claptrap. Had I not addresses your specific points, you'd have happily accused me of ignoring them!

Here's a suggestion for you: stop assuming that your lofty air of wisdom is all that's required for people to accept your pronouncements without question. I'm sure it impresses the kids, but I've been around a little longer.

All you've done is claim that Windows without support is cheaper than Linux with support. It's an extremely foolish argument and your attempt to switch this to a meta-discussion on debating styles doesn't change that.

For me, HN is an excuse to write and for me writing is thinking and the sorts of things I like to think about does not include accusing people of ignoring my posts, in part because many of them are worth ignoring [that's the way unedited writing tends to work] and in part because I have found I prefer conversation to flame wars -- and anyway, when I want a flame war, I have most of the rest of the internet upon which to stalk one and the one's I tend to stalk are much more important than vanilla ice cream versus strawberry, Mac versus Linux, AstroTurf versus natural grass, or the appropriateness of designated hitters and instant replay decisions.

Read the post to which I am responding. Was it thoughtful and reasoned and articulate? What did it accomplish? Did it raise anyone's standing in the HN community? Did it make HN better? Was it well written? What view did it advance?

Ok, I'll answer the last one. It advanced a view that I hold a particular view. Which is more convincing as to what views I hold, my original posts or brief assertions about those posts? And which is more interesting?

If despite the list of persons doing so being rather long, should finding disagreement with me constitutes an accomplishment, congratulations. Though as I've said, for me writing is thinking. Thus, I am also on the list.

Well, I guess that's easier than admitting you were wrong.

Yes you can. Hire a foss developer or two. Yeah, their skillset won't be applicable to the whole program stack, but if every one of these ignorant companies funded a single developer each Linux software would as a whole be an ironclad beast of perfect performance and usability.

> This is nothing against Wine or Linux, but shows why organizations will choose Windows after a business analysis - fixed costs.

You mean vendor lockin - hopefull, more applications will move to the web.

You'll have a hard time to get Microsoft on the phone to make the business case for fixing an edgecase...

I have. I'm using it for a German tax reporting software (ElsterFormular), and I couldn't get it to run at all with the current Wine version (1.7.17), so I had to downgrade Wine to 1.6.1 so it would work (but not without prepending "taskset -c 0").

So yeah, when Wine works flawlessly, it's great. When it doesn't: good luck.

1.7 is not stable, I think. The last time I had issues with wine, I learned that 1.odd is unstable and 1.even is stable.

Ah, thanks, that's good to know. Still, the 1.6.1 version crashes if started without "taskset -c 0", so either it's a concurrency bug in Wine, or Wine exposes a concurrency bug in the software. In any case, this is one more data point showing that using Wine in a production environment is not necessarily a good idea.

>some of the Linux desktops run Wine to support Windows applications. Which is a huge hacky configuration nightmare.

Wasn't that a total of two? From the article, it seems that they generally just used a Windows computer when they needed a Windows computer.

Why didnt they just change OS as they bought new PCs?

Most places won't refresh entire departments at a go, and allowing a single department to "mix" windows / linux without a clean cutover would likely make the migration more work.

The OS is not the issue. Users mainly use applications not operating systems. Software that people need to accomplish their work is much harder to replace.

The team in Munich had to develop their own extension to OpenOffice/LibreOffice to support existing workflows http://www.wollmux.net/wiki/Hauptseite

It looks like they had to develop it for windows too.

That was part of their phased transition plan.

1. Transition to LibreOffice on Windows 2. Transition to Linux

This is where things like Citrix could come in.

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