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Munich is ditching Linux in favor of Windows 10, at a cost of €49.3 million:
The Linux love affair of the German City of Munich, which decided to favor Linux in 2003, is finally over. The city has officially cleared the plan to bring back Windows 10 on about 29,000 PCs.
In 2003, when the city decided to switch to a Linux-based desktop called LiMux and other open source software, it showed that free software could be used on a large scale. However, things didn't turn out the way they were planned.
Coming back to the recent development, the politicians who supported the switch said that Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible application and drivers, according to TechRepublic.
[...] Linux enthusiasts should also note that the city's IT Chief has previously said that any concrete technical reason doesn't back the move; it's all politics.
Also at Engadget.
Previously: No, Munich Isn't About To Ditch Free Software and Move Back to Windows
Munich Reveals Preliminary Costs for a 'Return' to Windows
Linux Champion Munich Takes Decisive Step Towards Returning to Windows
(Score: 5, Touché) by Whoever on Tuesday November 28 2017, @07:25AM (17 children)
Linux crashes more than Windows? That has never been true. Windows certainly has improved in this regard and now rarely suffers from crashes, but even so, periodic reboots appear to be necessary under Windows to maintain performance.
The 2000's called and they want their [Mocrosoft-shill-promoted] trope back. Driver support under Linux is not an issue. I don't claim that every piece of hardware is supported, but if you have enough buying power and control of the hardware you are buying, driver support simply isn't an issue.
Exactly when is virtualization not an option? This is a set of government offices. They are not driving some weird hardware with a custom hardware interface that will not work when virtualized. Again, BS.
That's an awful lot of money. One might think that there is a payoff for someone.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @07:39AM
Please take a moment to form a complete response, rather than just responding to line items.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @08:00AM (2 children)
Please take a moment to form a complete response, rather than just responding to line items.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @08:36AM (1 child)
The identical comment a half hour later is NOT "Offtopic".
It's SPAM.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday November 28 2017, @09:59AM
The first one was off-topic. The second one was both off-topic and redundant, though I'm not sure it qualifies as SPAM.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 28 2017, @08:22AM (5 children)
Indeed, my father had more driver issues under Windows than I had under Linux. Usually because the old hardware (e.g. printer) didn't have drivers for the new version of Windows. While under Linux, you can generally be sure that if hardware works now, it will also work after upgrading.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday November 28 2017, @09:55AM (4 children)
Haven't used windows since 2000. What's a driver?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @10:31AM
Apparently you also haven't used NVidia graphics cards either.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday November 28 2017, @03:56PM (2 children)
-1 silly
We use drivers in Linux Land. What OS are you using, which requires no drivers? Don't even go with Mac. Their drivers may well be hidden deep, but they've got them. Baaahhhhhh - they aren't even buried deep. If you want to run an HP printer with a Mac, you'll be visiting this page - https://support.apple.com/downloads [apple.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @10:30PM (1 child)
To be clear, what GP was alluding to is that hardware support is typically completly transparent for Linux users.
In 2017 (and for a lot of years now), WRT Linux and hardware, you mostly hear "it just works out of the box".
You may also hear "Linux loves old hardware", which is very different from the Windoze experience.
Use of the term "device driver" is mostly a carry-over from Windoze users.
In Linux, that is called a "module".
On the rare occasion where a Linux user has to hunt down a software adapto-kit for a piece of hardware, that will carry the extension .ko (kernel object).
Not all kernel modules are drivers, however.
Some are non-hardware-related processes.
For the curious, more details are available from these guys. [stackexchange.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:14AM
Indeed, hardware "just works". I haven't had to compile a kernel or even run modprobe for over a decade. Software to use that hardware, yes you have to look in apt, but the days of device manager and yellow exclamation marks vanished around the same time as geocities.
I use Linux because my time isn't free. I have a work Mac, but someone else admins it, and to be fair I rarely find a problem other than the @ and " being the wrong way round.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday November 28 2017, @02:51PM (4 children)
Agreed. BSOD's and hard crashes are almost a thing of the past since at least Windows 7. Though it's still not perfect. We have to reboot a lot because the print spooler still shits the bed on Windows 7/10 and sometimes mapped drives from the file server won't mount or unmount at random and a reboot is the only fix. Flushing the windows state toilet is still necessary in 2017.
How fun is it opening device manager after a fresh Windows install to find a dozen yellow exclamation points indicating a lack of a drivers for the associated mystery device? Linux has been beating Windows at the hardware driver game for years so long as there is a driver (and if there isn't, it's the dumb manufactures fault). The kernel is great at figuring out what hardware is in the machine and what drivers/modules to load. I rarely encounter standard desktop or server hardware that Linux has trouble with. Windows sits there like a fucking idiot waiting for you to insert a disk in drive A.
Not so fast. Some ERP systems have crazy hardware for things like time clock devices, barcode readers, building access, alarm systems, paging, and so on. Some is via serial port and some have PCI devices. Sure, that could be virtualized but I've found that hammering the square software and hardware into the round VM is more trouble than it's worth. I did that with Windows based HMI for an industrial laser. Tried Linux+Wine, ran but the serial comms fail causing the HMI to crash forcing you to kill it. Tried ReactOS but it crashes. Tried Windows XP and 7 in a VM but the serial comms through a VM are sketchy and would frequently lose comms with the laser. Gave up and bought a PC with Windows 7 pro on it. VM's arent magic bullets.
For sure there is bribery involved. Governments love to tout the sunk cost fallacy. Reversing a project of such scale seems out of place for such an entity.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @03:29PM (1 child)
Three years ago, I attended a presentation from a senior Munich IT technician. The bulk of "unsolved" porting from older Win-installations were at that point mostly some archaic homebrew solutions in Access/Excel, made to manage things like parkings and inventories. Since it would be quite a task to port these, the older systems still worked, AND that parking revenue wasn't crucial for the city, it was sort of postphoned to "later".
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday November 28 2017, @04:12PM
There was a lot of that going on in the late 90's early 00's. A lot of VB applications using COM and MS access were common in business software. It is also very common in industrial automation and SCADA stuff. That is almost impossible to port after MS completely dropped VB support in favor of VB.net. I have a XP VM setup with Visual studio 6 to maintain a data logger system for our vacuum ovens which uses a COM library for a Dataq logger and I/O box plus an MS access database to store the report data. Thankfully I have the source as it was built in-house.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Saturday December 02 2017, @05:57PM (1 child)
Actually, Windows driver support out of the box isn't bad. The problem with Windows is that many times, you're installing as 5+ year old OS on new hardware. A fresh install of Windows 7 on a new PC isn't going to recognize a lot of your hardware because it is 8 years old. Go install that on an older Core 2 or Pentium 4 and you'll find it'll likely recognize everything. With Linux, most of the time people are installing the latest and greatest, and even if they are not, it's pretty rare to install anything older than 2-3 years.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:14PM
USB serial port support was terrible. Not sure about 10 but even on 7 any USB serial device you plugged in needed a driver even if they all had the same FTDI chip. Linux didn't are if it was an arduino, USB serial or whatever, it saw an stty device and loaded a driver. Even OpenBSD fairs better.
Even video drivers were better as at least Linux would have something to fall back on where Windows for a long time would stick you with 640x480 @ 16 colors or maybe 800x600/1024x768 if you were lucky.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday November 28 2017, @09:58PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @02:23AM
they were terribly misformatted
You can get that while simply using a different release of M$Orifice than the creator of the document.
You can get that by using the SAME version of M$'s crap but having a different printer.
"M$ Word format" is NOT a standard by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyone who thinks it is is a fool.
If your correspondents insist on using MICROS~1's stupid buggy broken incompatible products, you should insist that they send you things in the most-usable form.
Word 95 format would be a not-too-awful choice.
OpenDocument Format is the smart way to save documents.
a poor gov worker when she has to process ms word documents
Easy solution: Don't accept that shit as input.
Alternate solution: Put a steep fee on accepting that shit.
That'll break 'em from sucking eggs real quick.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]