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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 28 2017, @06:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the linux-nein dept.

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


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday November 28 2017, @02:51PM (4 children)

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday November 28 2017, @02:51PM (#602512) Journal

    productivity had "decreased notably" due to crashes and printing errors since moving to open-source software.

    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.

    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.

    Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS

    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.

    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.

    Munich has always kept a minority of Windows machines to run line-of-business applications that are incompatible with Linux, and where virtualization isn't an option.

    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.

    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.

    The estimated cost of the move to Microsoft Office, when combined with the Windows 10 migration, could surpass €100m according to one report, due primarily to the huge expense of converting more than 12,000 LibreOffice templates and macros, as well as developing a new templating system.
    That's an awful lot of money. One might think that there is a payoff for someone.

    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.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @03:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @03:29PM (#602525)

    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

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday November 28 2017, @04:12PM (#602545) Journal

      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.

      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)

    by toddestan (4982) on Saturday December 02 2017, @05:57PM (#604330)

    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

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:14PM (#604397) Journal

      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.