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Comment by thebear | Hacker News Reader

Very brief summary of the article:

- Second Mayor Josef Schmid (CSU, conservative): "Every department I talk to reports user complaints. Our employees are suffering. The original decision to switch to Linux was politically motivated. We feel that Linux is not cheaper for us, because it requires a lot of software development. We're missing a program to handle email, calendar, and contacts in one place. The city will get an opinion from an independent panel of experts."

- First Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD, social democrat): "Linux software sometimes trails behind Windows software."

- Sabine Nallinger (Green Party): "Data exchange with government agencies outside of Munich does not work well."

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Who cares if they can't do x, y, and z in the same program? That's just an arbitrary, unimportant feature they happen to be used to. Personally, I like having separate apps for separate tasks.

It sounds like they're just making up variations of "we don't like doing things except the exact way we learned it".

Your preferences aren't relevant. These people are not working in IT (for the most part). They would prefer

- something they know

- something that works with the world

And while we can talk about the benefits of the Linux environment/free software and being independent all day, that is absolutely irrelevant for the administrative workers in they day to day jobs. Derision isn't helping here, they're just wanting an easy way to do their job - and arguably Outlook/Exchange is one of the weaker spots if you're thinking of OSS replacements (vs. LibreOffice for Office stuff, for example, which is different but comparable. A comparable mail solution is missing in my opinion).

>Your preferences aren't relevant.

Thank you, I'm aware. The point is that neither are the preferences of whichever random government person they're quoting. There is no issue with Linux here; the issue is that the people complaining about Linux are too inflexible to deal with a slight change in process.

Actually _those_ are relevant. You are judging from the side (just like me). Those people have to work with whatever their environment provides.

Belittling their issues is not very helpful.

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